Just a note: the Godine special offer of The Prospector and Desert for 30% off ends Friday. Read up on Nobel Laureate J.M.G. Le Clézio cheaply, while it lasts!
* The reviews of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Inherent Vice are just starting to roll out, mostly in the UK, but here is one from Louis Menand at The New Yorker. Menand writes, 'The title is a term in maritime law (a specialty of one of the minor characters). It refers to the quality of things that makes them difficult to insure: if you have eggs in your cargo, a normal policy will not cover their breaking. Getting broken is in the nature of being an egg. The novel gives the concept some low-key metaphysical play—original sin is an obvious analogy—but, apart from this and a death-and-resurrection motif involving a saxophonist in a surf-rock band, “Inherent Vice” does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything.) It’s a slightly spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope and watch “Gilligan’s Island” instead of sitting around a night club knocking back J&Bs. It’s “The Maltese Falcon” starring Cheech and Chong, “The Big Sleep” as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether you think it’s funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about two minutes. It’s funnier than Chandler, anyway.'
I can say absolutely nothing about Pynchon — his being one of the more gaping holes in my contemporary fiction knowledge — and so I can say nothing about whether the book sounds interesting, on its own or compared to other Pynchon novels, beyond Menand's essay and that of others. That being said, by its descriptions this book sounds tedious.
* The LA Times book blog Jacket Copy reports on six famed literary feuds, including that between 'three giants — Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev' who 'carried on their dispute in public. They called one another names, satirized one another in print, and in 1861, Dostoevsky challenged Turgenev to a duel. It never happened, but they did stop speaking for almost 20 years.' Oh Fyodor, you rascal!
* The reviews of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Inherent Vice are just starting to roll out, mostly in the UK, but here is one from Louis Menand at The New Yorker. Menand writes, 'The title is a term in maritime law (a specialty of one of the minor characters). It refers to the quality of things that makes them difficult to insure: if you have eggs in your cargo, a normal policy will not cover their breaking. Getting broken is in the nature of being an egg. The novel gives the concept some low-key metaphysical play—original sin is an obvious analogy—but, apart from this and a death-and-resurrection motif involving a saxophonist in a surf-rock band, “Inherent Vice” does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything.) It’s a slightly spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope and watch “Gilligan’s Island” instead of sitting around a night club knocking back J&Bs. It’s “The Maltese Falcon” starring Cheech and Chong, “The Big Sleep” as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether you think it’s funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about two minutes. It’s funnier than Chandler, anyway.'
I can say absolutely nothing about Pynchon — his being one of the more gaping holes in my contemporary fiction knowledge — and so I can say nothing about whether the book sounds interesting, on its own or compared to other Pynchon novels, beyond Menand's essay and that of others. That being said, by its descriptions this book sounds tedious.
* The LA Times book blog Jacket Copy reports on six famed literary feuds, including that between 'three giants — Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev' who 'carried on their dispute in public. They called one another names, satirized one another in print, and in 1861, Dostoevsky challenged Turgenev to a duel. It never happened, but they did stop speaking for almost 20 years.' Oh Fyodor, you rascal!
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