doorstoppers

[malignd at aol.com]

I've had exactly the same experience.  There's this unpleasant cutesyness (of all things) that has gotten into his sense of humor as he's aged.  Very off-putting.


Much as I enjoyed Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, I've found more
recent Barth pretty tiresome and have no inclination to try LETTERS.




-----Original Message-----
From: James Kyllo <jkyllo at gmail.com>
To: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 7:12 am
Subject: Re: doorstoppers








Much as I enjoyed Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, I've found more
recent Barth pretty tiresome and have no inclination to try LETTERS.

As for Wolfe, I read Of Time and the River, and The Web and the Rock
twenty-some years ago.  It was good to get in the flow of the writing
and take pleasure in the language.  Not sure I'd have the patience
now.

(and talking of taking pleasure in the language - I've just been
reading Joyce Cary's first trilogy, and it's fabulous stuff.
Particularly as used by Gully Jimson in the third "The Horse's Mouth")

J

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 11:36 AM, Heikki Raudaskoski
<hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:
>
>
> A more or less playful doorstopper race seemed to go on for
> decades:
>
> The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) - 756 pages
> Gravity's Rainbow (1973)   - 760 pages
> LETTERS (1979)             - 772 pages
> Mason & Dixon (1997)       - 773 pages
>
> If memory serves me right, Barth disses The Recognitions in
> passing in an
 essay of his, the ostensible reason being that
> a novel mustn't be more than 772 pages long...
>
> But JB is a lesser writer than WG or TRP. Have any of you
> read LETTERS from beginning to end? I haven't, and it's
> unlikely that I ever will.
>
>
> Heikki
>
> P.S. Does anyone read Thomas Wolfe's novels these days? Novels
> like the almost 1000-page-long Of Time and The River. Haven't
> read anything by him.
>



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