/lit/ - Literature

fucking honkey

It's much easier to read than GR and MD. Not quite as funny as his usual stuff though

It is worth it?

The prose is relatively easy to follow, the plot lines are pretty clearly laid out. Still, AtD seems kind of bloated compared to Pynchon's classics.

I've been thinking about getting it for 6 months, but wasn't sure. I think I will. Pynchon has some interesting ideas.

Just read Mason & Dixon, it's his best by a mile.

Inherent Vice is great summer reading.

Not OP, but I just bought Crying Lot and was wondering if it's easy to read compared to GR. I attempted to read GR and stopped at around page 50.

It's funny I bought AtD a few months ago, read the first few pages and put it down. I was going to ask how it was and if the journey (its a rather thick book) is worth it...might give it another go.

Well, Against the Day has got all the sort of usual science/paranoia stuff in Pynchon---most memorably the Tunguska Event in AtD.

But you kind of have to have a high tolerance for late Victorian boys' books, of the sort that nobody reads anymore. Like there's a lot of parody of that sort of subliterary stuff, to prove he did his research.

But ultimately the other Pynchon novel it needs to be compared to is Vineland. They're Pynchon's most directly political books: AtD is specifically about a moment in time when technological innovation exploded and there was a glimpse of potential liberation, that vanished. It's not unlike the way the 60s are seen in retrospect in Vineland.

>>1770664
I was sort of surprised by how political Vineland is. It's not typical of Pynchon to sound off on people like Reagan.

I'm still thinking about it in the context of Frenesi and Brock--liberal and conservative fucking compulsively with each other despite the marriage and child said liberal has with another liberal. Interestingly done.


Also, what exactly happened to Brock at the end? He seems to be usurped in some weird Thantoid version of crossing the rivers of Hades, relinquishing his skeleton (conservative rigidness) in the process. Interested to hear takes on this.

Bam.

>>1770712
Oh wow, well put. I got the impression his department got pulled by higher-ups when they realized he was going AWOL and playing war games up in rural California- the result having an instant effect and forcing him to back down. I didn't re-read that passage in the helicopter though. It was so surreal at that point I was kind of just flowing.

>>1770813
It is surreal, and actually pretty sudden. I'm still mulling it over. If one thinks about it, all the liberal, hippy people intermingle and are at peace with the Thanatoids, whereas Brock seems to get thwarted by them in a sudden clap.

To me, this is a possible commentary on how liberalism embraces the changes of the world (death being a fairly natural change) where conservative Brock tries to retain (conserve) and ends up facing shifts in sudden and unavoidable ways.

> mfw I'm scoffing at all y'all and your literature of
ideas