Thomas Pynchon discussion
Against the Day
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Against the Day is my favorite of all Pynchon's books. I've read it twice and I could go again. The audio recording is also quite good, narrated by Dick HIll who does a superb job. I'll never forget his quirky little yell calling - "Suck-ling!" (lol)Vineland was my first Pynchon and it was a wonderment.
I love Against the Day, too. Does anyone on here like Umberto Eco? He's not nearly the genius that Pynchon is, and his novels are really just a method of explicating his ideas about history, I think, but his postmodern narration in The Prague Cemetery was fun for some of the same reasons I like Pynchon.
Umberto Eco is a big favorite of mine. I think Foucault's Pendulum is his best with The Name of the Rose a close second - then he slid off somewhere with too much semiotics and theory stuff. But I really enjoyed The Prague Cemetery again - to the point of third. (g)
Yes AtD is awesome, but Phillip, you really must read Vineland. perhaps because it was the first Pynchon that I read, it has long remained my favorite (and i recently finished the canon by finally reading V.), but I think it's more because it takes place in a world that i can more directly relate to and therefore better understand Pynchon's awesome ability to warp reality and yet incorporate subtle details of the everyday world. Becky -- it took me two tries to get through the Island of the Day Before, but that book is truly mindbending in ways that Baudolino and his subsequent works have not been able to match. And don't give up on Eco's semiotics stuff, Kant and the Platypus is the only book i've read that comes close to Godel Escher Bach for completely altering my understanding of the human mind. save the first chapter to read at the end and it is an easier book to get through.
Oh I don't mind semiotics as a light theme in a novel but I thought Eco went a bit overboard in Island of the Day Before - I mean... an orange dove? I've got about 3 non-fictions by Eco on my tbr shelf - heh - Kant and the Platypus sounds pretty good, though. I love Eco's sense of humor.
Umberto Eco is one of my all time favourites....I like "island of the day before" the best of his works - to me this novel is the best example of keeping good balance between the emotional/feeling part and the mental/intellectual part. One of the most beautiful stories -structurally- I can remember reading...He's a great 'architect' like Pynchon....my all time least favourite work by eco is his new one 'the prague cemetery'....really disliked it. never came together for me , found it quite thin and shallow, and I had to force myself to finish it. Jan wrote: "I love Against the Day, too. Does anyone on here like Umberto Eco? He's not nearly the genius that Pynchon is, and his novels are really just a method of explicating his ideas about history, I thin..."Becky wrote: "Against the Day is my favorite of all Pynchon's books. I've read it twice and I could go again. The audio recording is also quite good, narrated by Dick HIll who does a superb job. I'll never ..."
Jan wrote: "I love Against the Day, too. Does anyone on here like Umberto Eco? He's not nearly the genius that Pynchon is, and his novels are really just a method of explicating his ideas about history, I thin..."
Against the day is my most recent TP; I have Mason & Dixon left to finish them all--for the first time, at least. ATD certainly had a "pulse" for me, or maybe a "groove" but whatever, it felt like this novel pulled me along more than any other of his. And they all have pulled me along.Apparently I have to check out Eco.
The Name of the Rose is usually suggested as the best starter novel for Eco and I agree. Happy reading! :-)
Jan wrote: "I love Against the Day, too. Does anyone on here like Umberto Eco? ..."i read eco's writings on james joyce (he wrote a nice study of the language of finnegans wake) and semiotics (the wake book was all about semiotics, really), but i haven't read his novels. i keep putting them on to-read lists, but ... so many books, so little time.
And I have Eco's little study of Joyce's language (if it's the one included in "Umberto Eco: On Literature"). But although I've read almost everything Joyce wrote, (not Exiles) I haven't read Eco's essay. (heh)
i wrote my graduate thesis on joyce, and studied with a joyce scholar that recommended it. was quite useful. it had a very wake-ian title ... can't remember what though.
that's it! - if anyone is looking for a short (read: manageable) read on the language of FINNEGANS WAKE, that's a good one.
i like this group, but one thing concerns me - there isn't a lot of actual discussion on the BOOKS that we are talking about (that were written by thomas pynchon).maybe i need to frame a specific question or thought about ATD, maybe not - but it would be cool if we could actually discuss things about the book.
i love the manifold character streams and the various stories - it falls in line with a lot of films that have been made in the past 10 years, say BABEL, for instance, where seemingly unrelated storylines converge and you realize - by golly - we are all connected after all!
while that device has grown a bit gimmicky, i love what pynchon did with it in ATD, that's one of my favorite features of the book. i also love how tight the book is, for it seems like, given its size and bulk, there would be a lot of extraneous material - but i don't find that. i really appreciate how well it all fits together. and the characters and scenarios are wonderful, as they are in his best work.
I would submit that it's easier to talk about books that i am actually reading or have just finished. I have read the Pynchon canon. V was the last book i finished and that was last year. I am not a big re-reader, but am considering GR again since it's been years.As for AtD...I loved it when i read it because of its scope and tautness, and because i had read enough Pynchon before to expect dead ends and looniness interspersed with razor sharp prose.
it is definitely among his best
agreed. now i just need to read MASON AND DIXON from start to finish. i have started it a few times and got stuck because i was too busy to stay focused, and like AtD, it's not a book you can easily put down for a week and then pick and remember where you left off (it's many streams).i'm just finishing VINELAND, which is my least favorite of the pynchon novels. parts were brilliant, but it didn't feel as focused as the others. that is not to say i don't like it when pynchon goes off on tangents, but these tangents didn't feel wholly connected to the center. and yes, i realize there is a contradiction in my last statement; tangent being something that is free to roam from the corral.
Vineland was my intro to Pynchon so maybe I didn't expect so much. In about 1995 I was browsing in a small-town indie bookstore and liked the cover and the blurbs. I bought it although I'd never heard of Pynchon prior to that. Anyway, I enjoyed the book well enough to read more of his work. I went on to The Crying of Lot 49 and when it came out in paperback. Mason & DIxon. Finally, in probably 1999 or so. I tackled Gravity's Rainbow and wasn't all that impressed. Okay fine - I reread the ones I liked. (g)
I pre-ordered Against the Day and read it cover to cover over that Thanksgiving weekend. Over the next few months I reread it. That's my fave of the oeuvre. Then I went back for another go at Gravity's Rainbow and it was better but not on my personal "greatest hits of TPR" list.
I've also read Slow Learner, the intro to Orwell's 1984, Inherent Vice and V. V. was last.
I'm curious - where did y'all hear about and first read Pychon, in what order did you read his books, and which are your favorites?
i heard about him from a room-mate in the early 1980s - he was reading GR, and passed it on to me - i was flabbergast and confused, but curious. i put him away for a while and was overly-focused on james joyce for about 10 years or more, but came back to pynchon via crying of lot 39 - that really won me over, and i knew i wanted to get back into him.
when mason and dixon came out, i picked it up, but still haven't made it all the way through - i started it three or four times, but i have a very busy life and find i need big stretches of time to work on the bigger novels.
nonetheless, when against the day came out, i read it straight through after a few false starts. that book really re-kindled my love for fiction, and i thank mr pynchon for that. at
that point, i decided to go back and read everything, starting with gravity's rainbow. on second reading, i loved that one.
then i went back to the beginning and read V, and liked it, but it didn't have the effect that GR and AtD had.
then i read inherent vice, and because i grew up in los angeles during that era, i loved that one as well - really connected with it. read it twice, actually.
i just finished vineland, and am going to re-read crying of lot 39 this summer.
i plan on reading mason and dixon before the year ends - hoping for a stretch of time i can truly dedicate to it; august is the period where i'm most likely to achieve that.
I am in the middle of AtD for the second time. The first time through, it was great. This time it's even better, as I can see him setting up his themes and tropes, and see better the connections among these and all the plot lines.My Milton professor once suggested a course called "Going Down Holes," which would focus on epic journeys into the underworld (Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, etc). Pynchon seems to have gone after this same subterranean turf in AtD – in spades (pun intended). He's delivered an American epic.
I love rereading - reading a masterpiece and going on to the next is like a series of one-night stands. Re-reading a delicious book is to find the nuances, the connections, the depths. It's like getting to know a new friend so much better - until you're old friends. I couldn't have known the meaning of the first sentence of Finnegans Wake until you get to the last one. And then you want to do it again. (Or I did, anyway.)
I've read Against the Day twice. I, too, find it my favorite, although The Crying of Lot 49 comes close. I think I especially enjoyed the descent of the Chums of Chance from boyish optimism into paranoia.Has anyone here read Dahlgren by Samuel Delaney? It reminds me of Pynchon, not necessarily in style, but in its frenetic, sometimes insane prose and the jumps in points of view.
-Steve
don't know the writer samuel delaney ..
In that case, I highly recommend Dahlgren. I spelled Delany wrong by the say - there's only one 'e'.Dahlgren is about a guy known only as "the Kid" or "Kid" who enters the city of Bellona having forgotten his name. Bellona is a city in the middle of America where some unknown and unexplainable catastrophe has happened and only a few thousand people are left.
Delaney intentionally wrote the book in such a way that you could start it at several different points. It famously begins in the middle of a sentence and ends with the beginning of the same sentence. At one point in the book the Kid finds a spiral-bound notebook which is clearly someone's diary, written on only the right side. He starts using the left-side pages for his own writing. By the end of the book, it is no longer entirely clear who wrote which sections of the notebook, and it appears that the book actually may be the notebook.
Anyway, I can't do the book justice here, any more than I could describe Gravity's Rainbow as "the madcap adventures of Lt Tyrone Slothrop".
Yes, Steve, thanks. I'll put Dahlgren on my to-read list.
I've been slowly reading AtD for the last 9 months, on my phone of all places, and now that I've just crossed the divide into the later half of the book I'm starting to understand the thematic importance of the math that Kit and Yashmeen are up to. I love Pynchon when he cracks my mind wide open and fills it with so many cool ideas and occurences from the obscurity of history (obscure to me at least). I fell hard for rocket science after GR and had an amazing moment at the Air and Space Smithsonian in DC when I saw an actual V2. I am stunned by the math in AtD....my question is really, is any of this stuff familiar to any other readers? How obscure are the Quaternions, Hamiltonions, Vectorists, Cantorians to the rest of you? I remember Cantor from trying to read DFW's book on Infinity, but that's about where my knowledge of this era of math theory ends. I must say this idea of an actual navigational map that shows higher-dimensional travel is so exciting! What excites me about Pynchon is what I learn from him...any one else agree?
the second half really does begin to gather narrative steam - as you say, it builds so well on the first half. on a somewhat unrelated note, i have been writing a suite of music for saxophone trio inspired by the characters ... the first part is called THE YASHMEEN WIGGLE, the second part is called TRAVERSE THE WEB, the third part is called JUST BE FRANK ALREADY, and the fourth and final part isn't finished and does not yet have a title.
Phillip wrote: "the second half really does begin to gather narrative steam - as you say, it builds so well on the first half. on a somewhat unrelated note, i have been writing a suite of music for saxophone tri..."
I have a bachelor's degree in mathematics and I couldn't necessarily parse all of the math stuff in AtD, though that's probably due to the length of time I spent since my college years, all during which I haven't really used math... At any rate I find AtD to be an almost endless well of riches of all sorts, not just mathematical.
Jeremiah wrote: "Phillip wrote: "the second half really does begin to gather narrative steam - as you say, it builds so well on the first half. on a somewhat unrelated note, i have been writing a suite of music f..."
definitely
last summer i re-read MASON AND DIXON with the pynchon wiki as companion … it cites many historical references and offered a lot of depth. you see how patiently pynchon researched the work.
if i get around to re-reading ATD, i’ll definitely use it … i know there are countless historical markers in the mix.
this is one of the best examples of pynchon's ecstatic prose - i know lots of folks bogged down in the book, but i felt that once i got a hold of the pulse and kept reading i was completely swept up in it. the myriad story lines were fascinating and i loved the way they began to converge a little more than half-way through. some amazing pynchon-esque scenes (mayonnaise factory!) and lots of bawdy humor ... and songs!
i can't even say which storyline i liked best - they were all so entertaining and fascinating. i think this is pynchon's best work to date.
has anyone else here made it all the way through?
VINELAND is still the only text i haven't read, and once i work my way through that i want to go back and re-read this one. probably won't happen until next year.
thoughts? comments?