"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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