Colson Whitehead - Zone One

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Very interesting. Thank you!

Am 01.11.2018 um 23:58 schrieb John Bailey:
> Halfway through my first book by Colson Whitehead and I'm thinking:
> damn, this has Pynchon in its veins. Some quick googling confirms that
> Whitehead is avowedly a fan.
> The novel is NYC post-zombie-apocalypse, following a Benny
> Profane-like schlub tasked with mopping up the undead stragglers. For
> all its genre roots it's very literary, to a point that irked me early
> on - why say it's cloudy when you can call the sky a "solemn
> nigrescence"? - but the thesaurus bashing turns out to be less
> frequent and less annoying than I first thought.
> And the stylistic methods Whitehead has purloined from Pynchon are
> giving me greater insight into just what P was doing in GR,
> especially. What actually *happens* in Zone One is very slight - the
> protagonist's actions could probably be condensed to 5-10 pages - but
> his temporal bandwidth is huge, so everything is echoed and refracted
> by the past that still lives in the present. It's not as simple as one
> thing triggering a memory, but everything in the novel's present
> conjures up the past as a kind of field. We're not just given a line
> of dialogue, but a bunch of lines that people used to say in those
> moments. Or a handful of situations that collectively describe the
> broader world, rather than merely one. It's hard to describe but it's
> extremely reminiscent of Pynchon's big books.
> "They rappelled from gunships into key intersections, eliminating a
> hundred shuddering skels before clipping back to the cables and
> floating out of the strike zone, camoed fairies of destruction. They
> strafed, loosed fusillades, and mastered the head shots, spinal
> separators, and cranial detonators that diverted the dead to the
> sidewalk against newspaper boxes, fire hydrants, antiterrorism
> planters, and inscrutable corporate-sponsored public art. The soldiers
> terminated targets on fire escapes, where they slumped like moths
> caught in wrought-iron cobwebs. Kill techniques cycled in their fads,
> in this week and out the next, as the soldiers refined and traded tips
> and accidental discoveries. Everyone had their own way of handling
> things. The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares
> and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and
> franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer. Exquisite
> glass panes crashed down in their music, manufacturing geometric
> shapes that had never before existed in the history of the world,
> which in turn sharded into newer shapes and brilliant white dust.
> Shell casings danced and skipped on the asphalt like tossed cigarette
> butts. The gun smoke was sucked up into braids and curtains by the
> atmospheric patterns created by skyscrapers and avenue crevices, those
> mountain faces and valleys, and when it cleared the creatures gushed
> in renewed fortified lines.
> The soldiers discussed work over dinner."
> --
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