What hooked me on Pynchon...

[Murthy Yenamandra]

was this passage (GR, page 317, viking):

"A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a
topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked
on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among
the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling
like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives?
Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of
desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction
or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly
old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up
trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas
Markets.... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the
outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down
and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his
slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with
open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a
softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as wooly as the hair on
his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis and coca
grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do
ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian
Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the
colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms,
with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals,
white marble statues, noble thoughts.... No word ever gets back. The
silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how
dirty, how animal it gets...."

I'd actually started with GR, on a friend's recommendation, and finished
it in a marathon reading over a few days. Then of course it was V.,
Vineland and COL49 (the order is a bit nontraditional, I know). I've
been looking at the world through a Pynchon lens ever since.

Murthy

-- 
Murthy Yenamandra, Dept of CompSci, U of Minnesota. mailto:yenamand at cs.umn.edu
"Every heart/to love will come/but like a refugee" - Leonard Cohen