Pynchonesque Rushdie

[Henry]

I agree with Rushdie on Eco. Eco was a great essayist and semiotician, and he was entertaining, e.g. fun, as such, but his novels give me a pain. 
Rushdie, even when not great, is... fun! What's the matter with fun, i.e. Rossini? :-)
HM

-----Original Message-----
From: Ya Sam [mailto:takoitov at hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 9, 2006 03:08 PM
To: torerye at hotmail.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: Pynchonesque Rushdie

What also surprised me is that despite his benevolence towards Pynchon 
(especially his review about Vineland) he was incredibly hostile towards 
Umberto Eco's 'Foucault's Pendulum'. That's his opinion, of course, but I 
think that he was a bit unjust towards Eco, applying to his book categories 
that were not relevant.

just some snippets from 'Rushdie's Umberto Eco' in 'Imaginary Homelands', 
Granta Books, 1991

"Pynchon once wrote a short story called 'Under the Rose', its title an 
Englishing of the Latin sub rosa. Foucault's pendulum, the obese new volume 
from Umberto Eco, is an illuminatus-novel for the end of the eighties, a 
post-modernist conspiracy fiction about, I suppose, the world under the name 
of the rose. It is, i regret to report, a very faint Eco indeed of those old 
Pynchonian high jinks. It is humourless, devoid of characterization, 
entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word, and 
mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts. Reader: I hated it." (p. 
270)

"And, because he's [Eco] enough of an intellectual to know that hokum is 
hokum, he has not written an 'innocent' late-sixties illuminatus-novel, but 
a 'knowing' version, a fiction about the creation of a piece of junk fiction 
that then turns knowingly into that piece of junk fiction. Foucault's 
Pendulum is not a novel. It is a computer game'. (271)


My comment would be that I enjoyed 'Midnight's Children' a lot. But 
'Shalimar the Clown' is a clownish book about a clown whose author has 
become a literary clown by abusing his old repertoir of clownery.



>From: "Tore Rye Andersen" <torerye at hotmail.com>
>To: takoitov at hotmail.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: RE: Pynchonesque Rushdie
>Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:41:24 +0200
>
>Yep, I totally agree - perhaps they should have been more Pynchonesque, 
>embarrassingly or not.
>
>
>>From: "Ya Sam" <takoitov at hotmail.com>
>>To: torerye at hotmail.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
>>Subject: RE: Pynchonesque Rushdie
>>Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 14:42:09 +0300
>>
>>Last novels by Rushdie came out as simply embarassing.
>>
>>
>>>From: "Tore Rye Andersen" <torerye at hotmail.com>
>>>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>>>Subject: Pynchonesque Rushdie
>>>Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 09:49:31 +0200
>>>
>>>Salman Rushdie has sold two unpublished novels from the 1970s to Emory 
>>>University, Atlanta. One of these, 'The Antagonist', was, according to 
>>>Rushdie, "embarrassingly Pynchonesque."
>>>
>>>http://www.mumbaimirror.com/nmirror/search/mmsearch.asp?query=&sectid=5&articleid=10820062118101082006211647265&pubyear=2006&pubday=9&pubmth=10
>>>
>>>I wonder whether Pynchon's scrapped novel from the 1970s, 'The Japanese 
>>>Insurance-Adjustor', was also "embarrassingly Pynchonesque"....
>>>
>>>
>>
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>

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