A Kakutaniesque Turn by Kakutani

[Bruce Appelbaum]

Janet Maslin usually does the book reviews on Mondays in the NYT.   
Kakutani must have pre-empted her to get in one of her signature bad  
reviews.  Kak hates most everything.  One wonders why she is the lead  
book reviewer.


Bruce

"Nothing is ever the same as they said it was."
--- Diane Arbus



On Nov 20, 2006, at 6:19 AM, Carvill John wrote:

> Very harsh review of ATD for NYT. Spoiler-free excerpts follow:
>
> A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon
>
> By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
>
> "Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort  
> of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly  
> fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a  
> humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without  
> being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating,  
> complicated without being rewardingly complex."
>
>
> "For all its razzle-dazzle brilliance, Mr. Pynchon’s earlier work  
> tended to be cold, hard and despairing: devoid of any real sense of  
> human connection, soulfulness or redemption. That began to change  
> with his 1990 novel “Vineland,” which evinced a new interest in an  
> individual’s relationship to family, and with “Mason & Dixon,”  
> which made its heroes’ longings and dreams as palpable as their  
> comic high jinks.
>
> Although this impulse can be discerned in “Against the Day,” it’s  
> blunted and stillborn."
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/books/20kaku.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Share your latest news with your friends with the Windows Live  
> Spaces friends module. http://clk.atdmt.com/MSN/go/ 
> msnnkwsp0070000001msn/direct/01/?href=http://spaces.live.com/ 
> spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.aspx&mk
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20061120/cbfd4716/attachment.html>