– Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon A father to a daughter. Unexpected beauty in a cynical book.“You were always like this. I kept waiting for you to give it up, let it go, turn as cold as the rest of us, praying all the time you wouldn’t. You’d come back from school, history classes, some new nightmare, the Indians, the Holocaust, crimes I hardened my heart against years ago, taught them but didn’t feel them so much anymore, and you’d be so angry, passionately hurting, your little hands in fists, how could anybody do these things, how could they live with themselves? What was I supposed to say? We handed you the tissues and said, it’s grown-ups, some act that way, you don’t have to be like there, you can be better. Best we could ever come up with, pathetic, but you know what, I never found out what we should have said. Think I’m happy about that?”
Gravity's Rainbow is one my faves, but it requires some dedication. Crying of Lot 49 is his Portrait of the Artist, in terms of accessibility.
I've tried Gravity's Rainbow a couple of times now and just haven't been able to get through more than 40 or 50 pages of it. Read the Crying of Lot 49 and loved it though. One of these days I'll read all of Gravity's Rainbow...
I struggled through GR, but I don't recommend it. Gems in there, but it's a damn hard slog.
"V" is similarly cryptic, but for some reason I enjoyed that quite a lot; it's probably half as long as GR.
Hahaha, I'm sorry. I meant how is Bleeding Edge? Would you recommend Pynchon?
I've been awfully curious as to how Pynchon has weathered, especially when faced with subject matter so, well, modern. I have faith in his ability to choose subject matter but whenever I see Bleeding Edge I get the feeling that, if I ever read it, it'll be with my fingers crossed hoping he doesn't come across as a withered old man in a foreign landscape.