Bleeding Edge - A Rolling Assessment

[Max Nemtsov]

second this
plus, in BE we see the speech tempo itself increased, and its density, 
with the times, that, to my ear, sounds very true to the times 
a-changin'. phrases get shorter, meaning is packed. of course, it's 
different from earlier novels, even IV, but it doesn't mean it's worse
Mx

On 26.09.2013 14:53, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
> I'm not sure how BE is a decline from IV. Readers here, and in several 
> reviews,  seem to be faulting the author for not writing a novel that 
> they can get at from the inside. BE is brilliant in its humor and in 
> how it captures, as only Pynchon can, a period and place, saturated 
> with cinemas. The project begins with VL, as film gives way to TV, 
> moves on to the Net with IV and bombs out the mind with BE. Who can 
> write these dialogues? Were a part of BE put on stage, the theater 
> would have a Shakespearean audience, young and old and middle of the 
> pack. Kings and Children.  I can't wait for the film and I hope P 
> sticks around and pitches in on it.
> The parody is Shakesepearean. The magic of puns is lowlanded in your 
> lap, a kick in the crotch.
>  If you want cannonical, Nobel Literature, read his great novels; this 
> one is for the preterit, those passed over by the nobels.
>
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 6:09 AM, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com 
> <mailto:johncarvill at hotmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Thanks for that enjoyable personal history, Robin. And I reckon
>     we're all with you on the lamenting bookshop culture front.
>
>
>     > It arrives yesterday. I'm about 60 pages in. This seems affectless,
>     > like it was written on autopilot.
>
>     Reads like it was written by a Pynchon-imitating robot. Maybe
>     that's the point, given the tech theme?
>
>
>     >There's jokes, but I'm not laughing.
>
>     Yehp.
>
>
>     > I did what I did to defend I.V. in the group read.
>
>     I never understood the downers on IV. Yes, it was a relatively
>     minor work, but wonderfully enjoyable and still full of striking
>     passages, from page one onward. In IV, the snappy dialog was on
>     the right side of that line where cute crosses over into annoying;
>     in BE, that rubicon has been left way behind. In IV, the dialog
>     was supported by beautiful Pynchon prose - jazzy and poetic; in
>     BE, that prose has degraded by several orders of magnitude. In IV,
>     I was forever reaching for a pencil, either to make a note or just
>     to run a line down the side of the page, marking a particularly
>     good passage; with BE, my pencil has not been called for once so far.
>
>     I've had a busy week, so I'm still stuck around page 100 or so.
>     I'm in tow minds whether to carry on, or go back and start again,
>     hoping to 'get' it second time round.... It's Pynchon, so I'm open
>     to the suggestion that the fault lies with the reader, i.e. me.
>     But if my current impression doesn't radically change, this is
>     destined to be the first Pynchon novel I unequivocally categorise
>     as a stinker. Yikes.
>
>
>
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