One of the things that gets missed in my obsessing over the history in Pynchon is his unbelievable talent as a descriptive writer. How he can describe faces, Galina: "Her eyes hide in iron shadows, the orbits darkened as if by very precise blows. Her jaw is small, square, levered forward, the lower teeth more apt to show when she speaks..."
It's made more brilliant by the fact that tchicherine was just thinking to himself, that he doesn't remember her specifically, doesn't want to: "Galina won't even be a proper memory. Already she is more like the shape of an alphabet"... To me that is such a familiar internal monologue, one part of me says, "I'm so abstracted from that part of my life I can't even remember it" and then another part of me, the part of me that was formed when there was that relationship, when I did know that person, remembers them.
Just expert-level word mastery you don't get anywhere else.
Rilke shows up again here, in Galina's passage; to my shame I'm using the new Penguin edition because I can't bear to write in any of my copies of the true editions, so I have the wrong page numbers.
From the David Young translations, which I highly recommend, tenth elegy:
"Oh how an angel would stomp out their Consolation Market, leaving no trace --
Pynchon points us toward an interesting history that I didn't know about -- the 1916 Kyrgyz uprising. I wonder how much of the success of the uprising in 1917 was due to a weakening of the Tsarist regime's outer colonial holdings -- there could have been events working in the Bolshevick's favor that they might not have even been aware of. Not mentioned in histories of the Russian revolution like Mieville's October. The writing in that passage seems to echo the dodo interlude.
One of the things that gets missed in my obsessing over the history in Pynchon is his unbelievable talent as a descriptive writer. How he can describe faces, Galina: "Her eyes hide in iron shadows, the orbits darkened as if by very precise blows. Her jaw is small, square, levered forward, the lower teeth more apt to show when she speaks..."
It's made more brilliant by the fact that tchicherine was just thinking to himself, that he doesn't remember her specifically, doesn't want to: "Galina won't even be a proper memory. Already she is more like the shape of an alphabet"... To me that is such a familiar internal monologue, one part of me says, "I'm so abstracted from that part of my life I can't even remember it" and then another part of me, the part of me that was formed when there was that relationship, when I did know that person, remembers them.
Just expert-level word mastery you don't get anywhere else.
Word for word one of the best prose stylists who has ever lived. Both in terms of his clear descriptions and his more abstract ones.
Rilke shows up again here, in Galina's passage; to my shame I'm using the new Penguin edition because I can't bear to write in any of my copies of the true editions, so I have the wrong page numbers.
From the David Young translations, which I highly recommend, tenth elegy:
"Oh how an angel would stomp out their Consolation Market, leaving no trace --
the church beside it too..."
reminiscent of a rocket strike
Pynchon points us toward an interesting history that I didn't know about -- the 1916 Kyrgyz uprising. I wonder how much of the success of the uprising in 1917 was due to a weakening of the Tsarist regime's outer colonial holdings -- there could have been events working in the Bolshevick's favor that they might not have even been aware of. Not mentioned in histories of the Russian revolution like Mieville's October. The writing in that passage seems to echo the dodo interlude.