ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

                  John Bailey:
                  Is it NY Hunter first resurfaces later? Can't recall. If so, 
                  you could see his Escape from New York not as a 
                  literal movement but of shifting realities, from a 
                  post-apocalyptic one to...something else. An 
                  imaginative relocation. 

                  John Carville:
                  Imaginative relocation, yes. Certainly that's what Hunter 
                  does, imagines himself somewhere else, and physically 
                  gets out by stowing away on the Vormance boat, as 
                  does this otherworldly 'Figure' which brings fire and 
                  blood to (probably) New York. There's also the less 
                  literal sense, possibly involving bilocation. We're told 
                  that sometimes the land and ice shifts itself into such 
                  a pattern that it becomes a double for venice - in 
                  'painstaking' detail, and that on those nights it's possible 
                  for one to pass from Iceland to Venice, and it has to be 
                  significant that Hunter does indeed travel to Venice. 
                  So does he travel physically, via Vormance and London 
                  etc. - or does he bilocate along with all of his Icelandic 
                  home - or does he do both?

Isn't Hunter a Time Traveller, one of the ones whose temporal excursions lie
far outside of the ostensible time period (1893-1920ish) of AtD?

                  John Carville:
                  All in all, the more you re-read these passages, the more 
                  the layers pile up and the interconnections multiply, and 
                  I more and more tend to think of ATD as being possibly 
                  Pynchon's most densely interconnected book.

And a really bad choice to hand off to a reviewer with less than a 
month to read and review.