V.

I thought it was just some fun romp until the Southwest Africa chapter. I was shocked after the alligator hunts and the whole sick crew shenanigans

>that chapter with the voyeuristic ballerina

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>tfw ridiculously smart

>>8967074
YEAH, I finished it about this time last year, and it really is a picaresque kinda novel until that novelette...that part was fucked. Like holocaust anticipatory shit. Really takes the whole novel for a heavier turn. The nose job part was pretty funny.

I get the whole Pynchon-entropy recurring theme...which is explicitly thematic in col49, but more of a figuration of content in V. Definitely looking forward to reading more Pynchon.

That being said, I don't really get the meme-worship Pynchon gets, at least with my exposure of his first two novels. Seems like plebey reverence towards doorstoppers...the books are probably endlessly interesting, but that's my impression so far...just funny floods of hyper-contextualized content. Does it get better?

>>8967129
Yes and no. Gravity's Rainbow is his best and most complex work, it's extremely well-written on a sentence by sentence basis and in consideration of the novel as a whole. None of it felt weighty, overwritten, or bad. It's a first rate novel and deserving of the meme hype.

Mason & Dixon is considerably worse but some people swear it's great. I thought it was a slog and I just could not get into it. I haven't attempted Against the Day and I probably won't-- at least this year.

I really hope you make it around to GR. I'm glad you liked V., because it's a bit in that tangent but very different at the same time, and everything done right in V. is done even better, and everything wrong is done away with. The whole backdrop of WW2 and the Hieronymus Bosch-style narrative, the themes of predestination, rocketry, binarism, post-ww2 pre-cold war politics are so tightly woven and well done, I find myself almost 10 years later reading an article or a book totally unrelated and I'll say "hey that reminds me of in GR when..." and something will click and make me appreciate the book that much more.

I hope you like it. It's not a pleb-tier doorstopper like Infinite Jest.

Most of the book felt like a dumping ground for various short stories/projects cobbled together because Pynchon wanted to get something published.

>>8967216
I could see that. Even if that is the case it still makes for a hell of a debut novel.

Oh, I have a strictly plot-related question, actually. Was the only reason Stencil brought Profane to Valetta because Paola loved him? As in just to keep her in line? And did he only agree because it meant he could keep yo-yoing around instead of getting a job? For some reason this confused me.

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How do you guys think pic related holds up to other Pynchon? I've only done GR, CL49 and his short stories.

Not nearly as cryptic or intricate as Gravity's Rainbow but definitely still packs a punch with it's prose. Plus, the character's are less cutout-like - I connected with them a lot more.

>>8967059
>using those terms to describe someone whose work you enjoyed
I hate people like you

>Poetic.
>Doesn't rhyme.

>>8967805
Shouldn't you be in school?

>>8967270
If Inherent Vice was written by anyone else it would be considered a masterpiece. The last passage is one of the best things he's written, in my opinion. It's not as dense (not even close) as his big three, but he fucking nailed the genre and did it better than anyone else. It's a romp, and I actually liked it a little more than The Crying of Lot 49.

One of Pynchon's early concerns and recurrent themes is his interest in how war affects the human psyche.

In my opinion, it is much more important an interesting than the fact that paranoia is a theme in his work. For me that always just seems like an attribute that simply allows him to explore character's cognitive biases.

>>8967270
I read it twice. It was my first Pynchon (I haven't read anything else yet). Sort of a letdown. Should've picked something else as it killed my interest of reading more of him.

>>8967175
If you thought M&D was a slog you definitely don't want to read AtD.

>>8967216
That's just a plebby rationalization for the way the Stencil chapters are set up and the way decadence is addressed as a theme. The first Stencil chapter was a reworked version of a story that later ended up in Slow Learner but he made a very conscious decision to have Stencil's perspective mostly be shown indirectly through his reconstructions of those events.

I liked V. a lot but I'm not smart enough to get everything. I'm reading Bleeding Edge now, which is a lot easier (probably easier than TCOL49). Going for Gravity's Rainbow next, wish me luck

>>8968689
>That's just a plebby rationalization
No, it isn't. V. incorporates a lot of his pre-existing writings, and some feel shoehorned in. That's a legitimate critique.