Ballooning with Gabriel

[Monte Davis]

I've always said that TRP hyper-exemplifies Henry James' "Try to be one of
those on whom nothing is lost."

I just tripped over this, from his 1988 review of _Love in the Time of
Cholera_, which I read at the time but hadn't recalled in a decade. Well,
d'oh! in the context of AtD, if it were any more self-recognizing and
self-descriptive it would disappear up its own ass:

"
the Garcímárquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction
has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level
where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to
praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon,
take off and soar, as in this description of a turn-of-the-century balloon
trip:
	

	'They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted
in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam
apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by
everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water,
jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the
canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to
recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent
food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the
basket of the balloon.' "


http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_cholera.html


  
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