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

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Note that I had to take several opening stabs at V and GR before making a full pass through each. They're like Bruckner or Mahler: the opening 100 or so pages are so full of exposition that you've gotta get a fifth of the way through each before you get to the development section. GR didn't really take off for me until I was in "The Zone". Tyrone gets to be a country of his own for a while, and seems to be more of an anchor/center for the various story elements from that point in the book "till the riders sleep by ev'ry road,". After you get to the end of GR, the beginning starts to make sense. The end/beginning recirculation of GR is the most Joyce-ian thing about it, with all those multiple narrative voices coming in a close second.

I've never really sensed that much linkage for all the varied stories in V.

"The Crying of Lot 49" initially seemed a transparent tale that headed south and then bailed on the plot, but now seems the most perfectly cryptical of all of his tales. There ought to be a "Reader's Guide" to "49" the thickness of GR that has potted histories of all the secret societies that are sufficiently menacing to the status quo as to be unutterable in public, exiled magicians and questionable magic from the middle ages through modern times, and the international history of postal services from Thurn & Taxis to Broadband Cable.
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Tore Rye Andersen" <torerye at hotmail.com>
> 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.
> 
>