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It's not all frolicking around in the sunshine here in Gozo, another winter storm rages outside my window and there's nothing else for it but to batten down and read. I get through a lot of novels, some of dubious literary value, but the latest was so extraordinary I feel compelled to mention it.
V, by Thomas Pynchon, charts the search for the elusive and possibly mythical V, a place, a woman, an abstract concept, represented in various incarnations across history. Non-linear time-shifts take in alligator hunting in the New York sewers, spies and intrigue in 19th Century Egypt, a gruelling account of German colonial South West Africa, espionage and hapless art theft in Florence. Coincidentally, given my current geography, also World War II and Suez era Malta. The Maltese, he says, live under the protection of the guardian spirit, sorceress Mara (Maltese for 'woman'), Mother of Earth figure, the Island itself. Sanctuary during both the Great Siege of the Ottomans, and the bombardment of World War II, in her caves, caverns and catacombs, sheltering her children. The womb of rock. Valletta, where the Knights walk the streets after sunset, protecting the people.
V is riddled with society's flotsam; drunks, idlers, brawlers, Godless priests, pederasts, the flawed and the feckless. Members of The Whole Sick Crew come and go, they float itinerantly past or come roaring into the book and leave again, inchoate figures, gone. More completion is given to a rambling explorer, claiming to have found the paradisiacal Vheissu, a teenage ballerina, fetish figure, impaled during her own performance, an insane priest tending his congregation of rats. The idea of progression from animate to inanimate run throughout; cosmetic surgery, glass eyes, prosthetic limbs, death.
Thomas Pynchon is not for the faint-hearted, he seems wilfully incoherent, incomprehensible, abstruse. The teeming multitude of characters are impossible to track, he leaps around historically and ideologically. I nearly gave up a number of times, but then rather than trying feverishly to understand it, I just went with the flow. The jazz musician McClintic says in the novel, 'Keep cool, but care'. I think that is the way to do it. Enjoy the majestic prose, the relentless onslaught of ideas, the genius and turbulent creativity, become immersed in it, let it go where it will. It's more of an event than a book, a cross between soaking in a warm bath and being hit by a truck.
V, by Thomas Pynchon, charts the search for the elusive and possibly mythical V, a place, a woman, an abstract concept, represented in various incarnations across history. Non-linear time-shifts take in alligator hunting in the New York sewers, spies and intrigue in 19th Century Egypt, a gruelling account of German colonial South West Africa, espionage and hapless art theft in Florence. Coincidentally, given my current geography, also World War II and Suez era Malta. The Maltese, he says, live under the protection of the guardian spirit, sorceress Mara (Maltese for 'woman'), Mother of Earth figure, the Island itself. Sanctuary during both the Great Siege of the Ottomans, and the bombardment of World War II, in her caves, caverns and catacombs, sheltering her children. The womb of rock. Valletta, where the Knights walk the streets after sunset, protecting the people.
V is riddled with society's flotsam; drunks, idlers, brawlers, Godless priests, pederasts, the flawed and the feckless. Members of The Whole Sick Crew come and go, they float itinerantly past or come roaring into the book and leave again, inchoate figures, gone. More completion is given to a rambling explorer, claiming to have found the paradisiacal Vheissu, a teenage ballerina, fetish figure, impaled during her own performance, an insane priest tending his congregation of rats. The idea of progression from animate to inanimate run throughout; cosmetic surgery, glass eyes, prosthetic limbs, death.
Thomas Pynchon is not for the faint-hearted, he seems wilfully incoherent, incomprehensible, abstruse. The teeming multitude of characters are impossible to track, he leaps around historically and ideologically. I nearly gave up a number of times, but then rather than trying feverishly to understand it, I just went with the flow. The jazz musician McClintic says in the novel, 'Keep cool, but care'. I think that is the way to do it. Enjoy the majestic prose, the relentless onslaught of ideas, the genius and turbulent creativity, become immersed in it, let it go where it will. It's more of an event than a book, a cross between soaking in a warm bath and being hit by a truck.