Pynchonesque Rushdie

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

"The Satanic Verses" just cooks.
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Will Layman <WillLayman at comcast.net>
> 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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