Another Literary Agenda: Mr. Wallace

In a section of NY Times that usually houses articles about books, novels, culture, writers, artists, I chanced upon one that left me intrigued like how a bookish collector and voracious reader would be intrigued. Usually, reactions to articles vary, from none to slightly intrigued to highly intrigued that would make me rush to the bookstores and buy. I’m currently in a slightly intrigued stage, which is pretty much impressive.

For some weird reason, I want to read one of his works next, soon I would hope. His works promised in depth examination of his generation, culture and complexities of human emotions.

A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, Mr. Wallace was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity — about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century. He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian. Critics often noted that he was not only an experimenter and a showoff, but also a God-fearing moralist with a fierce honesty in confronting the existence of contradiction.

I told you, intriguing. Hopefully I’m worthy reading his works.