/lit/ - Literature

Why is Gravity's Rainbow considered Pynch's best when it is clearly Against the Day?

>>23237629
Don't have Mason & Dixon but I bought Against the Day a while ago, is it a whitepill book?

I've only read Lot 49 but I was looking to read more Pynchon. I'm really interested in Against the Day and Mason & Dixon. Which one is better? I heard that AtD is easier to read but M&D is more "concise"

is this the best novel ever "written" by Pynchon?

Alright, I just started reading this, what am I in for?

>>23086167
Pynchon does pulp better. Austere deserves a nod, City of Glass is pretty great and a fantastic example of using pulp for lit ends. But none of these are pulp by any standards, especially Burroughs.

>that Lovecraft pastiche
Don't think anything has made me laugh so hard. In general the way he uses pastiche and the interaction between them all is really impressive, not sure if I completely missed them when I first read it years ago or completely forgot but I am loving it. This is easily his most complex and enjoyable work and if he maintains it through the entire work it will be by far his best and my memory of that first read suggests it will.

He seems to pastiche just about all of those genre defining authors and styles from the time period and does it well while maintaining his own voice but the whole Iceland spar Lovecraft pastiche is really something else.

I like this Franz Ferdinand character so far I hope nothing bad happens to him

I doubt more than a couple hundred people have ever read this whole thing.

what a journey

Against the Day

Have any of you pseuds read this in its entirety? I just finished it, in my opinion a definitive step down from Gravity's Rainbow/Mason and Dixon.
>pynchon at his most on-the-nose with politics, the scene with the anarchist commune late in the novel actually made me roll my eyes if it wasn't meant to be some joke
>the yashmeen/reef/cyprian trio somehow managed to disgust me more than the corprophagy and other shit from his novels
>the characters from the balkan excursion were, even for pynchon, flat and uninteresting
>first 300 pages or so and the rest of the novel feel as though they were written by different people
>"austria bad" without any sort of nuance whatsoever

What went wrong?

this century? gotta be this

About to start reading Against the Day
what is some good reading music for it? I want something ambient but with a 1890s+ feel

How is it that you motherfuckers spend so many threads talking about Gravity's Rainbow but barely anyone talks about the even more epic *prequel* to Gravity's Rainbow?

>>19651038
Wrong.

>>19590916
I wanted to talk about this. It's arguably steampunk and Gravity's Rainbow is arguably sci fi too.

>Fate does not speak. She carries a Mauser and from time to time indicates our proper path.

I just finished it and I kinda want to cry. Did that really happen to the Chums of Chance? Could it all have actually worked out so happily for damn near everybody?

So what happened to Kit?

>>12740919
Grande Sertão: Veredas?
What an amazing book. I found about it 4 years ago. Blew my tuga mind. One of my personal favourites. Good taste, macaco.

>>12740314
>It varies, but currently is pic related
Worked for a crooked lawyer for 3 years and created a multitude of false legal documents that bamboozled courts and clients. He's dead now, but many people say he faked his death, which makes sense, knowing the man.