Pynchonesque Rushdie

[Will Layman]

I'm with Henry.  Though not given universal praise, I thought THE  
GROUND BENEATH HER FEET was about as rocking a smart novel as you're  
going to get in the average decade.

For me, too many writers who are "pynchonesque" are merely tedious  
and smart and complex.  Rushdie takes some delicious joy in the details.

-- Will

On Oct 9, 2006, at 11:26 AM, Henry wrote:

> 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=200 
>>>> 6&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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