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Ogni Storia D'amore è Una Storia Di Fantasmi. Vita Di David Foster Wallace (2013)

Ogni storia d'amore è una storia di fantasmi. Vita di David Foster Wallace (2013)

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Author
Rating
3.74 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
8806214624 (ISBN13: 9788806214623)
Language
English
Publisher
Einaudi

About book Ogni Storia D'amore è Una Storia Di Fantasmi. Vita Di David Foster Wallace (2013)

Made me miss Wallace all over again, but also thankful for what he left. This bio is heavy on insights into Wallace's literary creation and includes revelations that paint a better picture of him as a real, flawed human. A hagiography this is not. It's light on the circumstances surrounding his final decline and demise, and avoiding prurience is a mercy. Max's Rolling Stone article was sufficient for that. Very disappointing in many respects, although not too much should be expected from a first biography published only four years after the author's unexpected death. This work does not really read like a academic literary biography, but like a very long article that was written by a journalist. The writing is pretty pedestrian at times, and oddly colloquial. Max rushes through certain sections, particularly the last ~7-8 years of Wallace's life, which I was most intrigued about. He merely glosses over other aspects, like the rift between Wallace and his parents. Hopefully someone else comes along in the next decade or so and compiles a more comprehensive biography. On a side note, I always assumed that mental illness was the direct cause of Wallace's death - or more specifically, that he battled depression his whole life and one day had enough and just ended his life. Not exactly. He tried to "cold turkey" the powerful drug Nardil after 22 years while attempting to continue living his usual life. You give a person without mental illness Nardil for 22 years, try to immediately remove it, and they might attempt suicide too.

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Audio version. Although the definitive Wallace biography has yet to be written, this is an important book for shedding light on so many aspects of an extremely gifted but extremely troubled soul. The addictions, insecurities, detours, confusion, the compulsions, the frailties...if nothing else, this biography demonstrates "what it means to be human." I found this book compelling, especially on audio, and I looked forward to the long commute just to progress through the stages of Wallace's life. And then . . . The ending. I am astonished. No afterward, no analysis, no epilogue . . . At least not in the audio version, and I'm still reeling. Was this intentional, some strange mockery masquerading as irony...a "Lynching"? I don't know, but to my mind, this book, and its subject, deserve better, or at least more thoughtful, treatment.
—trish

To write a biography of a dead man is to use his corpse as a puppet. The thought of my own obituary terrifies me beyond anything, and the idea that someone would extend that to book-length seems like an almost inhuman punishment.I didn't learn much from Max's autobiography that I hadn't heard in some form already. It's all part of the cottage industry surrounding the legacy of Blessed David Foster Wallace, patron saint of sincerity, which, while I recognize it as disingenuous and crass, I still feel some need to hoover up every text it produces. I suppose that's on me.
—shazza85

Good, but the last sentence is a real piss-off.
—Valerie

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