2 Comments

  1. If you consider that the book is not only full of bad French but also of sloppy, funnily inaccurate German (the “Bröckengespenst”) and that the explanations given to the respective phenomena (e.g. “Bröckengespenst”) in the endnotes are usually slightly misguiding, it seems likely that DFW is very carefully playing with the limits of not only what the novel’s personae let go uncriticized in their conversations but also what the average complacent US-american reader might be willing to believe to be accurate. Thus, I think that the mistakes are deliberate and that it’s as a very funny if somewhat cheap critique of a widespread ignorance towards other languages/cultures etc.

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