NM Einfach durchziehen

[Michael Bailey]

a try at translation.  I'm no German scholar (obviously) but to me
this guy's prose is a little bit loose and informal sometimes.  Also,
perhaps not a huge P-fan, seemingly.

2010/10/8 Otto <ottosell at googlemail.com>:
>  Einfach durchziehen
>

A simple run-through?

> Thomas Pynchon hat einen Krimi geschrieben. »Natürliche Mängel« ist
> unumständlich, psychedelisch und vor allem richtig groovy.
>

Thomas Pynchon has written a "Krimi".  _Inherent Vice_ is
uncomplicated, psychedelic, and above all properly groovy.


Only what have they done with Thomas Pynchon?

About 300 fewer characters than elsewhere, no endless excursions into
technology or esoterica, and the only dog in _Inherent Vice_ can't
even speak!

There's even a plot stuck in there, which our beloved phantom has
plugged away at and brought into clear exposition!  Perhaps
Pynchon-fans, infected with the ever-present paranoia in this author's
work, have actually been asking these types of questions.  Because
_Inherent Vice_, this streamlinedly conceived crime novel, could in a
hasty estimation be interpreted as a break in his work.  The buzzword
"Pynchon Light" made the rounds even prior to the publication of the
German edition.

The case begins in 1970 in Los Angeles.  Behind an office door with
the inscription "LSD Investigations", which stands for Location,
Surveillance, Detection.

Larry "Doc" Sportello, a notoriously marijuana-smoke-beclouded
Hippie-sleuth, is hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of
a notorious real estate shark.

Michael Wolfmann, a Jewish Nazi, after years of speculation and land
acquisition, has made an ideological course correction: "I just can't
grasp that I've spent my whole life making people pay for housing,
when it ought to be free."

As a consequence, Wolfmann, presumably in remorse for his earlier
profits, invests in a futuristic free-for-everyone housing development
in the desert ("waste") and thereupon disappears without a trace.

When eventually an agent and member of the extreme-right goon squad
"Californians Awake!" is murdered, the LAPD in the person of
hippie-hater Bigfoot Bjornsen appears to be covering up evil
machinations, a group of white dentists emerges and a mysterious ship
named "Golden Fang" makes its rounds, and Doc, with a "White Afro of
just under a foot-and-a-half diameter", descends into a manifold mess.

At last! cheer the Pynchon-fans, made up of literature nerds, workers
of jigsaw puzzles, Trekkies and X-Files-philes.  "Something to solve."
 And the attempt begins to fit _Inherent Vice_ into Pynchon's
narrative tradition.

Actually, resemblances do spring to mind, for example to _The Crying
of Lot 49_, Pynchon's first "Californian" novel, in that: the
protagonist Oedipa Mass, who as executor of an ex-lover's estate
develops in the course of her travels through California into
something of a detective herself, is moved to recognize a trail of
associations in a wilderness of (unrelated?) signs.

Doc and Oedipa are similar insofar as both may only be capable of
partial application of logical reasoning - Oedipa's conclusions could
be fueled by paranoia, Doc's could be afflicted by the consumption of
kilos of weed, especially since he quite naturally justifies the
habit: "But what about Sherlock Homes, he was always doing coke, man,
that helped him solve cases."

But of course!  The profession of private detectives has always been
recognized by  massive affinity for smoke, and specialization.


After all, every literary investigator has mastery of one discipline
or another. He can either deduce or he can punch.  Or, as with Philip
Marlowe and Lew Archer, both.  They handle logic and deal out
fisticuffs.  And Pynchon?  Pynchon orients himself by the morally
dubious prototypes of Californian prefabs and replaces the gunpowder
smoke of Colt guns with dense weed smoke.  This naturally makes Doc a
bit lame and forgetful, his specialty being simply to remain
laid-back.  That would be the case, that is, were it not for his
incorruptible nose for clues, which begins to run in the presence of
suspicious signs.  However, in the main, Doc doesn't move especially
steadily through the story, and is surrounded by bumbling
good-for-nothings, dreamers and crackpots.

In other words, somebody we can totally identify with.

In this author's work, a real innovation - was Pynchon working on this
for roughly 40 years while filling thousands of pages with whole
dynasties of the flattest characters imaginable?  As a representative
of the reader, the solution overtakes Doc, is recapitulated in
genre-typical question-answer format, and accounts are settled.

The resulting adherence to the literary development of a
detective-novel plot brings a further innovation.  NB: where there is
no causal connection between the corpse and
reconstruction of the deed, there is no crime novel!

Indeed, Pynchon since _Gravity's Rainbow_ had refrained from
plotbuilding.  _Against the Day_, his most recent work before
_Inherent Vice_, had a surprisingly chronological narrative style.
However, in the course of that 1,600 page book one plows through
various genres and a fantasy world in which the materials of fiction
and fact crowd together unrestrainedly.

_Inherent Vice_ appears, in contrast, to be orderly.  "Figurants"
aren't everywhere bound up inextricably in the plot, but instead
appear in low enough numbers to keep track of.  It doesn't take place
in some abstract place of fiction, but in a recognizable nation, a
concrete, historical Place.

"Welcome to a world of troubles," says Bigfoot Bjornsen, because the
atmosphere is atilt.  Doc's Los Angeles of reefer lairs, surf music
and endless doper parties loses its innocence, the days of Flower
Power are numbered.  Vietnam, the Watts Riots, heroin, the police
attack on peaceful antiwar demonstrations in Century City, the murder
of two Black Panther leaders on the UCLA campus by nationalist groups,
friction between homeowners and developers, Charles Manson and more
Charles Manson, who even gives the "Cops" nervous "vibrations".

_Inherent Vice_ integrates historical experience, summarizes the new
spirit of the city, maybe of the entire country, and limns the lines
of conflict and tension satirically.

Bodacious!  Finally an evocation of the scene's manners and mores, and
fun, together for once!  When was the last time we've been so amused?
Eh, maybe _Against the Day_.  Because the atypical mystery story of
_Inherent Vice_ is populated by typically Pynchonesque caricatures,
the events are mainly bizarre to the point of absurdity.

Bigfoot Bjornsen, who, with his ridiculous muttonchops and goofy
mustache, looks as though he's fallen out of the famous sabotage video
of the Beastie Boys
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage_%28song%29]; addlepated pimps,
rockers who ride their motorcycles around in a circle for no reason;
postcards delivered by catapult, all the unreliable types in the
business of law enforcement, film references, daft song lyrics,
parodically caricatured dialogue - in short: one is once again granted
admission to a completely normal freakshow in a world between Sam
Spade, The Big Lebowski, the Furry Freak Brothers and Herbert Marcuse.

You might also notice something else even in the first pages: please
never forget "that Charles Manson and the Vietcong are both called
Charlie."  That has got to mean something.

--- not sure I got that:
Mag es auch auf den ersten Seiten anders erscheinen: Bitte vergessen
Sie niemals, »dass Charles Manson und der Vietcong ebenfalls Charlie
heißen.« Irgendwas hat es bestimmt zu bedeuten.