Sunday 21 June 2020

Favourite Books #17

Want to know what it was like to be a hapless GI abroad in London during The Blitz? Furthermore, one who discovers that V2 rockets are striking at the sites of his previous sexual trysts? That’d be enough to make anyone a bit paranoid. And that’s just the first section.

When I used to teach Contemporary Fiction it was always advisable to put Pynchon’s briefer  The Crying Of Lot 49 on a course instead of Gravity’s Rainbow: students won’t read long novels. (Similarly with David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men ahead of Infinite Jest.) But give this tome a go sometime, when you’ve got the time. Its sweep of contemporary history is chilling, and funny.


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