Comments | vorozheya: On Pynchon's "Inherent Vice"

vorozheya

On Pynchon's "Inherent Vice"

Aug 19, 2009 22:56

More to come....time off permitting. But it is the most accessible, most hilarious thing he has ever written. I hope that when I am 72 I have as good a sense of humor. I think this is the book to recommend people to ol' Ruggles oeuvre.

BUY THE FUCKING THING.

Comments 4

So the Greatest Living American Writer Is Doing a Drug-Addled Detective Tale? FUCK! shady_lamarr August 20 2009, 05:21:43 UTC

I'm going to admit, making amends if you will, that after strongly recommending "Against the Day" and saying it was Pynchon's best since GR, I stopped reading it a few weeks later, somewhere around the page 200 mark. A similar experience happened to me when I eagerly followed "Mason and Dixon" until a point where I set it down and just sort of forgot about it. Come to think of it, while I didn't quit in the middle of my first reading of "Gravity's Rainbow" I essentially got nothing out of it past the second half except for some pretty fucktastic quotes, and had to dive in again ( ... )

Re: So the Greatest Living American Writer Is Doing a Drug-Addled Detective Tale? FUCK! vorozheya August 20 2009, 15:41:04 UTC

I have that problem with him two. It took me a looong time to finish Against the Day and I still think it could have been edited down. I STILL haven't really read all of Mason & Dixon and there are parts of GR which I skip over when I re-read it, too.

Without giving anything away, I am somewhat reminded of you when I read Inherent Vice...

Re: So the Greatest Living American Writer Is Doing a Drug-Addled Detective Tale? FUCK! shady_lamarr August 21 2009, 01:20:17 UTC

Jesus fuck you bastard, that's just the sort of vague hint that's going to motivate me to plow through this book trying to discover reflections of myself like the classical mirror-addicted Narcissus.

Well played.

I will say this now that I have it in my hands, I'm less shocked that it's only around three hundred pages and more shocked that it's presented in bite-sized chapters, with standard hardcover font size and spacing.

just putting in my one-cent here .. tdaschel August 20 2009, 15:49:57 UTC

i remember buying M&D and AtD on their days of release.

that was back when i had, um, disposable income.

*still* haven't picked up the new one, but you can bet i'll enjoy it once i do !

.. regarding Against the Day, though, i found a good deal of it tedious, found myself wondering where it was going BUT / once completed, i look on it as an especially strong book, just a few notches below th' Raynbow, but much much finer than Mason an' D and Vineland. yes, a novel that stands strong in MEMORY (something i prefer, i think, to getting all hoop/hollered over a book while inside it, then doubting its powers after the fact ..). nods to Castaneda? a junkyard filled with Time Machines? your favorite potato salad recipe? it's ALL there.