fiction files redux discussion

I'm starting this thread because I'm going to start reading Gravity's Rainbow in a couple of days. I'm going to try to catch up with Dan, who started reading it a little while back, but had to put it on hold.

Please also feel free to discuss GR or any other Pynchon novel here. I've only read Crying of Lot 49 and V. so far.

Once I unpack my books I am going to start reading GR again, even if only a few pages a day. The only other Pynchon I've read so far is Lot 49.

I read Gravity Rainbow a few years ago. I liked enough to buy Vineland to read, but still hanging on the self, as my patience for long novels in prose decreased a lot a few years ago.

Cormac McCarthy seems the only to survive my grumpness recently.

OK I'm starting this today!

If I am lucky I'll have the books unpacked this weekend which means I'll have my copy of GR back in hand.

Banana breakfast is AMAZING. Do you think it's really possible to grow bananas in a rooftop hothouse? I haven't pinpointed their location yet, are we in England? Can you grow bananas in England?

OK, I'm still not very far into this. It's awfully chaotic (both the narrative style and the narrative content), and I find myself going back a LOT. If I'm understanding it correctly, my protagonist sort of channels other people's dreams/fantasies. So was the banana breakfast a dream? And if yes, whose dream was it? I already feel like there are going to be a million tiny things to keep track of!

Just hang in there, Patty -- there are parts of GR that feel like he is structuring the book solely by metaphorical linkage. The only comparable books I know is Finnegan's Wake and Dhalgren (read latter).

I'm not a fan of Dhalgren, and haven't read FW yet, but I'm enjoying GR quite a lot.

I am interested in the way Pynchon gives a specific plot detail, but then before he gives the reader adequate context/information to grasp what the detail really is/means/does in the plot, he goes into these long digressions. Not necessarily metaphorical digressions, but yeah, he seems to want the reader to infer the meaning/importance-to-plot/weight of the specific detail, rather than just handing it to us. He seems to like to keep things a bit foggy/mystical.

Yeah, Pynchon is not aiming for clarity in GR. Whether or not it is a correct choice, he did make the choice. And not in the clever literary ways he did with V or Lot 49.

Abandoning ship. Nothing to do with the ship. I'll come back to it some day.