Pynchonesque Rushdie

[David Casseres]

I'm with Rushdie.

On 10/9/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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Salman Rushdie has sold two unpublished novels from the 1970s to Emory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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