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by Thomas Pynchon
In a word (or two or three): i read this because i'm too much of a
puss to try gravity's rainbow again
From Mr. Hipster:
I took the wimpy way out. I could have
tried to read Gravity's Rainbow again. It would be my third time.
The furthest I ever got in that abomination was page 158 (out
of 980 or so). That's only two pages shy of The Crying of Lot
49's whole 160. Pynchon's prose is daunting. His sentences twist
and turn and run-on and fold in on themselves. This is the longest
160 pages has ever taken me to read and this is his most basic,
straight-forward book. He is constantly quoted by high-minded
MENSA-types, and is probably admired by a generations of nerds
everywhere. Despite that, his stories have, like Tom Robbins,
a good deal of absurdity. It starts with his characters' names,
which are at the same time ridiculous, and completely impossible
to remember (the protagonist in this case is named Oedipa Maas).
I found myself having to leaf back through the book to recall
who was whom. This one was at least reasonably linear, but the
subject matter was just bizarre. Our aforementioned protagonist
is named the executor of the will of her now deceased ex-lover.
He was apparently a wealthy real estate mogul in an imaginary
town in California. As she delves into his holdings and his life,
she uncovers what she believes to be a secret society that is
somehow tied in with the Postal Service. This discovery spins
the story into crazy curlicues of narrative that tendril out in
several directions but never really re-address the core question
of what the hell is going on. It's really as if Pynchon is screwing
with the reader seeing how far he can push him to care about obscure
fake plays about ancient postal service empires. I'm clearly not
smart enough to figure out what he's after here, but, again, that's
not the point. I swear the man sits in his hut or castle or wherever
he lives and laughs at all the pretentious shits who claim that
his novels are the key to the universe. Perhaps, like Oedipa herself,
we are just chasing a ghost to no end.
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