What does lit think of pic related

What does lit think of pic related

best book of all times

major marvel

i don't understand it and I don't like it

Astonishingly beautifully written. I'm reading it again after reading it as a teenager and not really understanding it.

The main things in this book are the style of the prose, the ideas, and the emotions he evokes more through these than through any significant characterization. The characters are admittedly kind of cardboard cutouts, but the fact that they are makes them seem that much more tragic, doomed, and defined by the War. It's not the characters in the book that are important, but, as I said, the ideas and the prose. Some might criticize this, but I think it's just a different and equally valid way of doing fiction, there's also Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky if you want more character-driven works, but you can't really compare them

I'm not really making a deep analysis, just preemptively reacting against the most common criticisms of the book as I see them

Oh yeah, I also forgot the most obvious one

Simply the fact that it's difficult.

It IS, but it's correspondingly rewarding. I don't think even the smartest reader will understand every allusion, every strange and almost incomprehensible metaphor, and be able to parse every sentence (especially the titanically long ones), but if you have enough attention, you can see that even at its most confusing parts it's beautifully written. Not being able to enjoy the style is not the fault of Pynchon iMO.

it looks like a jpg to me, just over 100 k.

>Astonishingly beautifully written.

the Brigadier Pudding section was especially beautiful.

>the Brigadier Pudding section was especially beautiful.
It is. That's the funny part about it, even while Pynchon writes about the most fucking ridiculous stuff, the prose is off-the-charts beautiful. It's such a strange form of aesthetic bliss to read beautiful prose about a man whose erections apparently coincide with rocket bombs and about strange fetishes. The man's an absolute genius.

Pynchon is sort of my litmus test for plebs. He's written some bad shit, but if you've read AND don't appreciate at least ONE of these: Mason & Dixon, Gravity's Rainbow, or The Crying of Lot 49, that tells me you're a pleb. If you haven't read them and thus can't have an opinion on them, I don't care. But if you read and like at least one of them, you're no pleb in my book.

>The characters are admittedly kind of cardboard cutouts

While this is true in some ways, Gravity's Rainbow has some of the most stunningly human passages I've ever read.


>Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn't make…. Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible….

Fucked that up, sorry.

Yeah, that's the funny part, it's really sentimental at moments. I still don't feel he succeeds in pulling of characterizations in this book very well for some reason, many sentimental passages aside.

Now Mason & Dixon, that's where he fucking pulls it.

Also, notice how he CONSTANTLY juxtaposes black and white in the prose, and opposites in general, relating to the theme of duality in the novel.

Random examples:
>A dark turd appears out the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks
>Up on the rooftop the black and white storks, long throats curved to the sky...
>...neighbors in dark coats over white nightclothes, old ladies who have a special place in their night-thoughts for the Fire Service no please you're not going to use that...
>...a black alley with white little feet, holidays all the family by the sea, brine, frying fish, donkey rides, peach taffeta, a boy...
etc...

>a black alley with white little feet
a black alley cat

Blue and yellow too, no?

Idk, I haven't paid attention to that because I'm not that subtle actually. I think it would be blue and orange that are opposite though, that would make more sense as a contrast, though I'mma start looking out for that too, thanks.

Not quite for opposites, more cutouts. Mostly remembering the flowers

That paragraph about pigs is probably one of the few things that may convince me to go vegan.

Mason & Dixon is better

For characterization, definitely. Mason and Dixon are amazing characters, the best Pynchon ever made.

But I'd argue Gravity's Rainbow is more beautifully written, ambitious, and thematically groundbreaking, even if it suffers from being all over the place and not as unified as Mason & Dixon (which itself is something of a digressive mess).

The blue and yellow of Gottfried contrasts with the brown and red of Blicero's Herero Boy.

Ah. As I said, I'm rereading it from when I didn't understand it as a teenager, so I'm just a bit less than 200 pages in, I didn't get to see this much yet. But thanks, I'll keep an eye out for it.

I'm currently on my first reading.

It helps to underline/highlight key phrases, snippets of really great prose, characters, and POV shifts as you go.
It's really making my speed lag, but I feel like I'm able to identify key themes and motifs easier. It should make my second go-around (if I ever decide to) that much easier.

Is there a character list on the net somewhere?

What'd you think of Inherent Vice?

>Mason and Dixon
Oh please. It's Pynchon-by-numbers. A cynical, easy-reading grab for awards and plaudits (especially "muh Great American Novel.")

Easily the most fun I've ever had reading a novel that long.

this is my fetish

I read it without trying to understand it
The storyline is not hard to understand
If you just enjoy the weird asides and buffooneries rather than trying to delve deep into what they mean youll basically understand it
Its a very good book

embarrassing post

I just started. I have no idea what's going on but bananas are versatile and the writing is exquisite.

>The storyline is not hard to understand
You didn't understand it

Bookchemist said V was more of. 'modernist' novel with super difficult writing. Is Gravity's Rainbow more or less the same? Fuck modernist books and their purposely unintelligible writing.

I think the style of V. is about 200 times more simplistic than Gravity's Rainbow, but then on the other hand Gravity's Rainbow is way more compelling, fun, and interesting.

IDK if i explained myself well, but if you like Gravity's Rainbow or even CL49, I still don't care. That's how i feel Pynchon is a litmus test for plebs.

I mean, there's people on Veeky Forums who say Pynchon's too hard for them. I don't care, but they should just stick to Harry Potter.

Sucks niggys?

nah its about spy satellites

postmodern literature is a term invented by hack academics to characterize a wide swath of hack writers who didn't understand what pynchon was doing

delillo understands was pynchon was doing and he basically writes like hemingway with a tinfoil hat