Unread

Sincerely blown away by this one-- amazing word play, staggering to conceive of the amount of work that had to've gone into this thing. The best book I've read in a while-- and, to boot, gave me an appreciation of Pynchon that his previous works hadn't. ( )

Dense, witty and well researched. In places like a postmodern “Island of the Day Before”, but less sentimental, and with a weaker plot. In fact the plot is pretty much the only thing that lets this book down, it lacks an overall direction, leaving it without suspense and expectation, a serious flaw in a book nearly 800 pages long. It is well written enough, which compensates to a degree, and amusing throughout, but not really a page turner in the way it could have been had it carried on at the pace it starts out at. Partly historical, partly imaginative, this book fails to combine the two well. The made up bits are meant to be funny, but because they don't add to the historical parts, being only diversions from them, the story loses out. I enjoyed reading this book, and will look out for other Pynchon novels, but I felt a lot more could have been done with this. ( )

On the face of it, this is an impenetrable, seven-hundred page chronically insane madhouse of a book. Not only is it written in eighteenth-century prose and replete with archaisms, it is also not "true" - or it's all true, depending. The narrator, the Reverend Cherrycoke, is telling the story to entertain his extended family, but he wasn't there for all of it, and people and places he never knew keep coming into it, and it isn't as if parts of it - crazed mechanical ducks, Jesuit conspiracies, flying children and talking dogs - aren't shaggy dog stories anyway.

And despite this, it's wonderful. Beneath the baroque anecdotage, it's a story of Mason and Dixon, the surveyors (a story, not the story) chasing transits of Venus and surveying their famous Line, and being "mates". The pay-off of the book, or what you get after you have patiently stuck with it for all seven hundred pages, is the wistful tale of two people who were friends despite every indication otherwise, and you believe it: because of all the things in the book, it probably makes the most sense. ( )

My favorite and in my opinion, the best of Pynchon's works so far. To the extent a Pynchon book is about anything, it is about everything, but the chosen vehicle for this voyage is a faux eighteenth century picaresque novel describing the adventures of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. The prose can be difficult at first, but once you adapt to the strange capitalization and phrasing, and adjust yourself as always to the Pynchonean sudden shifts in perspective and narrative focus, what emerges is a rumination on (along with the usual Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know), fathers and sons, husbands and wives, freedom and slavery, friendship and old age. As such, it far more tender than much of Pynchon's other work, and for its humanity it stays with you long after you set it down. ( )