Mason & Dixon: A Novel
by Thomas Pynchon
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Book Summary Information
Author: Thomas PynchonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-01-03
ISBN: 0312423209
Number of pages: 784
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Mason & Dixon: A Novel
Book Review: wonderfully rewarding to the patient voracious reader
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading all of Pynchon's prior novels.
Coming at this initially with a quivering unsure attitude.
Prepared for quite a long tough deep thorough slog of a read.
At first, blanching at the funny affected
old-fashioned language.
But fulfilled, and more, all expectations.
Also rewarded, brilliantly with Infinitely Fine Wonders
in many places at many Moments.
Even for the few parts I did skip over as boring, I ended jumping back to and re-reading, after realizing that they contained the seeds, of some significant event that blossomed pages later.
(the only example I can think of is the reaching of the crossroads in the north-south and east-west Indian pathways; somehow I'd sleep-read, through the trekking from the river up to the crossroads)
As with all his books, there is a pure joy in the moment to moment advancing through the actual reading for the first time of the text. Yet afterwards, there is a glow of memories, which spread like ripples in some tropical sunset panorama, and diffuse among the other memories of my life.... until I can no longer (nor do I want to) disentangle them -- some memories from the book (as with all his other books) are woven into "who I am" now, and are just as cherished, as fond, as some from the most "real" events of my childhood.
Thus the memory of their first venture overseas when their ship is attacked by the French, as it diffuses on through the book and is re-recollected by the characters, seems to be a memory of my own, that I share with them, from my own life. Like the crazy riverboat ride of Gravity's Rainbow, or the sunny southern California scenes of the Crying of Lot 49, or the northern California scenes of Vineland, or cruddy hotel rooms of V., ....
By some quirk of fate (or was it? did not realize this till I was well into the reading), I was actually reading the book, during the time of the next "transit of Venus" in 2004, after the pair of them that they pursue in the book.
After a while I could really get a kick out of how the Author manipulated his Almost Constant, yet Not Quite Ubiquitous, use of Capitalization .... some very funny Things even embedded at that Layer, e.g. where he chose to capitalize something but NOT another thing ....
And the duck, the duck! worthy of a series of Monty Python sketches in itself and its re-occurrences.
And you know, I actually did see mention of the duck, somewhere else in some other discussion of something involving the same timespan, so it is one more thing the author did NOT entirely make up out of whole cloth ....
And, the drift back and forth between narrators, points of view, timeframes, sometimes the Rev. Cherrycoke, sometimes not, sometimes a quote within a quote within a quote within a whole paragraph within a whole chapter, ...
Of course the obligatory (I knew there had to be some mention of this, just from knowing the time frame of the book, even before reading it!) smoking weed with Colonel (not General yet) Washington, his wife Martha, and their comedian servant, who might be Eddie Murphy's 6-times-great-grandfather.
Summary of Mason & Dixon: A Novel
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair--one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic--from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country's most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon's Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they travel the world mapping and measuring through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary America of Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and bawdy establishments of ill-repute. Fans of the postmodern master of paranoia will recognize Pynchon's personality in the novel's first phrase: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs," a brief echo of the rockets that curve across the skies in the writer's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow.
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