What makes Pynchon so special for you, Veeky Forums? From what I can see...

wrong

Not OP but what makes Pynchon's books hard to read?

this, american culture is pretty much world culture by this point, so anyone can read him

yeah okay so what, i browse reddit. And yeah i'm proud of it. It's a community that is intellectual, insightful, diverse, pluralistic, informative and dialectical. There are many people on reddit and many different opinions. Just because you don't like the opinions of one part of the community, doesn't mean that it's all bad. There is less of a hivemind than here, which shows in everybody here mindlessly and ingronatly flaming at redditors.

>He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow escapes which he finds exciting, physically graceful . . . and the Plot itself! is has a stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an Arctic voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs, kneeling in the grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as blue dye, an endless North, vast country settled by people whose old culture and history are walled off by a great silence from the rest of the world . . . the names of their peninsulas and seas, their long and powerful rivers are unknown down in the temperate world . . . it is a return, this voyage: he has grown old inside his name, the sweeping music of the voyage is music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten it completely . . . but now it is finding him again. . . .
I don't think any run-of-the-mill literature would have a sentence like this, but that's just my opinion.

dude that sentence contained more drudgery than even the stalest of "classical literature"

Sense of humor and general mood of paranoia which a lot of authors sought to copy; combination of low and high brow as well

He's not my favorite but he definitely stands out

this: i can only think of two or three interesting or thoughtful postmodernists and pynchon is one of them.

His books are loaded with run-on sentences that don't make grammatical sense, which can make it very difficult to get through. There are many clauses that are interrupted with disorientingly long enumerations and left unfinished. If you can get past that there isn't much difficulty in the writing, and it's actually very difficult to stop reading once you've started.

He can write very well, there are a lot of passages from GR that are stuck in my memory.

>“So?” is Säure’s customary answer to that one. “Which would you rather do? The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,” shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!”

>“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. ”

>“Himself, as the World sees him: the scholarly young Page of Pentacles, meditating on his magic gold talisman. The Page may also be used to stand for a young girl. But Pentacles describe people of very dark complexion, and so the card almost certainly is Enzian as a young man. And Weissmann may at last, in this limited pasteboard way, have become what he first loved. The King of Cups, crowning his hopes, is the fair intellectual-king. If you’re wondering where he’s gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, not low. His future card, the card of what will come, is The World.”

And that's just to name a few that I liked. What impresses me about Pynchon too is how much the dude knows. There was so much information and history in Gravity's Rainbow that it honestly inspired me to go out and learn more.

is this pasta?

Could you post a sample please?

Don't forget this one :
>He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn't about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end.

Pynchons my fav writer for sure because my fav thing in books is goofs, gags, jokes and rambunctious behavior, and his books are full to the brim of it. Every novel is like one of those novelty snake cans, you open the book & POP you get a face fulla snakes and you fall back cackling. The mad mind, the crack genius, to do it! and then you think hmmm whats he gonna do next, this trickster, and you pick the book back up and BZZZZZZZZZZ you get a shock and Hahahahahah you've been pranked again by the old pynchmeister, that card. "Did that Pynch?" he says, laughing yukyukyukyuk. Watch him as he shoves a pair of plastic buck teeth right up into his mouth and displays em for you- left, right, center- "you like dese? Do i look handsome???" Pulls out a mirror. "Ah!" Hand to naughty mouth. And you're on your ass again laughing as he snaps his suspenders, exits stage right, and appears again hauling a huge golden gong.

Like most American authors he is pretty bad, the Americans on this board meme him because America is so limited in books of any literary merit.

Meh

read other authors from the past fifty years. then go back to pynchon. you'll see the difference

>The officers' latrines, by contrast, are done in red velvet. The decor is 1930s Safety Manual. That is, all over the walls, photograffiti, are pictures of Horrible Disasters in German Naval History. Collisions, magazine explosions, U-boat sinkings, just the thing if you're an officer trying to take a shit. The Foxes have been busy. Commanding officers get whole suites, private shower or sunken bathtub, manicurist (BDM volunteers, mostly), steam room, massage table. To compensate though, all the bulkheads, and the overhead, are occupied by enormous photographs of Hitler at various forms of play. The toilet paper! The toilet paper is covered square after square with caricatures of Churchill, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-Shek, there was even a Staff Caricaturist always on duty to custom-illustrate blank paper for those connoisseurs who are ever in search of the unusual. Wagner and Hugo Wolf were patched into speakers from up in the radio shack. Cigarettes were free. It was a good life on board the Toiletship Rücksichtslos, as it plied its way from Swinemünde to Helgoland, anyplace it was needed, camouflaged in shades of gray, turn-of-the-century style with warp-shadowed prows coming at you from midships so you couldn't tell which way she was headed. Ship's company actually lived each man inside his stall, each with his own key and locker, pin-ups and library shelves decorating the partitions . . . and there were even one-way mirrors so you could sit at your ease, penis dangling toward the ice-cold seawater in your bowl, listen to your VE-301 People's Receiver, and watch the afternoon rush, the busy ringing of feet and talk, card games inside the group toilets, dealers enthroned on real porcelain receiving visitors, some of them lined up back outside the compartment (quiet queues, all business, something like the queues in banks), toilet-lawyers dispensing advice, all kinds of visitor coming and going, the U-boat crews hunching in, twitching eyes nervously and every second or two at the overhead, destroyer sailors larking at the troughs (gigantic troughs! running the whole beam of the ship, even, legend has it, off into mirror-space, big enough to seat 40 or 50 aching assholes side by side, while a constant river of salt flushing water roared by underneath), lighting wads of toilet paper, is what they especially liked to do, setting them flaming yellow in the water upstream and cackling with glee as one by one down the line the sitters leaped off the holes screaming and clutching their blistered asses and inhaling the smell of singed pubic hair.

That isn't the whole paragraph, but if you can make sense of it you're probably equipped to handle the rest of Gravity's Rainbow.

turgid and overwritten, not to mention humorless.

Jesus, you asked for a passage and I spent a long time typing that out. Fucking ingrate.

Prtty good, but I feel like it would be a pain to get through. Dense as fuck.

i'm not the guy that asked for the passage. im a drifter that just drifted into the thread after you posted it.

>p.s. I'm not American.
Not a surprise. American literature is typically too advanced for those detached for American culture, which shortly after WWII superseded European national cultures as the most aesthetically mature and intricate on the planet.

Yeah, it's pretty much like that throughout the entire book, but it's worth it I.M.O. It's a lot of fun to read once you get into Pynchon's writing style.

Then please, for the love of God, look at the context before you shitpost. I intentionally chose one of the most painful passages from the book to demonstrate the worst of Pynchon's writing.

Please. American ''''''''culture''''''''. Truly cancerous.

I'm the guy who requested the sample. Seems to hard for me which is a shame :(. Thanks for posting though.

He's fun, doesn't take it too seriously, yet still manages to build complex novels. I never get the feeling that I have to understand everything in the novel, I'm just there to enjoy the ride.

>only 300 years old
>already heavyweight in lit world

Eastern hemisphere btfo, the American way of life will continue to produce superior culture and art right up to the moment little chinese boots stomp on our white ass necks.

This thread is almost entirely bait except for a couple of quotes. Fuck off OP.

I really like his prose. This is one of my favorite passages from M&D:
>Pynchons my fav writer for sure because my fav thing in books is goofs, gags, jokes and rambunctious behavior, and his books are full to the brim of it. Every novel is like one of those novelty snake cans, you open the book & POP you get a face fulla snakes and you fall back cackling. The mad mind, the crack genius, to do it! and then you think hmmm whats he gonna do next, this trickster, and you pick the book back up and BZZZZZZZZZZ you get a shock and Hahahahahah you've been pranked again by the old pynchmeister, that card. "Did that Pynch?" he says, laughing yukyukyukyuk. Watch him as he shoves a pair of plastic buck teeth right up into his mouth and displays em for you- left, right, center- "you like dese? Do i look handsome???" Pulls out a mirror. "Ah!" Hand to naughty mouth. And you're on your ass again laughing as he snaps his suspenders, exits stage right, and appears again hauling a huge golden gong.

Please fucking kill yourself

Just popped in to say that this in no way is an accurate snippet of what one can read in Gravity's Rainbow

A man shares his opinion and all the muricans start talkng trash. lol.

I find this an easy read, and I don't understand why. English isn't my first language, and even though most of the times I struggle I'm reading poetry, I was sure this was going to be hard.
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are so far the only works of literature that make feel like a complete idiot.
If this is the overall challenge level that these posmo books present, I don't think it's going to be as much of a problem as I thought.

And by the way, I don't believe I'm some hot shit or anything. Just genuinely happy.

Could you post an accurate one then please?

lol

No one knows what he looks like and that's sooooo cool best author ever

i had a nightmare about Pynchon being some kind of evil psycho without legs, arms, and eyes, who i lived with.
weird.

You're thinking of Stirner

But it is accurate, these kinds of passages are all over Gravity's Rainbow.

It isn't a challenging read, but for someone who isn't used to denser varieties of literature it is.

>implying

I had a dream that I met him but he was just some dark and shrouded figure who had no face.

I find his linguistics ability pretty interesting, especially being from the north east of England, it was really cool albeit slightly exaggerated his take on accents up here in Mason & Dixon but I love the disjointedness each of his books have in every decade he tends to write about.

>It isn't a challenging read

what is?

Was gonna post that passage. It's my favourite.

Anyone know why everyone in V. says "wha" instead of "what"? Really bugs me.

>says
*sez

He's being a faggot and so is that other guy. It's considered extremely difficult to understand.

Hard for now. Keep reading other books and eventually you'll be confident enough

It's really, really not. The only reason people think so is because of the first chapter. Everything else can be understood by your average college student.

>The only reason people think so is because of the first chapter
Really ? I found the first chapter to be one of the easiest parts of the book. It's pretty straightforward, missile hits and then the guy makes Banana Breakfast. What's so difficult about that ? The most difficult parts for me were the ones where new storylines were introduced, like the exposition of the Franz and Leni story for example.

What are you on about? They're in the first chapter too.

I'm the one that said it was easy and I'm not being a faggot as you said. Most of the literature I read is philosophy and pre18 century stuff. I want to start with this modern literature and I just came across a nice surprise. That's it.

come on user, you gotta obey the inb4's >8430104

damn son, where'd you find this

>doesn't take it too seriously
making jokes =/= not taking things seriously

It's so much easier than Ulysses. If you finished it, you'll have no trouble with GR.

that's how most people say "what" most of the time unless they're being confrontational or are genuinely interested

Pynchon is Cortázar done right.

t. argie

That's the guy's point, he picked a particularly dense and weird passage and said "If you can make sense out of this, ur good"

No, I mean in general. IJ constantly comes off as pretentious and too try hard.
GR comes off as a passion project.
If that makes sense I guess.

DeLillo being the other.

It's pretty-sounding.

it does, and it is

Is there any other author who writes exactly how you think they would from the way they look.

All of them

Name an author that doesn't write how they look.
Protip: you can't

I would say most of them.

Didn't read it yet user, but I found both one day in a friend's shelf and had a hard time reading them. Definitely harder than most of the stuff I've ever seen.

But that makes no sense, given that this passage demostrates one of hundreds of possible moods and styles he uses on the book. So, if he can read this, there is still no guarantee that he will enjoy the book, or that he is above or below a certain standard, on any scale I can think of.

Someone post the one with Death.

I refrained from doing that... let them read it where it is

does anyone have the gravity's rainbow movie chart? with dustin hoffman as slothrop, etc

Can anyone link me a really trippy article/theory where a supposed common thread between all the books is proposed? I can't remember much more about it right now

This is supringsingly readable, better than i expected, allthough i suppose it's not just the writing style that would make it hard.
Also: i could see 800 (?) pages of this getting heavy.