Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland"

My lack of time accounts for not having written anything in the month of September. My courses are keeping me extremely busy, and leave me with little or no time to read. It took me nearly a month to finish Nabokov's "Glory," and I am worst off with Pynchon's "Vineland." The novel begins with Zoyd Wheeler, a drop out hippie, last generation of tuned out people living away from the Nixonian Regime. But like every Pynchon novel, "Vineland" turns surreal before you can say "recluse writer," and trying to keep up with the appeareance of ridiculously named characters is enough to keep one entertained and occupied. I mean to say that it is, in many ways, an interesting and well-written novel. I like it and I wish I could actually have more time to devote to it. Here's a passage I thought particularly well-written:



"At some point he must have gone drifting off to sleep, and she hadn't noticed. She watched over him, hers for a while, allowing presence, his beauty, the fear at the base of her spine, the prurient ache in her hands.... at last, so swept and helpless, she leaned in to whisper to him her heart's overflow, and saw in the half-light that what she'd thought were closed eyelids had been open all the time. He'd been watching her. She let out a short jolted scream. Brock started laughing."



Pynchon is a master of the surreal, of that which they call Magic-Realism in Latin American literature of the Boom. I recognize some of the major influences, incredibly so Faulkner is included here. The novel turns into a cloak-and-dagger thing of sorts with all kinds of agents and double-agents raiding and driving the plot of the novel in continuos changes of persona. It is hard to believe I have been struggling with this novel for so long and I still have over 100 pages to go. Again, it is sad I haven't posted much since school began.



I think my book list for the year has been shot. With only a few months to go I still have over ten books to read and at this pace I don't think I will be able to finish. That will be the first time I haven't been able to do so since 2005. Next year I am doing a full-year reading of Classics I have not yet read. There's a lot of Austen and Bronte I need to read, as well as more from antiquity and Dickens. Writing on the blog feels great again. I intend to make my rounds to my friends' blogs in the not so distant future.