Country: USA
Genre: Non-Fiction/Speech
Pages: 137
My review might just be longer than this book. This Is Water is one of the two posthumous publications of David Foster Wallace and one memorable speech he gave to the liberal arts graduates of Kenyon College. This is also the only speech he ever gave to students, but this is beside the point. This Is Water is available for free online, but the presentation offered in the book makes it a lot easier to conceptualize...if that justifies anything. All right, it doesn't. Faithful to his reputation of being a reachable philosopher, Wallace tries to answer the eternal rhetorical question that is: "What use will your liberal arts degree ever be in your life?"
I might just be the prime target audience for This Is Water, but those who know David Foster Wallace, know that it's selling him short to think he only attempts to answer one question during a speech/article/essay/novel. Over the hundred and thirty-seven pages (really, maybe fifteen-twenty full pages) of his speech, Wallace gives the students his take on the true nature of freedom and compassion. And this is not a lecture, where he preaches, Centaurian from the mountain like Zarathustra. No, the very format of This Is Water is very postmodern, even metafictional (I was expecting something when I opened it, got something completely else when I started reading) and manages to leap across the stereotypes of liberal arts.
But perhaps the greatest achievement of This Is Water is its inevitability. I'm thinking really hard now, and I can't find a single reason not to read it, given that you've been made aware of its existence. It's fairly short, it took me about thirty minutes to read. It's written in a reachable, common day language and even when it gets a little drier, you turn the page and Wallace explains what he means. It's funny and it's not written from some sort of moral pedestal where the speaker is trying to give "life lessons". These are merely very accurate observations made by Wallace on the nature of human beings and the angle, the heritage of liberal arts students in the big picture. I cannot go on forever about This Is Water, without heavily quoting and spoiling its best part, but I posted the link up, so you have zero excuses not to take time to read it. It's short, funny, not difficult and has universal appeal. It's the perfect doorway into the world of David Foster Wallace.
