The Pale King

I just finished listening to all 16 excruciatingly incoherent discs of DFW's unfinished "masterpiece," The Pale King. Amazingly even though you can listen to a brilliant narrators unabridged words for a mere 18 hours on audio CD, I was still, on several occasions, tempted to call it quits and throw my hands in the air. But I listened. Hour after hour. To 50 chapters of unrelated stories; 50 virtually unrelated lives; 50 unrelated and incoherent ramblings of what the author and editors call a theme of "challenging the notion of boredom." I listened to every word, I didn't skip a minute. And the end of the book - an odd drug-induced recollection from a work picnic - is just as unimportant and unconnected to any part of the novel as the front of the book - a disjointed pattern of thoughts upon landing an airplane. And in between we are introduced to utterly forgetful and unimportant characters.

The book cover and synopsis says it all in flagrantly unambiguous language: 'This is a book about boredom.' As you read it, you become bored. You ask yourself, "why am I reading such a boring book"? And unless you are one of the people who responds, "Oh! How brilliant! I am reading an utterly exhaustingly boring book about boredom. I feel like I'm a party to this utterly drove and bourgeoise joke!" then you will be one of the people who says, "This is by far the most pointless book I've read in my life. I award myself no points for gaining knowledge or for bemusingly passing the time. And may God have mercy on my soul."

Tough read/listen however, I found it worth the effort and rewarding. As the introduction will make clear, this is not a finished manuscript, but the characters are plentiful interesting even though their jobs maybe terribly dull..

Purchased this set of cds used along with the book. The cds immediately went into the car and were consumed in 2 weeks. I am a big fan of DFW (well, at least his books) but sometimes find I need to re-read sections to fully grock them. I was concerned that his lists and structures would be hard to understand without reading, but I'm finding the opposite is true and only a few small sections required a revisit. These recordings have been read beautifully and the chapter boundaries were placed well. A few sections sound as though they've been sped up electronically. If you're curious about DFW I'd start with Infinite Jest. If you already love Infinite Jest you might try these discs for fast access to Pale King. Pale King is an awesome piece, too bad DFW didn't finish it.