The Big Lebowski, Bored to Death, The Savage Detectives, Inherent Vice; pot and detectives go together like, well, pot and buffet-style meals? Pot and sex? Pot goes with a lot of things, I guess. The altered detective genre can trace its lineage back to harder and heavier days—Sherlock Holmes and...
4.5 stars ... In thinking about what to rate this novel - which I thoroughly enjoyed - I went down a mental rabbit hole not unlike those encountered by our protagonist Doc Sportello and the assorted hippies, seekers, and burnouts that he meets in the pages of Inherent Vice. Does 5 stars mean its ...
A private eye didn't drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops, and truth was, since crossing the doorsill of this place, Doc couldn't help noticing what you'd call an atmosphere. Instead of a ritual handshake or even a smile, everybody he got introduced...
One thousand two hundred twenty (1,220) pages in fine print, a high 4.04 average rating in goodreads. Let's see first the metaphors and what-nots it provoked among the brave souls who had read and reviewed it:1. Mikey Stewart (3 stars) - (his first sentence): "Good lord, where to start?"2. Orian...
Pynchon takes his readers on a wild ride. We attend a party on an abandoned cruise ship. We witness an assassination in Cairo. We hunt alligators in the sewers beneath New York City. We time-and-space travel to 1904 Namibia to witness the Herero Revolt and ensuing genocide. Florence, Italy to wat...
My first excursion into the Pynchonesque…and it left me disorientated, introspective and utterly confused about how exactly I feel about it. I’m taking the cowards way out and giving it three stars even though that makes me feel like I’m punting the responsibility football and doing my best imita...
An Approach for Simulating Text Consistent With Gravity’s Rainbow Technical Report issued 6 July 2012 by the Simulation Lab Originating Text-based Handiwork (SLOTH)While the exact algorithm used by Pynchon (1973) to produce Gravity’s Rainbow (henceforth GR) was never documented, we contend that ...
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were British astronomers and surveyors, most famous for journeying to North America to resolve the boundary dispute between British colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Their work took four years - from 1763 to 1767 - and the result becam...
Borderline juvenilia. Introduction by author dismisses the collection ab initio as “illustrative of typical problems in entry-level fiction” (4). Explains that “when we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death” (5) which I regard as probably phi...
There are two big things this book had working in its favor before I even cracked open Richard Fariña's under-appreciated final gem: The Pynchon connection (which is was what nudged me in the direction of this novel in the first place, albeit more than a year after "Gravity's Rainbow" mournfully ...
You don’t have to be illegal to be an outlaw. Это супер-роман о супраментальном. Это идеальный роман идей. Пинчон назвал его «изгойским эпосом», и это недомолвка столетия — по крайней мере, второй половины прошлого века. Потому что это намного больше и алхимического триллера, и квеста поперек Аме...
For years, whenever she and Flash moved in anyplace new, in a reflex superstition by now like sprinkling salt and water in every room, her thoughts would go to Prairie, and to where, in each new arrangement, she would sleep—sometimes the baby, sometimes a girl she was free to imagine. ...
Margherita has brought Slothrop to a rickety wood house near the Spree, in the Russian sector. A burned-out Konigstiger tank guards the entrance, its paint scorched, treads mangled and blasted off of the drive sprocket, its dead monster 88 angled down to point at the gray river, hissing and spicu...
A wind from the southwest swept quietly up rue Ibrahim and across the square, bringing the chill of the desert into the city. Then let it rain, Porpentine thought: rain soon. He sat at a small wrought-iron table in front of a café, smoking Turkish cigarettes with a third c...
That the substance is smoked in a Pipe has put it immediately in favor among the Dutch Gentlemen. Taken with tobacco, producing a vertiginous Swoon, such as might require most of an evening of drinking spirits to obtain, it seems to promise a great savings in time and cash, a thought these thrift...