Steven Shaviro Reviews ATD, or Steven Shaviro Praises ATD

[Otto]

Indeed a pleasure to read!

I agree to most of what he says!

2007/1/20, jentery sayers! <jenterysayers at comcast.net>:
> http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=544
>
> Some hightlights:
>
> You will gather that I am utterly unable to comprehend the most frequent
> comment people have made about /Against the Day/: that it is impossible
> to read, that its size is just too imposing, that forcing yourself to go
> through it is a chore, etc. etc. To the contrary: for me, reading it was
> an extraordinary pleasure, an epicurean delight. Pynchon's supple and
> sinuous prose is something I have to savor, reading slowly and
> carefully, letting my mind wander in the labyrinths of clauses and
> associations, in the twists and turns and continual modulations of tone,
> from the crassly comic, to the urgent, to the elegiac. There may well be
> other writers who are more profound than Pynchon; but there no other
> living writer of the English language whose /sentences/ I enjoy anywhere
> near as much as I do Pynchon's.
>
> ...
>
> I do not agree with the tendency of so many readers to fetishize
> /Gravity's Rainbow/
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN//dhalgrenstevensh> as Pynchon's
> one great book, and to ignore, or dismiss as uninteresting and
> second-rate, all three of the novels he has written and published since.
> To my mind, /Mason & Dixon/
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312423209/dhalgrenstevensh>,
> and now /Against the Day/, both of which are longer than /Gravity's
> Rainbow/, are both every bit as wonderful — and indeed as timely, or as
> untimely — as that earlier book — even if they do not overtly display
> all those kewl proto-cyberpunk dynamics.
>
> Enjoy,
> Jentery
>