Very P but all impressionistic.

[Mark Kohut]

I think that is RIGHT ON, in my experience too, even, time-changed re
'reading' GR vs the others.

 M & D was very hard for me to read from the Get-go as well--stopped out on
that as well.



On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 7:17 AM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> It took me perhaps 8-10 years to read GR all the way through and the
> whole time I still thought of Pynchon as my favourite novelist. I have
> distinct memories of what I thought of GR before I'd finished it.
> - There was a massive amount of context I wasn't getting, just because
> I didn't have enough history (especially military history),
> mid-century politics, American slang, and so on, and I felt I wasn't
> erudite enough to get it
> - I now think its mode is more poetry than prose, but at the time
> seemed so radical I couldn't figure how to mentally parse it
> - It seems so much bleaker and more nihilistic than anything else
> Pynchon has written, and I think it's easy to forget that when you
> come to a finer appreciation of the novel
> And so while Against the Day and M&D might be superficially similar -
> expansive, very peripatetic in a narrative sense, zany, full of
> linguistic playfulness and generic subversion and historical
> gear-changing - they're still very readable at the level of the
> sentence (the latter is obviously mannered in an archaic way but still
> pretty approachable). And they're not profoundly unsettling,
> disturbing, graphic and hard to reconcile emotionally.
> That's just my tuppence.
>
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 8:49 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I have just read a long twitter thread responding to the question
> > Which is Thomas Pynchon's best novel?...(person was reading GR).
> >
> > 1) supposition: the twitter responders skew younger than most of the
> Plist.
> > 2) many of the plist have read most of TRP from GR on, as they were
> > published
> >
> > 3) Surprising me, there were a lot of Against the Day answers. As well
> as M
> > & D answers
> > and not an easy plurality for GR. ---and a putting GR into some kind of
> > context--from "needs multiple readings" to what seems like
> > you had to be there, so to speak.
> >
> > Just sayin'.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>