2023-08-07 21:29:20
by EDOARDO NESI
From Wednesday 9 August, the sixth issue of the Americana series edited by Sandro Veronesi dedicated to American literature will be released with the newspaper. Here we anticipate the preface by Edoardo Nesi
The broom of the system arrives in America’s bookstores in January 1987, when David Foster Wallace hasn’t yet twenty-five and has just earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona. his work before him. An acrobatic, immature, brand new, risky, ingenious novel that comes out almost three years before The Girl with Strange Hair, the collection of stories of blinding brilliance and very broad inspiration – from winning and winning back to television game shows, to career exegesis by Lyndon Johnson, to the epic of a group of punks heading for a concert by Keith Jarrett – who brought both his talent and vision into focus, and a full nine years before Infinite Jest, the masterpiece that will consecrate him as one of the most important writers of the end of the millennium.
The broom of the system is the text with which Wallace presents himself, or rather announces himself, and already contains in itself, if not all, most of the unique characteristics of what will soon become a more robust and less acrobatic, inimitable, dense writing until touching the conceptuality in the iron resolution to want to tell everything, and therefore full, yet also so light as to border on lightness, even the joke.
Inimitable, I wrote, because it was imitated a thousand times with disastrous results by many of his colleagues from all over the world, who, admired, had evidently convinced themselves that in order to write what Wallace wrote, one had to write the way he wrote it, condemning themselves to disaster and to eternal damnation since DFW is one of those sublime authors who cannot be imitated, but who it seems possible to at least ape – I know and I can say it because I’ve tried – because by dint of reading and re-reading him one feels – indeed one understands – that then There’s a way to write the hard stuff easily, sure there is, and then when you try, even if you try to ape it, you fail miserably, horribly, and always.
That love for the clearest completeness, that knowing how to mix mathematics and philosophy, that superior intelligence, that unconscious and satisfied and playful aspiration to want to tell everything, really everything, about a story and a character; that faith that you can really do it, to tell everything about a story and a character, that you can and perhaps even should because what is literature if not a way to explain the world, and finally the ability to be able to put it on the page, all this, well, only he had it.
And then again the courageous and reckless approach, almost childlike, almost a race, towards the power of the very act of writing. Considering it a weapon, writing, the only weapon allowed to face a sharp and incomprehensible world. The desire and the need to show us life and its most senseless and embarrassing antics from a new, stimulating and unforgettable point of view. Only David Foster Wallace had all this stuff in his body, which then the paraphernalia with which a champion is born and cannot explain. of him, and learn to use it. Point. That’s what the broom of the system is. The work of a budding genius. Read it. Enjoy it.
When the best critics in America – because word of this brilliant debut had spread and therefore it was their turn to review it – found themselves faced with this novel, they immediately began to invoke metafiction and postmodernism, and set about finding comparisons with authors of big name but low sales — at the time the minimalists Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney were all the rage — masters like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass, William Gaddis and — but he sold — Thomas Pynchon.
Which was right, sure.
But he didn’t tell the whole story.
It didn’t even come close.
Where they were fine fencers, fencers, very elegant embroiderers of the absurd into reality, Wallace waved the durlindana of the comic and the absurd in the desperate hope of winning that war against pain and loneliness which is impossible to win, as we would see later. He was unique and inimitable, that boy. I miss him so much.
The collection edited by Sandro Veronesi
Wednesday 9 August on newsstands with Corriere La broom of the system by David Foster Wallace, with a preface by Edoardo Nesi: the sixth volume of the Americana series edited by Sandro Veronesi, 27 titles of US literature with prefaces by Italian authors (on 16 August is the turn of The Interpreter of Malanni by Jhumpa Lahiri, preface-interview by Marco Missiroli). Graphic design by XxY Studio, images from The Anonymous Project, curated by Lee Shulman.
August 7, 2023 (change August 7, 2023 | 21:29)
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#broom #system #newsstands #CorriereCorriere.it