Well, I've done it. I got through Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," my sanity intact. The ending was crazy, very fast paced (but he still had time for allusions to Isaac and Abraham and the Tarot, as well as Kabbala) and it ended in a very similar way to how it started, with a screaming coming across the sky. I still haven't one-hundred percent cycled through my thoughts about it, but I am glad I read it and I'm glad to move on. In comparison to reading Pynchon, anything else is easy. Well, almost anything else. I'm reading "Pictures at a Revolution," which I'm getting through really quickly. Expect a post on that soon, but not too soon (December will be focused on holidays, I'm thinking).
In writing news: the onslaught that is November will be over soon. My big projects are coming to a close (both NaNoWriMo and real-world projects), and I'm looking forward to the clearing out that will occur on December 2nd. It feels strange to have so many things wrapping up at once--graduate school applications included--and it will be a very welcome break. What will I do with my time, besides returning to a sane daily pace and blogging before 6pm every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? Well, like I mentioned earlier, Chanterelles will not be done, not in my opinion, by the end of the month, so I'll probably wrap up a draft of that. Everything has its trajectory set (I need to get out of rocket-thinking soon. I blame Pynchon.) and the ending will be interesting. But in a short amount of time, I've grown attached to these characters. I'll be sad to see this draft end. But it's never over, is it?
What else? Editing my previous manuscript, maybe returning to work on my Zeppelin story. I'm trying to decide on a title for that one. How about "To Be a Rock, and Not to Roll"? Or "Houses of the Holy"? I also got a very strange idea for a story--I don't know how I'd categorize it, because right now it's literally a sentence and a line of dialogue in my notebook, but maybe I'd call it a fable. Or it might be some kind of horror story. I really don't know. I won't reveal too much, but the idea is really calling out to me and I'm excited to see where it goes.
Well, I'll see you all on Wednesday. I think the post might be about the band Home, who I started listening to recently.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Fiction Mondays: Full-Circle
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2 comments:
It is a relief to finish Gravity's Rainbow, isn't it? And yet -- it's also a little sad. Pynchon also makes it tough on whatever book you read right after his because it's like stepping out of a race car after you've finished a high endurance race and then jumping onto a tricycle.
It's been a couple of weeks since I finished and I find I am making connections and associations constantly -- with film references, scientific references, historical events, with the power of the multinational corporations, with the tarot, astrology, the Kaballah, Christianity, mythology -- he left few subjects alone really.
I've also been forming a more clear impression of the overall tone and feeling of the story the more distance I get from it. Despite some of the appalling events described, I find myself quite sentimental and even affectionate about most of the characters and I think that in the end, almost all of them were quite hopeful really.
I'll be interested to hear more about what you think, especially after you've gotten some distance and had some time to mull it over more.
What's next? I've got The Savage Detectives here and I'm hoping to read it prior to the new year as a sort of warm up for 2666. Are you planning to give Bolano a whirl too?
I definitely will post some more thoughts about it eventually--I do agree, though, that there are so many connections you think about after reading it. I don't know if it's the effect of reading such a large book, or what, but I feel like it somehow gets mixed up into the way you think. Maybe that's the whole point of "big books" like this one.
In answer to your question, I took on the Savage Detectives last year, and it's a really tough but rewarding book. The first section goes by really quickly, as does the last, but the middle--the bulk of the book--is a long, drawn out (decades-long) search for the book's protagonists, who haunt the novel more than drive it. It took me a long time to figure out how it worked, but the title is a huge clue. Think of it as a kind of Citizen Kane structure, where you're going to get a lot of varying accounts and pieces without a clear picture (at some points) of how it goes together as a story. That was another book that inhabited my brain for a long time after I read it. I wanted to challenge someone to a duel, or start a literary movement and vanish, both of which will make more sense once you've read it. By the end, I really loved it, though.
I might eventually read 2666, especially now that it's in one convenient volume (as convenient as a book that big can be, I guess). Is someone doing a reading group for that one?
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