Infinite Jest Audiobook By David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers cover art

Infinite Jest

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Infinite Jest

By: David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers
Narrated by: Sean Pratt
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About this listen

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America.

Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

"The next step in fiction...Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty...Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think." Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic

©2024 David Foster Wallace (P)2024 Little, Brown & Company
Literary Fiction Sports Witty Fiction Comedy
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What listeners say about Infinite Jest

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Incredible

This version of the audio book is so impressive. Love how they handle the footnotes - it was a touch distracting at first, but you get use to it quickly and I don’t think there is a better way of doing it. The narrator really brought the characters alive. Amazing performance. I was never able to make it through the print version, so happy the audio book was so well done. It’s a life changing novel. It’s worth the effort and time.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Infinitely jesting but thankfully not interminably so

Review First Half to footnote 202:

Seduction strategies #12 and #16 being applied… but in the end it’s just Christ on a jetski! Complaint, but seriously: I had to look up “soccum” - hundreds of footnotes, but none explaining that? C’mon! …

Presenting: speedy seduction strategy #7! It never fails! We like chortles - chortles are good! Let the EEC pay for their own defense! Motions are gone through … then I took a breather - after 32h, I think I deserved it! …

Also, just coming to my mind: I really, at this point, could not imagine anything I’m less interested in than prep school or college tennis. Needed to say that. Québec is okay, though, somehow.

Review Second Half on from footnote 203:

“The unfortunate me” - unfinished, unreleased … The Year of the “let’s vote for the guy who we can be sure screws all of us over intentionally rather than for the lady who just pretends to care about us” Election … They took away my belt and my shoe strings - but I noticed they didn’t take away my feelings! …

“Now, you’re going to risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I goin’ to rip off your head and shit in your neck!” … It’s the chill of inspiration and all the girls in grass skirts. The daily bullshit here is hip-deep. The terror over the fall is overcome by the terror of the flames.

“No towardness. No narrative movement toward a real story.” Exactly. “This is no “saliva sticking to frozen metal”-type of situation.” No, it isn’t, or what sayest thou, Madame Psychosis, or Phully (sic!) Phunctioning (siccer!) Fill (siccest!), no DDD?

Although … … … Up to about 50h in, I thought about this book as sidetracks of sidetracks to sidetracks, with yet more sidetracks sidetracking these sidetracks… and when the author couldn’t narratively handle the third or fourth sidetrack level (it’s his book, after all, fair enough) he just put it into a sidtrack, uh, sorry: footnote.

Now, towards the end, it starts to feel like there is a book or story here. Unfortunately, it is a semi-bleak, semi-neutral, semi-detached - but beautifully worded - illicit drug addiction story in funny and/or graphic detail. And yeah, those poor drug users. Good thing we don’t have to worry about the other ppl who get robbed, fleeced, injured, killed, damaged by these drug users. At least not in this book. They’re not even in the footnotes here. Because that might just have made it less easy to read and too senselessly bleak? I understand noone is a winner here, baby, that’s the truth, and all are victims, but aren’t there some perpetrators, anywhere at all???

I read about David Foster Wallace only in the last hour of listening to this… and: what a surprise! He was a tennis-playing drug addict abuser. I am shocked - shocked, I tell ya!

What do I hear? I should be nice to him, post mortem? I think we should be as nice to him as he was to Linda McCartney, okay?

Oh, well. On to shorter oeuvres.

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Wonderful in audio

I couldn’t imagine this in audio but narrator did an amazing job, with DFW long sentences and great wordplay. Narrator was smooth and really brought IJ to life in unexpected ways.
IJ one of my favorite books. This makes my 5th reading as it’s so dense & not easy to hold & read such a heavy book that you also can’t put down.
I’d put this audio version over reading it first for its clarity and excellence overall. You can follow along with the book to get into the longer footnotes and not get lost.
Amazing job. Kudos to narrator and production team.

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First word of every 12th sentence or so cuts out..

The missing audio (about a word) at the beginning of every 12 line or so, is distracting and requires you to use context clues to figure out what it was.

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Difficult, yet delightful!

A very difficult book to follow everything going on, yet filled with so many compelling story arcs and an abundance of humor, albeit sometimes dark. The narrator was excellent in every way really bringing the characters to life with unique voices for everyone.

The footnotes are added in with the story, and yes there is a dinging sound to let you know it’s the end of the footnote, which is definitely necessary (and not jarring at all if you’re trying to pay attention) for flow.

One of my favorite reads ever and I don’t know why, just the way the world was established and brought about all of these characters who are connected to the main story in ways, some indirectly.

Very well worth the read and wait! I wish there was a sequel, but that will never happen. RIP DFW.

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4 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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The best way to enjoy this book

With how difficult it can be to go between endnotes and text this version of the audiobook is the best way to enjoy the book in my opinion. The notes are inline with the story and it keeps the pace of things up.

Overall it is still Wallace’s Opus and an incredible and strange story. It’s hard to grasp but it’s amazing and worth the effort to dig into.

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Awesome book, but long

A few of the sections seemed like work due to length but this is a very rewarding read/listen.

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Genuinely the best literary experience

Great narration, masterpiece book, and they added the footnotes! This version is basically perfect, it makes reading IJ much easier.

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An Impressive Recording, All Things Considering — The Narrator Is Brilliant, Does Not Give One ‘The Fantods’

For first time readers/listeners, as well as those that are unfamiliar with D.F.W, do yourself a favour and read the book while you’re listening. Read a few hundred pages then listen to ten hours or so, and just keep on until you’re done with both. There is a common misconception that D.F.W is dense. He is not dense at all. He is wonderfully easy to read and understand. The predicament with Infinite Jest is its length, and for first time readers/listeners a lot will simply get missed because it’s such a significant amount of literature to digest. So read while you’re listening.

The voices Sean Pratt hear employees are well deployed and useful. There are so many characters,and each are lengthily-developed and more complex than the last. Listening to this work be performed so to speak allows one to paint stronger mental images about what is occurring, why it is occurring, and how each segment is connected to the next/last.

I am of the impression that there are two types of D.F.W. readers; those who are interested in being entertained and potentially generating some input on entertainment as well as addiction, and those who are attempting to decipher what Infinite Jest is “really all about.” I think moreover that both types are of course linked at least to a degree… This recording with Sean Pratt will help you determine just which type they are.

Moreover; being that this is as long of a work as it is, a few pointers: A) Look up words you don’t know… B) Don’t pause the recording in the middle of a footnote as you’ll get confused/lost when you un-pause… C) Abstain from reading/watching any critical analysis of this work before or while you’re reading; this will impede your ability to paint your own imagery and/or draw your own responses.

-Noah Balfour
Listened from the 1st of May, finished on June 19th — 2024; re-read the work throughout the month of May 2024

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Achievement unloockef!

This work is as long as the Old Testament, and has about as much mystery surrounding it. Loosely based on "Hamlet," it's a story about a short piece of media (called a "cartridge") that is so entertaining that viewers cannot do anything else once exposed to it, causing death. This work had a long, rambling narrative that is almost impossible to decipher due to the many digressions, exhaustingly long cast of characters, and a plot that is extremely non-linear. Did I forget to mention the footnotes? This audiobook is a fantastic way to experience the work, as its narrator nails a dizzying array of accents, affects, and attitudes and the footnotes are conveniently delivered with a brief into and bell sound when concluded. The only criticism I have of this work is that it is so dense that it *will* escape your comprehension. Since it's author knows how to write in a more common, accessible style, as witnessed by his nonfiction work, one can only assume the inaccessibility is a feature, not a bug.

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