"exhausted by Mark Z Danielewski's dense and overly-complicated tome"

Tore Rye Andersen torerye at hotmail.com
Sun Sep 24 14:03:44 CDT 2006


Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 08:26:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: pynchonoid <pynchonoid@[omitted]>

>I read and enjoyed GR long before I got into a closer
>reading with research, which added new levels of
>enjoyment. "requires decoding" and "autistic" are
>unreasonably harsh assessments of GR, seems to me.

I absolutely agree. When I first read GR, I'd hardly heard of Pynchon before 
and didn't really know what to expect, but the novel just blew me out of my 
socks. Of course I didn't get half of it, but here was this amazing voice 
grabbing hold of me like no literary voice before or since. Many subsequent 
rereadings and tons of research have of course uncovered the incredible 
depth and richness of GR, but that first innocent reading remains precious 
to me, and it is the main reason why I can only shake my head resignedly (or 
shake my fist in anger) when people make such easy claims. In all 
likelihood, 90% of such claims come from people who've never finished (or, 
in fact, begun) the novel.
That being said, GR is of course not for everyone. I suspect one has to be 
wired in a certain way to appreciate GR.





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