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/lit/ - Literature

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18243793 No.18243793 [Reply] [Original]

Why do people here not like V.? It's good

>> No.18243831

>>18243793
As they say, it be like it is, and it is like it do.

>> No.18243860

>>18243793
It suffers from the enthusiasm of youth and he tried to say too much which leaves it somewhat rambly and unfocused. I enjoy it and reread it on occasion.

The Broom of the System is much the same but taken to extreme, there is probably 20 novels worth of stuff jammed into that book, DFW really had a great deal to say and felt a need to say all at once. Not as fun and enjoyable as V. but still a fun read, has some great moments better than anything in V. but also has some truly painful moments which V. is free of.

>> No.18243863

To me it is one of the best books

>> No.18244002

Rachel is my waifu

>> No.18244013

>>18243793
Very uneven with 2 great chapters and lots of mediocre ones.

>> No.18244217

Many people on here like V. It's great, and the sewer chapter is phenomenal. However, Gravity's Rainbow is deservedly more beloved. I recommend V. (and Lot 49) to first time Pynchon readers all the time

>> No.18244225

>>18243793
I dropped it after the second chapter.

>> No.18244296

>>18243860
To me the rambling just seems like joyce's experiment in wandering rocks applied in a reasonable manner. When pynchon starts expanding on people's lives all around and swapping scene willy nilly it actually creates a very good vision of the kind of life the sick crew and their groupies are living

>> No.18244315

>>18244225
This. Also Been Down So Long Looks Like Up To Me is equally not good and I’m tired of faux-Pynchonheads recommending these.

>> No.18244333

Is this the book with the turd-eating?

>> No.18244430

>>18243860
The Broom of the System draws back much more to The Crying of Lot 49, and both deal with the topic of paranoia and sense of reality. DFW himself recalled that the question made by a girlfriend of his that lead to The Broom of the System was what would the difference in being a written character and a real person (none, of course). But just as Oedipa Maas (and the reader) rapidly grows paranoid due to the idea that someone, some dark and mad figure, is running her life and her bizarre encounters. In the same way, the main character of DFW's novel desperately tries to make sense of her own life and tries to make a thread between events.

What you may find Pynchon-esque from The Broom of the System (the extremely saturated story filled with tangents and secondary plots) is rather an aesthetic resource that makes the novel more of a Crying of Lot 49 on steroids, rather than a V. or a Gravity's Rainbow.

>> No.18244442

>>18244333
No, that's Gravity's Rainbow. Still a fun read, but I'd say it is much more exhausting, due to the change of pace between comic and light hearted scenes of a group of NYC hipsters and junkies, and long unanounced passages of dense and very bizarre "historical" fiction

>> No.18244867

>>18244315
>faux-Pynchonheads
>people dislike books that filtered me
Gate keeping fag

>> No.18244891

>>18244333
This is the book with the nose job.

>> No.18245430

>>18244296
rambly AND unfocused, as in he is more concerned with saying everything he has to say than with supporting the themes, it has digressions which largely serve themselves and are weakly tied in. One of the things he rectified fully in his subsequent work.

>>18244430
The comparison was about authors being overly ambitious with their first novel, they both suffered from it but Broom of the System takes it to an extreme which I have yet to encounter. Pynchon is very much on point in The Crying of Lot 49, it is a tad convenient at times, but it needs to be to accomplish what he wanted too within its scope.

I would have to revisit Broom of the System to go into much depth, been a good while since I read it, but I recall the characters all being just slight variations of characters from tcol49/V., sentence structure at times being much like that of tcol49, humor, character naming. One of the worst endings ever.

>> No.18245445

>>18243793
I enjoyed this more than his California novels. This is the right place to start Pynchon, funny, accessible, and straightforward than his other works.

>> No.18245450

>>18244442
I really loved the parts about junkies :alligator hunting, nose job, stencil, the sick crew.

>> No.18245455

>>18243793
To me it was a series of fantastic chapters that made for an underwhelming book. Like an inverse of the “whole being more than the sum of its parts.” Enjoyed reading it, but by the end I couldn’t see what the point was. But maybe I’m a dummy. Or there was no “point.”

>> No.18245465

>>18245455
I didn't see the point either, but had a great time reading it, mostly appreciating the genius of a 26 year old man.