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/lit/ - Literature

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7782721 No.7782721 [Reply] [Original]

Hello. I'm a non-native English speaker and I haven't had much trouble with English books up to now. The most struggle I had was with Americana (DeLillo), and using dictionaries for the vocabulary and Google engine for references eliminated almost all of the difficulty. Now, I tried starting on Mason & Dixon and it feels impossible to go on while comprehending. I don't even get half the words, why they are capitalised (a reference to the era?), and I easily lose track of sentences (hell, I spent minutes to be able to understand the first one).

So... What should I do? Give up on Pynchon? Live in America for a few months? Get somehow smarter? Read more books and return?

>> No.7782746

>>7782721

The writing style of that novel is pretty retarded, so no, your difficulty with the novel is not by any fault of your own. It's an exaggerated mock of Early Modern English.

Protip: Try not reading books by authors who are full of themselves.

>> No.7782766

>>7782746
I don't know, it feels somewhat more respectable when one writes a book of that girth in the same "unconventional" style. I mean, I have no doubt that he'd be considered a tryhard if he wrote a short story in the same manner. But as it is people seem to admire him and his works a lot (like Joyce, whose only Dubliners I've read).

>> No.7783211
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7783211

>>7782766
Read Papa Pynch in the following order, just like I, a non-native, did:

The Crying of Lot 49 -> V. (You may skip this step or read the next entry first) -> Gravity's Rainbow -> Mason & Dixon -> The Rest

If you can make it trough TCoL49, you shall be able to keep going on Mr. Buckteeth's other works. It ain't easy but, I'm sure, it pays off.

Just do it.

>> No.7783270

Most Americans don't even read Pynchon. And if they did, M&D is so anachronistic that they wouldn't enjoy it. The reason Mason & Dixon is so great is that Pynchon so entirely immerses himself in 18th-century American culture. It's a time capsule/period piece. If you don't get it, it's okay.

I would agree that The Crying of Lot 49 is probably his easiest/most accessible work to non-native English speakers, but Pynchon is fundamentally a maximalist writer. He tries to jam as much information as he can into every single sentence he writes, so the overwhelming majority of what he writes is going to go over everybody's head. Especially /lit/.