David Foster Wallace e o último romance

A New Yorker do fim de semana trará uma matéria sobre o escritor David Foster Wallace, sua depressão de duas décadas e o romance The Pale King, que escrevia quando cometeu suicídio no dia 12 de setembro do ano passado. O texto, assinado pelo jornalista e ensaísta D. T. Max - autor, descubro agora, de uma das mais impressionantes reportagens que a piauí já publicou, retirada do livro The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery. Max escreve muito bem e é rigoroso com as informações e os detalhes. Abaixo, a abertura da matéria sobre Foster Wallace: Life and Letters The Unfinished David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.” by D. T. Max The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California. For many months, Wallace had been in a deep depression. The condition had first been diagnosed when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, in the early eighties; ever since, he had taken medication to manage its symptoms. During this time, he produced two long novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and reporting, and “Everything and More,” a history of infinity. Depression often figured in his work. In “The Depressed Person,” a short story about an unhappy narcissistic young woman—included in Wallace’s 1999 collection, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”—he wrote, “Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Wellbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol in combination with unilateral ECT (during a two-week voluntary in-patient course of treatment at a regional Mood Disorders clinic), Parnate both with and without lithium salts, Nardil both with and without Xanax. None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person’s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth.” He never published a word about his own mental illness. Continua aqui. Descobri o texto acima, na verdade, navegando no site da NY Magazine. Na capa de hoje há a seguinte chamada: O texto de Sam Anderson começa assim: Wrestling With the Mini-Biography of David Foster Wallace I'm feeling, predictably, of two minds about The New Yorker’s epic 12,000-word article about the life and death of David Foster Wallace. On one hand, I have gratitude and admiration for its author, D.T. Max. This is a heroic feat of research and synthesis — a bracingly adult, rational, honest, patient treatment of a subject many of us are still borderline hysterical about. It's as solidly intelligent a piece of literary detective work as you could ever hope for, and it will likely be our best one-stop clearinghouse for DFW information until someone eventually writes the full-length biography. (A project Max already seems to have a pretty serious head start on, if he’s interested.) Continua aqui. *** ps. conheci DFW no fim do ano passado, já depois de seu suicídio, via piauí - um dos artigos de que mais gostei até hoje na revista, aqui.