Brief Interviews With Hideous Men -

David Foster Wallace

Back Bay Books

2007

321 páginas

10h 42m

ISBN-13: 9780316925198

Some of the 23 stories in Wallace's bold, uneven, bitterly satirical second collection seem bound for best-of-the-year anthologies; a few others will leave even devoted Wallace fans befuddled. The rest of the stories fall between perplexing and brilliant, but what is most striking about this volume as a whole are the gloomy moral obsessions at the heart of Wallace's new work. Like his recent essays, these stories (many of which have been serialized in Harper's, Esquire and the Paris Review) are largely an attack on the sexual heroics of mainstream postwar fiction, an almost religious attempt to rescue (when not exposing as a fraud) the idea of romantic love. In the "interviews," that make up the title story, one man after anotherAspeaking to a woman whose voice we never hearAreveals the pathetic creepiness of his romantic conquests and fantasies. These hideous men aren't the collection's only monsters of isolation. In "Adult World," Wallace writes of a young wife obsessed with fears that her husband is secretly, compulsively masturbating; in "The Depressed Person," one of Wallace's (rare) female narcissists whines that she is a "solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum"Athis, to a dying friend. If MacArthur Fellowship-winner Wallace's rendition of our verbal tics and trash is less astonishing now than in earlier work (Infinite Jest; A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), that is because it has already become the way we hear ourselves talk. Wallace seems to have stripped down his prose in order to more pointedly probe distinct structures (i.e., footnoted psychotherapy journal, a pop quiz format). Yet these stories, at their best, show an erotic savagery and intellectual depth that will confound, fascinate and disturb the most unsuspecting reader as well as devoted fans of this talented writer.

Resenhas (2)

4.5 (Muito bom)

... And other stories

This is a book of short stories casually interupted by the proposal presented in the title. This is the first book of Wallace that I have read in its entirety and one of the first books I've read in English. I don't think I'll ever recomend this to anyone, not that I didn't like it, I just don't think this is the best introduction to the author's works as some people were to eager to recomend.
I find comical his info-dump way of prrsenting certaing things and the stories were very palpable.