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A review by discogotbooks
Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
5.0
A National-Lampoon-style-buddy-road- comedy that tackles the birth of the Great Satan.
There is no way to describe or explain Pynchon. His prose washes over you in every conceivable genre, in constantly narrowing and expanding asides. One moment you're laughing out loud in a quiet cafe to an 18th century fart joke and the next you're holding back tears after having your entire being summed up in a sentence.
Mason and Dixon is a later work but it is the begining of his career long quest to explain the American empire and with it where the world is and headed, always with an eye on our tiny lives going on within it.
Mason and Dixon seek to serve some objective science, the rallying cry of our modern age, they(more so Mason than his counterpart) believe it to be beyond the touch of earthly concerns and ancient mysticism. But it is in fact just another tool of the state, of the landowner, to carve into the earth lines of ownership of the earth and its inhabitants. They trace the path of the greatest horror unleashed on this earth, the triangle slave trade, and then are hired to drag its line out into the unblemished country, hacking down trees and dividing towns along the way.
For what? So that the Europeans and their Bastard offspring can drive men from their homes and through the blood of enslaved people hew profit from the earth. Creating a false map onto God's firmament to serve their own genocidal needs.
From the wild realities of our universe, The Royal Society and Clive of India carve in minutes and latitudes, enclosing us further and further into boxes of their own creation, a man made demiurge let loose upon our lives.
Yet for all of us trapped, he reminds us that there is coffee to drink, lovers to find, friends to be made, joy to be found, and, who knows, if you're lucky you may just stumble upon a philosophizing dog or the mole people or maybe even G-D H--SELF hiding just beyond the horizon at the star you can never quite reach.
There is no way to describe or explain Pynchon. His prose washes over you in every conceivable genre, in constantly narrowing and expanding asides. One moment you're laughing out loud in a quiet cafe to an 18th century fart joke and the next you're holding back tears after having your entire being summed up in a sentence.
Mason and Dixon is a later work but it is the begining of his career long quest to explain the American empire and with it where the world is and headed, always with an eye on our tiny lives going on within it.
Mason and Dixon seek to serve some objective science, the rallying cry of our modern age, they(more so Mason than his counterpart) believe it to be beyond the touch of earthly concerns and ancient mysticism. But it is in fact just another tool of the state, of the landowner, to carve into the earth lines of ownership of the earth and its inhabitants. They trace the path of the greatest horror unleashed on this earth, the triangle slave trade, and then are hired to drag its line out into the unblemished country, hacking down trees and dividing towns along the way.
For what? So that the Europeans and their Bastard offspring can drive men from their homes and through the blood of enslaved people hew profit from the earth. Creating a false map onto God's firmament to serve their own genocidal needs.
From the wild realities of our universe, The Royal Society and Clive of India carve in minutes and latitudes, enclosing us further and further into boxes of their own creation, a man made demiurge let loose upon our lives.
Yet for all of us trapped, he reminds us that there is coffee to drink, lovers to find, friends to be made, joy to be found, and, who knows, if you're lucky you may just stumble upon a philosophizing dog or the mole people or maybe even G-D H--SELF hiding just beyond the horizon at the star you can never quite reach.