Description
By (author) Thomas Pynchon; By (author) Pynchon, Thomas
Short /annotation:
Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line.
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Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and major caffeine abuse.
We follow the mismatch”d pair – one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic – from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the stange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment”s dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
Review quote:
Pynchon”s finest work yet…if anyone is still looking for the Great American Novel…then this may well be it
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A rollicking, picaresque tale… playful, erudite and funny
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Very grand and mad and beautiful…I can”t remember ever having reviewed a more original novel… and if America produces a novel to come near this marvellous, proliferating thing this decade, I promise to eat it
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Pynchon offers readers a trip as long and full of yearning as that of his heroes
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A hugely ambitous epic…show cases all of Mr Pynchon”s gifts as a writer: his magical abilty to fuse history and fable, science and science fiction; his Swiftean grasp of satire and his vaudevillian”s sense of farce. It”s a book that testifies to his remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller… as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring
Biographical note:
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity”s Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Against the Day. He received the National Book Award for Gravity”s Rainbow in 1974.
Promotional headline:
A hugley ambitious, epic work from this most inventive and creative author.
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