Word: pynchon
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That possibility of meaninglessness tantalizes and bedevils throughout the novel. But Rushdie's furious, organizing energy seems to mark him as an angel of coherence. He has obviously read his Garcia Marquez, his Joyce, his Thomas Pynchon. He shares with those authors the desire to assemble everything he has known and seen and make it all fit together, beautifully. In his fourth novel, Rushdie has done just that...
...novel centers on an emotional triangle involving an immigrant's daughter, Fermina Daza, a brilliant young doctor, Juvenal Urbino, with, as Thomas Pynchon has written, Florentino Ariza serving "as the hypotenuse." Florentino becomes obsessed with Fermina, who is about 13, and he writes her passionate, though unsuccessful, love letters. In typical Latin American fashion, the young woman is chaperoned and kept at a safe distance from suitors. Fermina's aunt agrees to serve as a courier, however, and soon the two fall hoplessly in love, exchanging piles and piles of stamps, envelopes and surreptitious locks of braided hair...
...these values will be more helpful to an understanding of the literature of the 20th century than to the foundation of a new literature for the 21st. For example, Calvino's comments about the encyclopedic Musil and Gadda, who were both trained as engineers, may shed light on Thomas Pynchon here in America. Also, Calvino has provided a reading list of modern and post-modern European and Latin American writers...
...screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow...
...seeds of our deterioration alongside our advancement, but they also--in people like Freud, Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold himself--taught us how to worry. At the same time, critics, grown somewhat more compromising, are no longer certain that science and technology signal the end of the world. Thomas Pynchon wrote in the New York Times Book Review last year that modern Luddites seem to be adjusting their antimechanical sensibilities to accommodate at least a few enticing inventions, like the word processor. There seems "a growing consensus," said Pynchon, "that knowledge really is power." Clearly, this is not the brash self...