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Home News by Category DFW Remembrance Franzen New Yorker Piece

Franzen New Yorker Piece

Jonathan Franzen has an essay with sections about David Foster Wallace in the latest New Yorker, “Robinson Crusoe,” David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude.  If you have a subscription (or a Facebook account and you're prepared to 'Like' the New Yorker) you can get access here. Although if you have Facebook's security settings set to high and thus forcing https:// for each session, it won't work... The Facebook New Yorker pages require you to disable it for a session. It would be a good enough reason not to bother - except for that the article is worth reading:
 
On the eve of my departure for Santiago, I visited my friend Karen, the widow of the writer David Foster Wallace. As I was getting ready to leave her house, she asked me, out of the blue, whether I might like to take along some of David’s cremation ashes and scatter them on Masafuera. I said I would, and she found an antique wooden matchbox, a tiny book with a sliding drawer, and put some ashes in it, saying that she liked the thought of part of David coming to rest on a remote and uninhabited island. It was only later, after I’d driven away from her house, that I realized that she’d given me the ashes as much for my sake as for hers or David’s. 
 

There's also a section with Franzen's thoughts about David Foster Wallace's suicide in the second half of the article in case you're are trying to steer clear of that kind of stuff (I found I was not prepared for Franzen's thoughts and reasonings..).

 
More over at HTMLGIANT, and NYMAG's Vulture.
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Last Updated on Monday, 11 April 2011 20:52  

Comments 

 
#1 zenzerei 2011-07-11 22:21
Hi, I was wondering why there are no comments on Franzen's article, which I found really ruthless. I think it's not clear why Franzen need to write such an article, in which he talks of aspects of his friendship with Wallace which, I think, would have remained private. The necessity of tearing the public image of DFW, to make it 'truer', to free the readers from something like a 'spell', is incomprehensibl e. Moreover to act as an expert in different field as psychitry, drug addiction, theology I think it's not correct.
I would like to know what others think about this. Sorry for my english!.
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