Eco vs Pynchon

[Craig Clark]

Personally I quite enjoy Umberto Umberto, though I think he is (at 
least in translation) a vastly inferior novelist to Pynchon. That's 
probably not saying much - I think everyone is inferior to Pynchon - 
but this was never made more apparent to me than when I tried a few 
months ago to read _The Island of the Day Before_ just after 
finishing re-reading _Gravity's Rainbow_. I found _Island_ quite 
frankly self-consciously clever and rather flat after _GR_, and I 
abandoned it a few chapters in to re-read _V._ instead. On the other 
hand, let's not deny that Eco is one of the few writers around who is 
trying to do something intelligent with the novel. And his parodies, 
as contained in the volume _Misreadings_, are brilliant.



Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"