A Reviewer's Hunch about Pynchon's Fans
bekah
bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
Sun May 27 11:39:20 CDT 2007
Well I read a lot of novels as well as some non-fiction and I'm a fan
of Pynchon. I recently read "The Terrors of Ice and Darkness by
Christoph Ransmeyr, The Memoirs of Hadrian by Margarite Yourcenar,
Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee, Falling Man by Don DeLillo (about 10
novels this month, total, so far). I also read non-fiction and am
in the middle of The Omnivore's Dilemma at the moment, just
finished 1491, The God Delusion and The Great Transformation by
Karen Armstrong. Essays, Who Owns the Past? by Inga Clendinnen
(60+ pages)
I've got The Road (a reread) , A Suitable Boy and a whole
shelf-full of other books (about 120) lined up for possible summer
reading.
Who are my favorite authors? Pynchon, McCarthy, Lessing, Ali
Smith, DeLillo, Ozick, Murakami, Ishiguro, Vollmann, Clendinnen
(history) Eco (fiction and non-). I follow McEwan and Coetzee but
they're not necessarily favorites. I like non-US authors I can find
in good translation - Ransmeyr, Yourcenar, Kadare, Marquez Garcia.
That Schneider person just has this wrong - and there might be a
reason for the history, science, technology, politics and culture
being "all mashed together." I don't learn about all this stuff in
the "correct" order - I find out about some stuff years and years
after it happened. So what? This makes me a part of a "messy...
society..." ? (lol)
Specific and historically accurate dating is of less importance in
this novel than the sense of the times and I think Pynchon was
writing with a specific view toward what was known at those times and
in the way those times knew it. Pynchon is not giving us a
history or a science book; he's giving us a slightly different way
of perceiving and organizing the information that was in those books
about 100 years ago along with a totally fictional cast and crew to
keep it light (so to speak).
Bekah
At 9:52 PM +0800 5/27/07, Dan Hansong wrote:
>Hi, here is Howard Schneider's shitty prophecy. Please share
>with us your reading spectrum and make a testimony against
>or for this iconoclastic judgment on the Pynchonites.
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>I have a hunch that Pynchon's zealous fans don't read
>many novels, so they're not bothered by his flaws. They
>cherish their idol because he presents the world as they
>know it: science, technology, history, politics, high and low
>culture all mashed together to make a garish gallimaufry.
>The results might be messy but so is the society the
>Pynchonites inhabit.
>
>----Review by Howard Schneider
>May-June 2007 THE HUMANIST
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
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