The Power of Five: Oblivion

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Jessica Chastain Reveals How Tom Cruise Saved 'Zero Dark Thirty' ". The Hollywood Reporter. April 3, 2017. La característica más destacable de la escritura de DFW no es su calidad literaria, que la tiene y mucha, ni las historias que cuenta, que son magníficas, todo un prodigio de imaginación, agudeza y erudición; lo que destaca por encima de todo es su visión del mundo, su inteligencia a la hora de abrirnos los ojos a la realidad que nos rodea. Su ojo, su mente, es como un bisturí con el cual disecciona todo lo que cae bajo su punto de observación. DFW narra como si tuviera un zoom, está contándote una historia, para a continuación pasar a otro sub-tema, y a continuación a otro sub-sub-tema, todo ello con la máxima minuciosidad. No se trata de historias dentro de historias, como hace Paul Auster. Lo que desea hacer DFW es contarnos la historia abarcando todos los puntos de vista y con todos los detalles posibles, utilizando para ello estadísticas, Historia, matemáticas, física, etc., pero siempre con unas dosis de observación extraordinarias. Creo que DFW sacaría un buen relato hasta del prospecto de un medicamento. La filosofía y el espejo de la naturaleza: No me gustó. Un cuento sin sentido, del tipo de los que desaparecen de nuestras vidas a medida que vamos avanzando en su lectura. No le encontré nada de magia a este trabajo. Algo bueno que puedo rescatar es que no es tedioso. (2/5) I think it’s interesting that each story has its own specific vocabulary and/or verbal tics from Mister Squishy's ad agency lingo to Oblivion’s strange use of latin/ pace/'air-quotes' to Suffering Channel’s magazine-speak; it’s almost as if the characters in one story would find it impossible to cross over and talk with the characters of any other story--they live in a modern/urban world that is also strangely provincial, where everybody is cut off from everybody else because of the level of specialization and in-your-own-headedness.

Only slight complaint: The very first story is a bit difficult as it's loaded with corporate marketing, PR and advertising jargon, but it still unfolds eventually as being brilliant nonetheless. According to an interview Wallace spent quite a long time writing that one. My complaint is that it was not the best decision to place this story as the first in the collection. I have to wonder how many people were put off by it and then didn't get to the rest of the stories which are wonderful, top-notch DFW. The locations in the book - South America, England, Antarctica, Italy and New York, respectively, form a pentagram, just like the homelands of the Gatekeepers do. Julia wakes up by the lake house. Sitting up in the sleeper pod, she witnesses the Tet explode spectacularly in the sky and weeps.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness—a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). a b c Keegan, Rebecca. "'Oblivion' Cruise-Mobile". HeroComplex.com. Los Angeles Times. Spring 2013. pp. 8 - 9.

Booklet about character creation and crossover play with other World of Darkness games. Bundled with storyteller [a] screen. [13] This story was too much on the over-intellectualization. It's kind of what you'd expect from DFW telling you a fable, I guess, reinterpreted through his ridiculous brain and spat out by a weird narrator, shot through with obtuse Latin phrases and rendered much less moving by being made so so writerly. Stories like this are why the haters hate DFW. Read no further if you've read already (with apologies to the appreciated commenters who rest in the dustbin of moronic efficiency):Vineyard, Jennifer (April 22, 2013). "Olga Kurylenko talks 'Oblivion', 'To The Wonder', and 'Erased' ". IFC.com. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015 . Retrieved April 25, 2013. Meanwhile, the executives of the now nigh-all-powerful Nightrise Corporation are in the ruins of New York attending a business conference named the "Endgame" where it is said, they will be given their rewards. But these "rewards" are really to become leading soldiers of the Old Ones. A riot ensues in the United Nations and twenty of the executives are killed. All but one of the rest are consigned to training camps to prepare for the outcome. The one who survived is Jonas Mortlake, who is given, by the new chairman, the task of winning Scott over to the Old Ones, to allow them to capture Matt. a b c "White Wolf". Casus Belli (in French). No.116. Excelsior Publications. October–November 1998. p.12. The only other thing I can say about this book as a collection is that DFW is very much concerned with the demoralizing aspects of modern society--from corporate culture’s obliteration of the personal (Mr. Squishy) to the reality-show aspect of pop culture and the vulture-like commercialization of every inch of genuine human feeling (Suffering Channel). What isn’t always consistent is how he sees a way out of this bleak view. In some stories I see brief moments of light, of transcendence despite the conditions, but mostly I feel oppressed and saddened by it. Not that DFW really has to provide solutions, but I wonder if he really did provide glimpses of ‘the answer’ but that it is so hidden in the complexities of each story that I have not been able to see it. These stories are filled with so much minutiae that it seems entirely too easy to just be buried by that alone, which is also similar to the lives many of these characters lead. They don’t reflect often because they are not allowed to. They are drowning in their own set of strange, often trivial particulars, and given no time to reflect.