Lit´s opinion on the Illuminatus Trilogy?

[phreaker1997 No.10042778]

It's a dreadfully long monster of a book... and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent—no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors—whom I've never heard of—have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy... If The Lord of the Rings is a fairy tale for adults, sophisticated readers will quickly recognize this monumental miscarriage as a fairy tale for paranoids.

-Excerpt from Book One: The Eye in the Pyramid-

[Anonymous No.10044050]

>>10042778
sixties' lit. it was cool in the seventies, when paranoia, drugs, weird sex and revolution was a new thing. if you read it as a sixties artifact, it's pretty good. it has aged about as well as any other sixties' text has.

[Anonymous No.10044066]

>>10044050
It was written in 1975 but I forgive your mistake and accept you.

[phreaker1997 No.10044366]

>>10044066
actually it was written between 1969 and 1971, 1975 was the publication date

[Anonymous No.10044396]

have a copy on my bookshelf, plan to read it eventually

[phreaker1997 No.10044407]

>>10044050
yep, it´s an artifact of it´s area, the first time i read i was 16 y/o so many of the sociopolitical references of this book flew over my head

[phreaker1997 No.10044423]

>>10044396
the structure of this book is all over the place, although it´s not complicated to read if you compare to books like Gravity´s Rainbow (which i´m still struggling to read it all)

[Anonymous No.10044425]

A MASTERPIECE
>>I didnt know that could be done in writing
>>Intro 2 conspiracies
>>Red-pilled
>>Funny

[Anonymous No.10044571]

>>10042778
Great book, RAW is a really fun writer, full of references to Joyce, Burroughs, Crowley, Flann O'Brien etc. It's been a dozen or so years since I read him, but he's wonderful, especially if you're a college pot/acidhead like I was. Many of his other books are almost as good.