Pynchon's fat novel repudiated?

[Bekah]

At 4:19 PM +0200 5/8/04, umberto rossi wrote:
>
>And Lethem's last effort, The Fortress of Solitude, though shorter
>than the books discussed, is much longer than his previous novels,
>and he told me it was such an endeavour he won't probably write
>anything that long again. Was it successful on the western side of
>the Pond?

I don't know how "successful" it was but I liked it. I think that's 
the first time I ever came across the term "sky-blue pink" and was 
captured by it, understood it. I thought it was a fine novel. I 
listened to it on an audible download (audible.com) and the reader, 
David Aaron Baker, was quite good as well. I did some extra housework 
in order to keep listening. (high praise)



>And don't you think that long novels, what we call mattoni in Italy
>(which means "bricks") are maybe not something novelist write because
>they just feel like doing that, but are the product of editorial
>pressure to put on the shelves the Big American Novel (as if there
>were not enough of them already)?


I don't know. I thoroughly enjoyed Underworld more than once and 
Mason & Dixon as well. I think that the authors get carried away and 
find there is more to the book than they first conceived. Big Authors 
can get away with Big Novels. And on the East side of the pond, Eco's 
books are not slender volumes and Haldor Laxness' Independent People 
felled a significant number of trees.

In fact, there's an online reading group that specializes in Big Fat 
Books, (Big Fat Books Readers ) country and century not a factor. 
Upcoming selections are,  (current) The Magus,  (Fowles)  Belle du 
Seigneur (Cohen),  Jude the Obscure (Hardy), The Good Apprentice 
(Murdoch) Dance to the Music of Time (Powell),  Bleak House (Charles 
Dickens),  The Makioka Sisters ( Tanizaki),  Ada (Nabokov), 
Gulliver's Travels (Swift) Of Human Bondage (Maugham) The Cairo 
Trilogy ( Mahfouz  Terra Nostra (Fuentes)  and more (see 
http://homepage.mac.com/mparker_46/LSG/LSG_Schedule.html  ).

No, Big is not an American publisher thing. I think perhaps it has 
more to do with the ease of writing with a computer. Think of the 
ease with which an extra few hundred pages can be inserted, added, 
pasted, whatever. A sentence here, a sentence there and...  wow, 
you've got yourself a Biggie!  :)

Bekah
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