Mason and Dixon

English language

Published June 29, 1998

ISBN:
978-0-09-977191-3
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5 stars (3 reviews)

Mason may refer to:

3 editions

incredibly good

5 stars

This was probably one of the hardest and best books I've ever read. A deliberately ahistorical historical novel, it tells the story of two men, one an astronomer, the other a surveyor, about whom very little is actually known, in the form of a picaresque tale that tells a story within a story, with some digressions into even deeper layers of narrative. All sorts of absurd episodes about talking dogs, flying magicians and the hollow earth are interwoven. Nevertheless, you learn a lot about history, including historiography and how much you can trust it, but also about colonial America, slavery, astronomy, seafaring and much more, and of course about the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line, which was an engineering achievement at the time and is still regarded as the dividing line between the northern and southern states of the United States. The novel is at times terribly funny and at …

reviewed Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

Mason & Dixon Review

5 stars

Finishing reading this really validates Pynchon being my favorite fiction author. Massive in the way the Gravity's Rainbow is, but more focused on key themes and the two protagonists here. The bond formulated between Mason and Dixon feels so real and beautiful.

I love the tall-tale untrustworthy narrator in this, and the idea of half-truths scattered through out bonkers story pieces.

This is truly a treasure of the mood of an early America (just before the Revolutionary War kicks off), in way that it depicts real historical and social feelings of the time so richly and remains real. Pynchon continued to be the master of this type of thing, I guess, and the idea of the Preterite is very alive here still (and even more close to its religious origins).

Maybe I'll do a blog post or more thorough writeup on this one sometime. There's a lot to peel away!

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rated it

5 stars