attempted english rendering of raddatz review

[Michael Bailey]

Thomas Pynchon's new novel is an overpowering prose mountain.  It has
no logic - except its own.

The words are all overused.  "Genius" we say these days about a mussel soup
or the newest fashion in eyeglasses; "masterpiece" is what we call the
everpresent (bekakette mickrige????) little novels that show up at book fairs,
and an "Experience" is the wedding of film starlets whose names even
on the wedding day are forgotten.

So how does one describe the burning blaze, the sparkling Roman candle
of Thomas Pynchon's prose?  First one would agree with one's colleague
Steffen Richter from the Tagesspiegel, whose recommendation about
Pynchon is "reading time is a lifetime"

Then, too, one can truly sigh in company with the Newsweek critic,
"I've now read more than 400 pages, and already have enough notes
about this Beast to fill a whole book!"  The Beast rages and blusters
and gallops and grins and bites - and reviewers as famous and infamous
and Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times and Louis Menand of the
New Yorker have aggressively bitten back.

I allow myself to contradict these dignitaries, and to offer the opinion
that it is an almost unique epic achievement, a wonderwork of modern prose.
This book is a mountain, that combs the sky, that impales the clouds
(the "gaukel-
clouds"?), it has its feet in the scree, the branches, the mire, and it
reaches - sometimes - to the fires that then shoot out as glowing lava.
It can hardly be climbed.

As another American critic admitted, "I find it impossible to summarize its
stories," and [easily Pynchon-inflamed?} ended his article: "The apocalyptic
oozes into the apocalypshtik."

This Genius leads us into abominable darkness and onto daylit heights.

Let us enter, then, a winding mountain path, whose tracks are actually
marked with meaningful (or meaningless?) vocabulary flags
planted painstakingly by this word-tinkerer, dreamed up or fetched from
afar with a sort of Nabokov-frenzy (which earned him, too, a reputation
as more sentence-mechanic than stylist): hootenany for social event,
boilermaker for whiskey with beer, cupcake for an attractive young lady,
or snoot for social snobs.

[me - these are actually not uncommon even
in current American slang and quite historically accurate - there are
lots more arcane terms in AtD, imho]

Maybe this is the right time to admire the courage of the publisher,
for nourishing and nurturing the fabulously successful translation
of this mammoth.  This one small sentence may serve to show what
nimble elegance both translators are capable of: "The [wine glasses
were from a matched dozen, each having begun as a glowing parison
at the end of some blowpipe over in Murano but days before." (247)

[me: speaking of arcane terms - "parison"?]

** sidebar: Thomas Pynchon

He is the best known unknown of American literature.  The photo of the
20-year-old sailor from 1957 is one of the few pictures to show
the publicity-shunning Pynchon, whose absence from the media for
decades has been brilliantly staged.  He was born on May 8th, 1937 on
Long Island, studied Phyics and English Literature, reputedly with
Vladimir Nabokov (who, however, couldn't remember him), wrote the
revolutionary epic _Gravity's Rainbow_, the novels V., Vineland,
Mason & Dixon, and disappeared in the anonymity of Manhattan.

    Als Elfriede Jelinek den Literaturnobelpreis erhielt, sagte sie:
»Es ist ein Witz, dass Pynchon den Nobelpreis nicht hat, und ich habe
ihn. Das ist gegen die Naturgesetze.« Seit dem Erscheinen seines neuen
postmodernen MegawerksGegen den Tag rätselt die weltweit vernetzte
Pynchon-Gemeinde, worum es diesmal eigentlich geht. Um eine
Parallelwelt? Ein Spiegellabyrinth? Eine Zeitreise?Oder vielleicht um
textuelle Elektroschaltbilder? Oder des Pudels quantenmechanischen
Kern? Nichts Genaues wird man nicht herausfinden. Pynchon lesen ist
eine erregende Zumutung.

When Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize for Literature, she said,
"It's a joke, that Pynchon doesn't have the Nobel Prize, and I do.  It's against
natural law."  Since the appearance of his new postmodern megawork _Against
the Day_ , the worldwide Pynchon community network is puzzling what it's all
actually about this time.  About a parallel world?  A labyrinth of
mirrors?  Time travel?
Or perhaps a textual circuit diagram?  One won't find out, exactly.  To read
Pynchon is an exciting imposition.

Now with equipment borrowed from [Alpinist] Herr Messner and up the glacier
and down into the Punjab of which poor Bertolt Brecht sang as "Surabaya-Johnny";
into the deceptive (lying!) heights and down in horrible darkness - this crazy
genius named Pynchon grabs us once and for all in his fables
of time and tide.

Which time?  The novel plays at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th
centuries, starts out with an adventurous balloon trip to the World Exhibition
of Chicago in 1893 which pleased itself in exhibitions of hymn-singing
Pygmies, Jewish Klezmer-Ensembles and their otherworldly clarinet solos,
Brazilian Indians who allow themselves to be swallowed by giant Anacondas,
and naked Tarahumara Indians who act as though they've eaten
hallucinatory cacti.
Whether Tunguskan reindeer-herders or a Zulu theater group reenacting
the British troops' massacre at Isandlwana - Pynchon places his strange crew
of the hot air balloon Inconvenience (and us) into a magical world of
unreality, splitting reality into smithereens with an almost
maliciously refined debris-shotgun-technique.

This world of vodka-drinking mosquitoes, reindeer flying gleaming skyward,
bible-thumping wolves that speak Old Church Slavonic, has no logic - except
that which is entirely its own: that of perfect Art.  Prose-architect Pynchon
can allow himself that as we walk by Westminster Abbey in London,
there enfolds us - ourselves, reborn as cats, dogs and mice -
a vegetation-fog as rarefied as the fog of Maya, and behind it the old
London landscape with holy places, sacrificial altars and mysterious
burial mounds persists..

Why isn't this only an automatic confusion, an undisciplined glut of
boundless fantasy?  Because Pynchon halts his
"to-the-point-of-anesthesia-frenzied"
giant wheel - and, hold on, we're no longer in conversation with a ball
of lightning, but instead in the middle of the labor union struggles of the
turn of the century.  Pynchon has not only illuminated a gunslinger Scheherazade
for us, who in early youth debuted as a technical writer at Boeing and
with his studies of the arms industry explained the saga of power at the root
of American business (from among the countless descriptions of
weapons alone, an unamusing glossary assembles itself)  As with all great
literature - from Werther to the Charterhouse of Parma [Stendhal] or to
the novel-cycles of John Dos Passos - the author melds reality in;
he sings the great anticapitalistic Hymn, he shows the trampling of humanity
in the founding of the industrial revolution, in which out of blood
and shattered
bones the glittering wealth of the Carnegies and Rockefellers emerged, that
we observe in all its pomp at the Frick collection of railroad magnate
memorabilia.

The biting bitterness of this author's scorn puts everything in the shadows.

One of the main characters, later murdered by a contracting bottom-feeder,
holds his union card till the end like a communion wafer in the light; his son
will in following years all through Europe seek to revenge him.  Brecht's song
of the Chicago slaughterhouses is a dutiful school-notebook page compared
with the biting bitterness of Pynchon's scorn: "Lew began to grasp somewhat
that he was dealing with a group of refugees
[me: Dude, I cannot find this passage in the English AtD - I am going
to have to read the
translation - find out what all is on the extra 600 pages...]
----------------
Pynchons Hohn: »Lew(…)begriff einigermaßen perplex, dass es sich um
eine Gruppe von Ausflüglern handelte, die zu einer Besichtigung der
Schlachtsäle und Wurstherstellungsräume hier war, zu einer lehrreichen
Stunde des Halsaufschlitzens, Enthauptens, Abhäutens, Ausweidens und
Zerlegens – ›Nun schau dir bloß mal die armen Viecher an, Mutter!‹ –,
bei der sie dem Vieh bei seinem traurigen Gang zusahen, von der
Ankunft in den Eisenbahnwaggons bis hinein in die Gerüche nach Scheiße
und Chemikalien, nach altem Fett und krankem, sterbendem und totem
Gewebe und in einen anschwellenden Hintergrundchor von Tierangst und
Gebrüll in Menschensprachen, die nur wenige von ihnen schon einmal
gehört hatten, ehe die Förderkette die Rümpfe endlich in feierlicher
Parade in die Kühlräume brachte. Am Ausgang würden die Besucher einen
Souvenirladen vorfinden, wo sie stereoskopische Bilder,
Ansichtspostkarten und Dosen mit Souvenir-Frühstücksfleisch in
›erstklassiger Gourmetqualität‹ kaufen konnten, die bekanntermaßen
auch Finger und andere Körperteile von unvorsichtigen Arbeitern
enthielten.«
-----------------

Now is the glory of the epoch, that Pynchon real and unreal collages,
throughout surrealistically as of the school of Max Ernst.
He can let a character see things "that aren't exactly there",
puzzling mandrake-beings sidling out of distant jungles,
and all the neurasthenics of Europe climbing, "their whole bodies covered
with radioactive bath-slime" out of electric bathtubs - and he can allow
an immigrant Finn in the US to realize that life here was "equally shabby
and poor, with the same ignorant wealth,
the same poor in adversity, armies and police free as wolves to exercise
cruelty in the name of the bosses, ready to protect what they had stolen."

This only works via an especially epic technique.  Pynchon didn't invent it,
but masterfully developed it: he adopted the "cuts" of film.  Almost
all chapters
or chapter sections begin asynchronously: "A heavenwide blast of Light";
"After he had won a modest sum at the gaming table, Reef rode up to Nice for
awhile" (where the reader hasn't been yet).  Linkages like that.
Such mechanisms let the narrative pass through crude absurdity to a leisurely
descriptive prose rhythm, to enchanted landscape depictions or a description
of Venice that one doesn't want to break down according to the rules
of the "Literature Police."

Admittedly it's also risky.  Playing fast and loose with costumes,
people's fates,
whole parts of the earth mingled together, could easily land in Karl
May territory.
[German adventure writer, enormously popular but critically disdained, wrote
about the Old West but never traveled beyond New York...]
When the reader is drawn into a journey to Bucharest and Constantinople
along the Black Sea coast to Batumi, or through the Suez canal over the Red and
the Arabian Sea to Karachi, transported to Kiamari via Northwestern Railway
to the salt delta of the Indus - one thinks of Kara Ben Nemsi [Karl
May character]
- then a few pages later a pure Arno-Schmidt-scene.  And this is where the
novel begins to lurch if not completely collapse.

On the question of how this gigantic holiday [? Feerie ?] ends, I must say,
it doesn't end, it falls to pieces.  Almost to the page I can tell
where the fantasy
begins to perfume itself, a hint of 007 begins to waft through the pages, and
the author begins to save himself in all sorts of mundanities.
Shaken, not stirred.
Although he brings off a wonderfully bizarre sodomite's ballet on the pages
1025 ff [German edition], hard homosexual flagellant scenes, it becomes cutesy;
even another orgy inserted near the end seems to be have been added for
book-kiosk appeal, as a "successfully literary obscenity"
We're no longer wandered in mysterious cities like Tuma-Tuva or Shambhala,
instead we're in a Venetian palace with a prince seen among his Carlo Zen
mobiles and vases from Galileo Chini.  And there's not lacking a desk
of gleaming cream color that naturally has to be from Bugatti.

Just a couple pages later we have to marvel at an aubergine colored
taffeta dress, with elbow length sleeves and 3 or 4 pointy frills, gloves
of calfs leather in a dark red-wine shade, and "painstakingly disarrayed hair"
It's glaringly obvious from this fashion commentary that Pynchon has
lost his usual precision of detail. Cream color can hardly glow [me: huh?
sure it can, i've seen it.  hell, piano keys sometimes...mother of pearl...]
and red wine is naturally dark - otherwise it's rose.

The publicity-shy author - one of the few available photos shows the
old Upper Westside Manhattanite Pynchon looking hale and holding
his young son's hand - slips up on this unfamiliar footing.  He promptly
calls the famous French cafe "Coupole des Cafes doing business as
Deux Magots" [me: two statues, I always think "two maggots"] and
the famous spa Aix-les-Bains he turns into Yz-les-Bains [me: this
I think he did on purpose...]  He polishes his set pieces in the last
1/3 of the book, pads his abysses, envelops his bleak skies with
the blue smoke of cigarettes with gold holders.  Even the sex scenes,
hitherto masochistic, become now pleasurable, if not absurd.

For more than 1000 pages this great author has spun us in the air,
dropped us into gorges, set the reader into the godless damnation
of the 2nd Letter of Peter - from which the title of the book is borrowed -
leaving us gasping with the breath pressed out of us.  He has put us
into powerless insomnia.  At the end, the balloon - to paraphrase
Pynchon's opening and closing images - is wrinkled, flaccid, its
ropes grinding through the fabric.

[me - mostly good review, hard to go along with him criticizing
on factual grounds after emphasizing the fantasia nature of the Beast...
interesting that he finds echoes of not-necessarily-canonical
German authors as we have been noting echoes of
disrespected American authors]

apologies to people who really know German...any corrections
most appreciated...wft is "bekakete mickrige" anyway????