Oblivion: Stories Audiobook

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.

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"Based on some negative reviews I had read of this book, I started reading it expecting to be disappointed. Far from it; it actually ended up sucking me in, and I thought that it was an excellent read overall. Some stories are far stronger than others, of course. "Good Old Neon" and "The Soul is Not a Smithy" were my two favorites, the former because it seemed the most moving, personal story in the collection, and the latter simply because I thought it was a very unique approach to what could have been a more conventional story (this could be said of a great deal of Wallace's work, but I thought that his style of writing really lent itself well to "The Soul is Not a Smithy"'s plot and structure). The weakest stories in the collection, in my opinion, were "Mister Squishy," and "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." Wallace's trademark style of not providing real conclusions to his stories works for me a lot of the time, but in the case of these two pieces I found myself wishing that just once he could have given the reader a bit more to go on. I also loved the last, and longest, story in the collection, "The Suffering Channel". I am a huge fan of "Infinite Jest," and to me "The Suffering Channel" read like a miniaturized version of that novel. One review I read claimed it's the most conventional story of the lot, which in my opinion is a description similar to "the skinniest kid at fat camp" or something like that. The story is set in July 2001, and its characters all work in NYC's World Trade Center. As such, I feel that Wallace's habit of not wrapping up stories properly works particularly well in this case. He doesn't provide a real conclusion to the narrative, but in a way he doesn't need to; the reader knows that the majority of the characters are doomed, and this dramatic irony makes the story extremely morbid and yet also, ultimately more satisfying than a few of the others in the collection. Overall, I would recommend "Oblivion" to any David Foster Wallace fan, as well as anyone who wants to get into his work but doesn't feel like laboring through "Infinite Jest"."

— Daniel (5 out of 5 stars)