reading from the margins Niran Abbas editor

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Actually, the one on Fitz and Pynch was given (almost
exactly 5 years ago) at King's College by Tom Schaub,
not Madeline Ostrander.

A fine talk and probably a fine essay (when I met Niran
in London, I swapped a copy of the Nordic TRP collection,
Blissful Bewilderment, for a copy of Reading from the
Margins, but haven't found the time to read any of it yet,
except for the Foreword by John and Introduction by Niran).
Anyway, in the first chapter Schaub prepares the ground
for his essay by referring to the one existing essay on
the two novels, "De-faced America: TGG and TCoL49" by
Charles Baxter in Pynchon Notes 7 (October 1981), saying
that "the plots of both novels, as Baxter points out, hinge
upon a dead man, 'an obliterated history and a crime buried
within it', as well as a character who tries to sort out
this history and solve (or redeem) its underlying crime."
(Margins, p. 139.) Etc. etc.

On a lighter note, I recall Schaub pointing out that the
first edition of Lot 49 is just one page longer than the
Scribner edition of Gatsby. So Schaub jokingly imagined a
scene of Pynchon making a furious phonecall to Lippincott:
"183 pages! I *told* you there should be exactly 182 pages!
I *told* you there should be exactly 182 pages!"



Heikki