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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
In a picaresque 18th-century adventure, two surveyors get to know one another while carving the eponymous line across colonial America. A quirky, philosophical romp that requires a lot of attention to read but lacks a meaningful integration of female perspectives or substantial genre subversion.
“‘These Family stories have been perfected in the hellish Forge of Domestick Recension, generation ‘pon generation, till what survives is the pure truth, anneal’d to Mercilessness, about each figure, no matter how stretch’d, nor how influenced over the years by all Sentiments from unreflective love to inflexible Dislike’
‘Don’t leave out Irresponsible Embellishment’” (695-96)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Trafficking, Kidnapping, Grief
Moderate: Death, Racism, Sexual content, Slavery
Minor: Racial slurs
16. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
published: 1997
format: 773 page hardcover
acquired: December 2015 from Half-Price Books
read: Mar 1 - Apr 13 (that's 44 days, but who is counting?)
rating: ????? (five question marks)
Don't read this book. That's one conclusion - I mean, if you're like me. I just put a lot of time into this, and there were consequences. For one, I don't know what I got out of it, or what you should. I've read a couple intelligent reviews, and they didn't change my feeling about that. It's massive and it wanders, and it plods, and it never, ever provides a clear picture of anything - whether about the story line, or what Pynchon is really trying to say or mean. He says a lot and undermines what he says a lot. He brings in a endless supply of real historical trivia with real mind-altering stuff in there, and then fills it with wildest of fiction and fantasy, even pulling in on those early science fiction-y novels where characters go to new lands, planets, under the earth or wherever (children of Thomas Moore's Utopia). "The reclusive Pynchon writes as if everything is connected to everything else, and detours so obsessively en route that even the revelation that there is actually no revelation seems extraordinarily significant."* So, I think I confidently say that any pronouncement on this book should be taken to be foolishy overconfident, obviously including this one.
My main take away is that this is Pynchon's play on the Age of Reason when the sciences were flawed with imagination and the occult was merely part of the process. When skills of measurement were refined to quite an extent and yet unknowns could fumble forward ideas, and when making things known had some troublesome imperative with unpredictable outcomes. How else do two rural born children become skilled master-craftsmen, who build nearly perfectly, over four years, a line in the almost wilderness, guided by the stars, that will quite soon become meaningless, and then later on define the American chasm that clashed in that Civil War. And yet, neither Charles Mason or Jeremiah Dixon would manage to become part of the Royal Society, or really amount to all that much. More humble creatures lost in the human machine. Or something.
Pynchon brings out a Mason and Dixon that are tied to facts well enough, are well defined full personalities, and hardly likely to be anything like anyone who ever existed. They bicker as their relationship fumbles forward, their skills taken for granted. They each have their struggles. Mason, the Astronomer, has more internalized struggles as he works through his melancholy and loss of his wife. Dixon, a surveyor, the more practical one, tied better into the real world. Albeit, a world defined by learned talking dogs, invisible angry automaton ducks, and, well, slavery, among other insane and wild encounters.
This is the sequel in process and theme to V. and Gravity's Rainbow. Like them, this is a ball of confusion with wacky happenings and many a drug-trip type scenes. But, it's really toned down in comparison. It's less wacky, less druggy, with less sex. The sex which was both disgusting and all over the place in the earlier two books here is reduced to implication and flirtation. When a group of gnomes or some such creatures want to explore Dixon, and asks him to undress as much as he is comfortable doing so, he takes off his shoes, but leaves his hat on.
I've noticed over the last several years how I struggle to link into the mindset of a book, to get the tone well enough that I can come along for the ride. It's like something I need to figure out, to learn, hopefully before I get too far into the book. I never got it here, never really tied in. The book always seemed to fall through my fingers somehow, remaining a other, and leaving me to plod along uncomfortably and unconfident. Of course it's all in humor and fun, and I could see that and kind of smile at myself. And that does make the book both easier and something other. Ultimately, it's not really intended to be taken in any kind of full seriousness. But, it seemed I fell in, and then couldn't find a comfortable place to sit anywhere. So, I just stumbled on through. The book has ended quietly, but I'm still stumbling along.
*Not sure what original source is, but it's quoted here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n14/jenny-turner/when-the-sandwich-was-still-a-new-invention
published: 1997
format: 773 page hardcover
acquired: December 2015 from Half-Price Books
read: Mar 1 - Apr 13 (that's 44 days, but who is counting?)
rating: ????? (five question marks)
Don't read this book. That's one conclusion - I mean, if you're like me. I just put a lot of time into this, and there were consequences. For one, I don't know what I got out of it, or what you should. I've read a couple intelligent reviews, and they didn't change my feeling about that. It's massive and it wanders, and it plods, and it never, ever provides a clear picture of anything - whether about the story line, or what Pynchon is really trying to say or mean. He says a lot and undermines what he says a lot. He brings in a endless supply of real historical trivia with real mind-altering stuff in there, and then fills it with wildest of fiction and fantasy, even pulling in on those early science fiction-y novels where characters go to new lands, planets, under the earth or wherever (children of Thomas Moore's Utopia). "The reclusive Pynchon writes as if everything is connected to everything else, and detours so obsessively en route that even the revelation that there is actually no revelation seems extraordinarily significant."* So, I think I confidently say that any pronouncement on this book should be taken to be foolishy overconfident, obviously including this one.
My main take away is that this is Pynchon's play on the Age of Reason when the sciences were flawed with imagination and the occult was merely part of the process. When skills of measurement were refined to quite an extent and yet unknowns could fumble forward ideas, and when making things known had some troublesome imperative with unpredictable outcomes. How else do two rural born children become skilled master-craftsmen, who build nearly perfectly, over four years, a line in the almost wilderness, guided by the stars, that will quite soon become meaningless, and then later on define the American chasm that clashed in that Civil War. And yet, neither Charles Mason or Jeremiah Dixon would manage to become part of the Royal Society, or really amount to all that much. More humble creatures lost in the human machine. Or something.
Pynchon brings out a Mason and Dixon that are tied to facts well enough, are well defined full personalities, and hardly likely to be anything like anyone who ever existed. They bicker as their relationship fumbles forward, their skills taken for granted. They each have their struggles. Mason, the Astronomer, has more internalized struggles as he works through his melancholy and loss of his wife. Dixon, a surveyor, the more practical one, tied better into the real world. Albeit, a world defined by learned talking dogs, invisible angry automaton ducks, and, well, slavery, among other insane and wild encounters.
This is the sequel in process and theme to V. and Gravity's Rainbow. Like them, this is a ball of confusion with wacky happenings and many a drug-trip type scenes. But, it's really toned down in comparison. It's less wacky, less druggy, with less sex. The sex which was both disgusting and all over the place in the earlier two books here is reduced to implication and flirtation. When a group of gnomes or some such creatures want to explore Dixon, and asks him to undress as much as he is comfortable doing so, he takes off his shoes, but leaves his hat on.
I've noticed over the last several years how I struggle to link into the mindset of a book, to get the tone well enough that I can come along for the ride. It's like something I need to figure out, to learn, hopefully before I get too far into the book. I never got it here, never really tied in. The book always seemed to fall through my fingers somehow, remaining a other, and leaving me to plod along uncomfortably and unconfident. Of course it's all in humor and fun, and I could see that and kind of smile at myself. And that does make the book both easier and something other. Ultimately, it's not really intended to be taken in any kind of full seriousness. But, it seemed I fell in, and then couldn't find a comfortable place to sit anywhere. So, I just stumbled on through. The book has ended quietly, but I'm still stumbling along.
*Not sure what original source is, but it's quoted here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n14/jenny-turner/when-the-sandwich-was-still-a-new-invention
someone who knows me well is spreading rumors
about the hearts i've broken in my time
from northern maine down to palestine, texas
they're talking bout my mason dixon lines
my texas drawl just killes them in ohio
in dixieland my new york flow is fine
north or south i got two different ways of coming on
that's why they call it my mason dixon line
mothers have been warning all their daughters
telling them they'd better run and hide
stay away from that silver tongued devil
and beware of his mason dixon lines
this southern boy delights them up in detroit
but georgia girls like hollywood and wine
city dude or souhern gent i give them what they want
and i hit them with my mason dixon lines
my papa told me son respect the ladies
so i respect them each and every night
i found out what they're looking for then i change my habit
they all want my mason dixon line
Waylon Jennings
...to be continued
I never know what’s going on in any Pynchon novel and I love Thomas Pynchon. Like stars in my eyes LOVE. With all of his novels it is definitely about the journey and not the destination. I get it, Tom. But this was the first time I was ever bored. I hate to rate this so low but, yeah, I couldn’t wait for Mason & Dixon to be over so that I could read a different TP book and re-kindle this romance we have going on.
It's constantly awe-inspiring how much mental vitality and agility Pynchon has at his command. Awesome also how extensive and detailed is his research. His immersion in his subject is all-consuming and watertight. It tells the story, in picaresque form, of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the British surveyors and astronomers who mapped out the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland in colonial America, the line used to divide the North from the South. In the novel Pynchon takes riotous and sometimes hilarious exception to the validity of any kind of boundary - Mason and Dixon share a bond that sometimes reminds one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza - though this boundary, of course, is peppered with violent omens. America is very much a central character in this book, and we get a evocatively convincing and insightful depiction of the country's childhood and how its personality was formed.
The narrator of the novel is the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke sitting with his family around a drawing room fire. More often than not he is recounting incidents he could not possibly know in such detail. Essentially he has virtually no authority to be telling us this story. But this is the lynchpin of Pynchon's jibe at official histories: "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."
I loved all the fun he poked at the recounting of history. Having just finished Hamnet with the strong suspicion that O'Farrell's Agnes bears as little similarity in reality to Shakespeare's wife as I do to Eva Braun I was left with the feeling that to write historical fiction about real people you either have to acknowledge your mischief making and make it a weave of the narrative or perform a kind of all-consuming spiritual possession of your subject. Hilary Mantel succeeded at the latter; Pynchon opts for the former and, in this regard, does a fabulous job.
But this book, more difficult to read than anything I've tackled since Finnegan's Wake, was ultimately just a little too bonkers for my taste. So often it resounds beautifully with poetic authenticity but Pynchon being Pynchon we also get an invisible amorous mechanical duck, a talking dog and a talking clock, giant vegetables, a restless golem, conspiracy theory and alien abduction.
At times, brilliant; at other time times, exhausting, like any long tortuous excursion up towards the realms of thinner air.
The narrator of the novel is the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke sitting with his family around a drawing room fire. More often than not he is recounting incidents he could not possibly know in such detail. Essentially he has virtually no authority to be telling us this story. But this is the lynchpin of Pynchon's jibe at official histories: "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."
I loved all the fun he poked at the recounting of history. Having just finished Hamnet with the strong suspicion that O'Farrell's Agnes bears as little similarity in reality to Shakespeare's wife as I do to Eva Braun I was left with the feeling that to write historical fiction about real people you either have to acknowledge your mischief making and make it a weave of the narrative or perform a kind of all-consuming spiritual possession of your subject. Hilary Mantel succeeded at the latter; Pynchon opts for the former and, in this regard, does a fabulous job.
But this book, more difficult to read than anything I've tackled since Finnegan's Wake, was ultimately just a little too bonkers for my taste. So often it resounds beautifully with poetic authenticity but Pynchon being Pynchon we also get an invisible amorous mechanical duck, a talking dog and a talking clock, giant vegetables, a restless golem, conspiracy theory and alien abduction.
At times, brilliant; at other time times, exhausting, like any long tortuous excursion up towards the realms of thinner air.
This is Pynchon's best book since Gravity's Rainbow. It took me quite a while to spend the time and effort that the book takes, but I am glad I did. There is something fun and original on every page.
Couldn't really get into it, though that may be due to the fact that I was reading it on my commute rather than on binge-reading sessions
Più che un libro un'epopea. Pynchon si cimenta col falso romanzo storico e riesce, in un monumentale romanzo di quasi 800 pagine, a cambiare le carte in tavola su cosa è stata la linea Mason-Dixon e come si sono svolti i fatti.
La Linea Mason-Dixon è una linea che segnava il confine tra Maryland e le terre non ancora inglesi e questo è l'aggancio per Pynchon per lanciarsi nel suo folle romanzo corale a metà tra vicenda storica, palesemente anacronistica, e delirante saggio su tutto ciò che è il romanzo fino ad ora, per arrivare anche ad affermare che "Chiunque reclami la verità, costei lo abbandona. La storia è assunta o costretta, solo per gli interessi che devono essere sempre provati. E' troppo innocente, per essere lasciata a chiunque al potere la raggiunga, chi non necessita altro che lei, e che tutto il suo crdito svanisca, come se non ci fosse mai stato. Piuttosto, lei ha bisogno di essere seguita con amore e onorabilità dai favolisti e i contraffattori, dai cantori di ballate e gli svitati di ogni raggio, maestri del mascheramento che le permettano un costume, una toeletta e un affido, un dialogo talmente veloce da lasciarla al di là dei desideri, o persino, della curiosità del Governo."
La falsità di questo romanzo storico incontra due personaggi, Charles Mason e Jeremiah Dixon, tremendamente diversi tra loro eppur complementari; vedovo il primo, single il secondo, che si ritrovano a girare per l'america in balia della Massoneria, guerre interne, indiani, geomanzie e servi oscuri di una religione che si rifà al Cristianesimo nel mondo occulto.
Certo, per leggerlo dovreste prendervi un mese di ferie o leggerlo in modo consequenziale, senza troppi stacchi. Aiuta molto il fatto che, per una volta, Pynchon abbia usato lo schema "a puntate" che si susseguivano, al contario dell'Arcobaleno della Verità.
La Linea Mason-Dixon è una linea che segnava il confine tra Maryland e le terre non ancora inglesi e questo è l'aggancio per Pynchon per lanciarsi nel suo folle romanzo corale a metà tra vicenda storica, palesemente anacronistica, e delirante saggio su tutto ciò che è il romanzo fino ad ora, per arrivare anche ad affermare che "Chiunque reclami la verità, costei lo abbandona. La storia è assunta o costretta, solo per gli interessi che devono essere sempre provati. E' troppo innocente, per essere lasciata a chiunque al potere la raggiunga, chi non necessita altro che lei, e che tutto il suo crdito svanisca, come se non ci fosse mai stato. Piuttosto, lei ha bisogno di essere seguita con amore e onorabilità dai favolisti e i contraffattori, dai cantori di ballate e gli svitati di ogni raggio, maestri del mascheramento che le permettano un costume, una toeletta e un affido, un dialogo talmente veloce da lasciarla al di là dei desideri, o persino, della curiosità del Governo."
La falsità di questo romanzo storico incontra due personaggi, Charles Mason e Jeremiah Dixon, tremendamente diversi tra loro eppur complementari; vedovo il primo, single il secondo, che si ritrovano a girare per l'america in balia della Massoneria, guerre interne, indiani, geomanzie e servi oscuri di una religione che si rifà al Cristianesimo nel mondo occulto.
Certo, per leggerlo dovreste prendervi un mese di ferie o leggerlo in modo consequenziale, senza troppi stacchi. Aiuta molto il fatto che, per una volta, Pynchon abbia usato lo schema "a puntate" che si susseguivano, al contario dell'Arcobaleno della Verità.
challenging
funny
inspiring
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Delicious, delightful, full of dialect and science and history and stars and colonial whimsicality. A great bus or plane companion, or a lounging in the yard companion, but far too pretentious for a coffee shop, don't even try it. You've got to sneak this book in around the edges, not in public--otherwise you'll be forced to answer lots of questions while your adoration is growing, and you'll be inclined to gush.