/lit/ - Literature

Come on, GR threads everyday but no love for ATD? How did you guys feel about the graphic sexual encounters?

A passage that I found particularly beautiful and sad:

>Speaking quietly, with downcast eyes, as if all but stupefied by whatever she had come here out of, almost too young for the woman he remembered, innocent as yet of her immortality. The light seemed to have gathered preferentially about her face and golden hair. He imagined himself reaching out to her through dust-crowded shafts of light, not optical so much as temporal light, whatever it was being carried by Time’s Æther, cruelly assembled in massless barriers between them. She might not know anymore who he was, what they had been through together. Was that her voice he’d heard? Could she see him from wherever in the mathematical mists she’d journeyed to?

>“One thing to try and keep to an honorable deal with your dead,” it seemed to Reef, “another to just go spreading death any way you can. Don’t tell me I’m infected with bourgeois values. I’ve got to where I like these cafés, all this to-and-fro of the city life—rather be out here enjoying it than worried all the time about some bomb going off—” which is of course exactly when it happened, so unexpected and so loud that for many days afterward those who survived would not be certain it had really occurred, any more than believe someone had actually desired to send such long-evolved and dearly-bought civility into this great blossoming of disintegration—a dense, prolonged shower of glass fragments, green and clear and amber and black, from windows, mirrors and drinking glasses, carafes and bottles of absinthe, wine, fruit syrups, whiskey of many ages and origins, human blood everywhere, blood arterial, venous and capillary, fragments of bone and cartilage and soft tissue, wood splinters of all sizes from the furniture, shrapnel of tin, zinc and brass, from torn ragged sheets down to the tiny nails in picture frames, nitrous fumes, fluid unfurlings of smoke too black to see through—a huge, glittering passage skyward and back again, outward and across the street and down the block, passing through the rays of a completely indifferent noontide sun, like a long heliograph message sent too fast for any but angels of destruction to read.
>Leaving these so abruptly wounded bourgeoisie, crying like children, children again, with no obligation but to look helpless and pitiable enough to move those who had the means to defend them, protectors with modern weapons and unbreakable discipline, and what was taking them so long? As they cried, they found they were able to look into one another’s eyes, as if set free from most of their needs to pretend adulthood, needs in force up until what was still only a few seconds ago.

>>12018752
What is it about? Tell me more.

>>12019087
>Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

>With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

>The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

>As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

>Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

>Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

— Thomas Pynchon

I'm currently reading it and it's beautiful.

I don't have any answers to your questions.

I want to write like this. Not necessarily the convoluted narratives and the constant shifting of perspectives, just prose like this that can make me laugh one second and cry the next.

Dammit.

>>12019172
I'm glad you're enjoying it too. Pynchon's prose truly is something special. Sometimes he's being goofy and then gradually he just builds up this momentum and lays down a sentence that goes on for an entire page and completely blows me away.

>>12018752
about a quarter through, very enjoyable
only other pynchon I've read is V. and inherent vice

Against the Day was great. I still like GR and Mason Dixon more but AtD is woefully underrated. The part about 9/11 was right on. It’s definitey Pynchon’s most pessimistic novel yet, I think.

The chums physically existed for sure—in the same way that Thomas Pynchon exists for you or me. As a reflective foil for society rather than as intimately known entities, you know?

>>12019271
How does IV stack up against V and what you've read of ATD? I'm thinking IV is going to be my next Pynchon before I get to GR.

>>12019272
I assume by 9/11 part you mean the Vormance Expedition and the bringing the "Serpent" to NY? I didn't catch that at first.

>>12019478
Inherent vice was pretty funny desu, read much easier than v which I had trouble with in a few parts. Still would say I enjoyed v more, it was a little more mystical and surreal

>>12019579
Compared to v and iv I’m enjoying ATD A bit more, the historical aspect of V was my favorite and ATD sorta expands on it with all these weird characters and events

Gonna pick this up after I finish GR (maybe I'll give my head a rest first).
Turns out /lit/ was right about Pinecone, he's legitimately fantastic.

>>12019607
I can understand why people don’t like pych but it’s hard to deny his talent

>>12018752

Only Pynchon I have yet to read, somehow have been putting it off for years. How does it compare to GR or MD in terms of scope and quality?

>>12018752
There's so much going on within the novel I feel compelled to read it again, even though I finished it about 4 months ago.

The moment in the literal middle of the book when it splits from pre WWI to post is so damn good.

And the Tunguska event will forever be in my mind

Just finished GR about a month ago. Does Pynchon get any better or is GR his magnum opus? I’ve heard that M&D is supposed to be better but is that just a meme?

Just curious how long did it take you guys to read this book? I've been meaning to but I'm not sure it's worth the time.
It took me almost a year to finish Gravity's Rainbow and I'm not sure I can waste another year on a book so similar.
Not sure if that makes me retarded but I did a lot of re-rerading as I went for full comprehension.

>>12020968
No, M&D is the genuine deal. It's all the best aspects of Pynchon with total sincerity.

>>12020981
AtD took me 2 months, GR took me 3. The former is a lot easier because it isn't as disjointed in its prose and arc. While there is some skipping around, you know where you are exactly at all times. While GR is a clusterfuck

>>12020995
so you're saying I'm retarded?
I can't even imagine how someone could read GR in 3 months unless they read for hours straight every day.

>>12021037
Not trying to be a dick, but reading for hours every night is pretty easy to do of you've made a habit of it. Maybe you don't have the time to spare, but I bet there's something in your leasure time that you do for two hours which could be replaced with reading.

>>12021037
Where on Earth did you get me calling you retarded from? People have their own pace. And with a tome like GR its easy to understand if someone really took their time with it.

But yea, I read for about an hour or two a day, and was living the NEET life at the time.