V

[Anonymous No.10081528]

I'm reading V.

What am I supposed to think while I'm reading it? It's just incomprehensible same-voice character orchestra of boring webs.

[Anonymous No.10081549]

>>10081528
If you don't know what to think when you're reading, how do you expect to understand an answer you read here?

[Anonymous No.10081553]

>>10081528
>What am I supposed to think while I'm reading it?

"Gee, this guy sure likes The Recognitions."

[Anonymous No.10081555]

>>10081553
kek

[Anonymous No.10081556]

>>10081528
You should think about the fact that it's completely nonsensical and yet alluring

[Anonymous No.10081565]

>>10081556
Brainlet please, V. is Pinecone's most mundane story

[Anonymous No.10081581]

Am I the only one who thinks Pig trying to rape Paola is the funniest thing ever written?

[Anonymous No.10081615]

>>10081565
They're all mundane and boring and contrived, except for M&D. Don't call me a brainlet, brainlet. You don't know who you're speaking to.

[Anonymous No.10081688]

You're just too dumb to understand it. Go back to /v/

[Anonymous No.10081696]

>>10081688
so meta.

[Anonymous No.10081703]

This is quite dull and boring.

[Anonymous No.10081868]

>>10081581
I don't really find anything funny or interesting.

[Anonymous No.10081905]

>>10081528
I didn't like much of it besides a few of the moments where pynchon wanted to make a comic vignette. otherwise, i quickly gave up after the young woman was raped by the entire squadron of soldiers and begged for the bayonette and the gun squirming her hips in the dust.
i recently just finished Gravity's Rainbow, and I must say it was a far better experience for me. In retrospect, Pynchon was far more raw, unfiltered, and passionate in V. despite the insanity in GR, it definitely had a much more refined persona behind it, collected in a more satisfying way, the atrocities more subdued somehow.
I am glad I was tenacious with GR, but I doubt I would have felt the way about V. ultimately the way you feel is a personal thing, man. You can't just come asking us how you should interpret things. That's bullshit. If you don't like the book, move on. No one is forcing it onto you.

[Anonymous No.10082254]

>>10081905
I thought I was thinkening of wrong thing. So maybe there's somethign else to think.

Is all pomo lit like this, because this is terribad

[Anonymous No.10082484]

>>10082254
>Is all pomo lit like this

I fucking wish

>because this is terribad

kys

[Anonymous No.10082506]

>>10081615
>Pynchon
>boring and contrived

Do you know what either words mean? He's the opposite of boring - he's throwing concepts at you left and right, the guy's a fucking encyclopedia. It all ties together, believe it or not.

[Anonymous No.10082594]

>>10082484
It's literally nothing. lol dude random things and random connections and stream of conscious

[Anonymous No.10082613]

it seems to me there is no point to pynchon's books. it never evolves past this slapstick paranoid stoner comedy. which is fine butt he punchline is almost always "somebody doesn't get IT"

I get that being cool and nihilistic was all the rage back in the sixties when tommy was getting his first handjob and learning how to roll a blunt but is this "in-joke" really funny enough to base a whole literary career off of?

I think not. I think not...

[Anonymous No.10082658]

>>10082594
>>10082613
Your pseud is showing

[Anonymous No.10082662]

Shit, do we not like Pynchon anymore?

[Anonymous No.10082667]

>>10082658
>"You just don't get it."
Typical

[Anonymous No.10082679]

>>10082662
/lit/ is slowly becoming /v/

soon all books will be pointless wastes of time and the board will company wars between Penguin, Randomhouse and Harpercollins with simon and shuscter and oxford university press occasionally stepping in to break the monotony.

[Anonymous No.10082684]

>>10082594
>>10082667
Not him but those "random" things are connected, Pynchon saw the need for those elements to interact. So maybe instead of decrying them for being random and being all defeatist about it you should think about what is accomplished when they are combined.
You know, like a reader would do.

[Anonymous No.10082693]

>>10082684
give me one example of random things that connect in a pynchon book. go ahead I dare you.

>inb4 read it yourself and figure it out
no thanks I already have and it's randumb holds up spork level bullshit.

[Anonymous No.10082730]

>>10082506
Explain one instance of resolution in any Pynchon work.

I'll wait.

[Anonymous No.10082749]

>>10082693
I read your post and got a little freaked out at how consciously closed off your mind must be to read someone like Pynchon and see the mixture of disparate elements and not want to decode them at all.
The "random things" as you call them are not random because they were selected to interact with each other at a textual level. It seems that because you've read the book and identified certain elements as discordant as opposed to obviously connected in some obviously established thematic way you assume that they're random. That's an observation, and not a particularly valuable one.
The benefit of Pynchon is that he gives you a ton of things to work with on an interpretive level and just dismissing it as random just boggles my fucking mind how someone could be so braindead I hope you are just trolling and being contrarian to get (you)s

[Anonymous No.10082758]

>>10082749
so instead of giving me an example you wrote a paragraph calling me stupid and re-asserting you dubious claim.

I see. I hope one day I can achieve an intellect as powerful as yours so that I too can transcend the need for facts in a literary debate. Now fuck off stoner.

[Anonymous No.10082800]

>>10082758
If you think all my post did was call you stupid you're, well, stupid. I addressed claims you made and tried to adjust your skewed perception of the work of literary interpretation.
In truth, I haven't read V. , but just today I finished Gravity's Rainbow, which I imagine is quite a lot like V. so I'll give you an example of seemingly "random things" that connect from there, although before I do that I should remind you that my "dubious claim" as you called it is asserting that Pynchon is actually a good writer and the elements included in his novels might not be as random as you think they are. This is not actually a dubious claim, since Pynchon and V. are quite well regarded. You're claim, that's it's all random nonsense and not worth thinking about is, in fact, the more dubious argument to make.
There is a passage In Gravity's Rainbow, near the end that talks about how "they" could turn off the sun, and in doing this could unleash some unbearable silence upon their target. On the one hand it doesn't seem to be connected to anything other than broadly to the established motifs of paranoia. But then you realize silence is something that had already been connected to bomb strikes earlier on in the novel, as had the flash of the bomb obscuring any other light source (including the sun as a kind of turning off the sun) so what this seemingly unconnected passage does is further motifs and connect disparate elements in a way that had not yet been done before in the novel. Now I reckon you, if you weren't such a fucking black hole of intellectual curiosity, could deign to do this for V. My interpretation wasn't even very good, but you wanted me to connect things in a Pynchon novel so I tried my best.
Although in reality c'mon you should be able to interpret things yourself instead of asking people on a fucking Burmese fish fucking forum to do it for you.

[Anonymous No.10082820]

>>10082662

He's in the Pantheon, but there are some dips in this thread

[Anonymous No.10082823]

>>10082749
>>10082800
don't waste your breath on this moron anon, he really isn't worth your time

[Anonymous No.10082857]

>>10082684
If he had a point about all this random musings he'd have said it without bullshit in 200 pages.

[Anonymous No.10082862]

>>10082749
Or maybe it is you who is biased and sees *connections* the hack never intended to add in there? Oh, you say this is the grand wisdom of his books now?

[Anonymous No.10082868]

>>10082662
I don't really like or dislike V, I'm just at loss about it really.

>dude vignettes in time and space!
>dude it takes three people to connect you at any time and space to any time and space

like nig really?

[Anonymous No.10082875]

>>10082857
>the artist has to point blank state his point

>>10082862
artist's intention, grand wisdom

This will be my last sarcastic response since it has become apparent you are afraid of interpreting and thinking.

[Anonymous No.10082892]

>>10082875
No please tell me what to think that's why I made the thread because for now there's nothing to think and it's just random stuff 300 pages in

[Anonymous No.10083298]

Ok is better at 230 page in

[Anonymous No.10083450]

I wonder which book Pynchon considers to be his best. I'm betting M&D.

[phreaker1997 No.10083483]

>>10083450
let´s ask him

[Anonymous No.10085045]

>>10081615
>>10083450
>M&D
>Pynchon-by-numbers
>muh Great Murcan Novel

[Anonymous No.10085209]

>>10081581
This dancing is simultaneously so skilled and so cringey. What does it mean?

[Anonymous No.10085246]

>>10082857
>A screaming comes across the sky. Hi, I'm Thomas Pynchon, and I'm here to tell you about the disconnection of the causal forces of history, the dissolution of the individual, and scat fetishes. Hope you enjoy the ride, hyuckhyuck.

[Anonymous No.10085271]

>>10083450
I was surprised to hear he doesn't like Crying of Lot 49. He said something along the lines of "I had forgotten all I had learned as a writer when I wrote it".

[Anonymous No.10085288]

>>10085209
It's the physical manifestation of Pinecone's prose

[Anonymous No.10085290]

>>10085246
>tfw you think an open letter from pynchon to his readers really wouldn't be such a bad idea

[Anonymous No.10085325]

>>10082857
Pynchon tends to make various points throughout his novels, the only thing is, they’re not dedicated to making a single point about a single subject. For example, in V a lot of the scenes could be linked to what the saxophonist says: “Keep cool, but care.”, in turn showing the effectiveness and maybe importance of such an ethos. There are a good number of characters (especially the sick screw) who wouldn’t have been in the respective situations which they seemed to loathe if they had just kept cool, but cared. This is one of the points Pynchon makes in the novel, along stuff about technology, the war, relationships, time, etc...

[Anonymous No.10085331]

I found myself confused at the end of V.

I liked a lot of the individual episodes and I mostly saw how they all tied together, but I couldn't really see any point or meaning behind it.

But I found a pretty good essay somewhere about how the V. woman represents humanity. She was there at all these important events in the early 20th century and at each step of the way she has become more and more mechanized and less human. The essay did a much better and more in-depth job of explaining it but after thinking about it for a while I thought it was a pretty interesting interpretation that did give the book an overall "point" more-or-less.

[Anonymous No.10085349]

so was the character 'V' meant to be a metaphysical entity or merely a metaphor of storytelling itself ?

[Anonymous No.10085384]

>>10085349
>>10085331
It's just his love-letter to The Recognitions and trying to wrestle with the same themes (authenticity, faking identities, basically being a pseud). He didn't come into his own until TCoL49, as much as he dismisses that book

[Anonymous No.10087042]

>>10085271
I was shocked by that too because that's his favorite of mine but I'm of the opinion that since writing that in 1984 his thoughts on it have changed.

I feel like he's come full circle over the course of his career where he started off with V which was entertainingly complex, then 49 was the one easygoing work of his at that stage but come GR I feels like he was going for complex for the sake of complex. But now his most recent stuff being IV and BE, I feel like he's found a new found appreciation for that easy going single protagonist cheesy joke style. He wrote that criticism of himself in the thick of that complex for the sake of complex stage...

Plus I remember reading somewhere that when he read GR he said himself that there were entire pages he couldn't comprehend because of how fucked up he was on drugs.

[Anonymous No.10087047]

>>10081553
underrated post

[Anonymous No.10087062]

>>10085045
>>10083450
accounts show pynchon had been thinking about mason and dixon since the 70s
It's got to be his favorite

[Anonymous No.10087066]

i think its pretty good but then i only read it once. i got plenty out of it thematically but i guess you have to dig a bit you know what i mean.

[Anonymous No.10087079]

not OP, but also reading V. right now. It's decidedly easier to read than his later books. His prose is more simplified/less stylish, but you get traces of later pynchon here. I was surprised by how little I reread for comprehension

[Anonymous No.10087080]

Don't put effort into understanding those sections set in the past. They exist only to build a vague aura of mystery connecting several loosely based events together in a Stencilized way. There's like one piece of useful information in those chapters per ten pages and when you read them you'll know what they are.

If you're anything like me(a total piece of shit schlemiel) you'll fall in love with Profane and have dreams of one day finding a lazy semi-artist commune group of friends, so the chapters set in the present should be plenty entertaining.

I also feel that most people of our generation can relate pretty profoundly with Stencil. The guy has nothing to live for and so he sleeps for like 15 hours a day, but one day he discovers this vague mystery that may or may not exist but it gives him purpose in life and because it does he never pursues it so hard to answer all his questions but goes at such a speed to live with a vague sense of purpose in life.

[Anonymous No.10087135]

>>10085271
Pretty strange, given that Mucho's introduction is probably, imo, one of Pynchon's most haunting and accurate characterizations of modern American life out there.

[Anonymous No.10087184]

>>10087080
>and have dreams of one day finding a lazy semi-artist commune group of friends

Once I will say it, is all: that Crew does not live, it experiences. It does not create, it talks about people who do. Varese, Ionesco, de Kooning, Wittgenstein, I could puke. It satirizes itself and doesn't mean it. Time magazine takes it seriously and does mean it.

[Anonymous No.10087404]

>>10087184
But they're fun, easygoing and self-aware enough that you can't really accuse them of being pretentious assholes. Who wouldn't want a social circle like that? And at the center of everything is the cutest nymphette who is inexplicably in love with you...Profane's life is my ideal life.

[Anonymous No.10087468]

>>10087404
read Hopscotch, it does the pretentious arty clique thing so much better.