Pynchon / Tournier nexus etc.

[Kris Majer]

Hello,

Okay, here goes the first post, since the de-lurk message was merely a way
of announcing my (albeit meager) presence.

As I said earlier, I'm about two-thirds through Gravity's Rainbow and I'm
often reminded of Michel Tournier's "The Ogre": the way the Hansel and
Gretel game is used for ritualization, the witch / werewolf motive
(Blicero), Pokler's realizing that he had been serving death is not unlike
Abel Tiffauges'... It's been some time since I read Tournier, so I might
have mixed things up a bit here. Hopefully not, though. Is anyone familiar
with "The Ogre"? I posted this question before at the Yahoo group, but got
no response at all.

Dave wrote:
>By the way, Entertainment Weekly (...) mentions that Joel
>Schumacher (...) is currently casting a "Now a Major
>Motion Picture" adaptation of On the Road, with a
>screenplay by Russell Banks.

Somehow I can't imagine Jack's lush prose translated into film, even though
the topic itself seems so well-suited to cinema. I think I recall seeing a
film about Kerouac and Cassady called "Heartbeat" (Nick Nolte was in it)
which was loosely based around "On The Road". Didn't like it, actually... As
to some other disappointing adaptations of breath-taking on-the-road prose,
I guess I could include "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" here, Johnny Depp's
brilliant performance notwithstanding. But then I don't really dig Terry
Gilliam's pictures except for the early Pythons.

Oh, and I hear they've finished "The Luzhin Defense" based on Nabokov, with
John Turturro. Loved the book, like Turturro, so I'll surely go see it as
soon as it opens here (read: half a year later than everywhere else).

And since we're at it, it would be interesting to think about what Pynchon
learned during his classes with Nabokov. Those chess knights surely turn up
way too often in GR to be a coincidence (is anything a coincidence there? Or
is it everything? My head is spinning...). The Great Nab had a chance to
read GR, since it was published at leat 3 years before his death - did he?
Or does he ever mention any of P's works? I've read most of Nabokov's
novels, but hardly any of his criticism - I only heard that story about
Pynchon's writing (literally, I mean, his a's, b's and so forth) -
alternating uppercase and lowercase in his words, which was a detail that
Vera Nabokov remembered.

Kris



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