Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Chapter 1: Section 5: Page 38: Line 66 (648)

 By now he could not bear her woundedness—the tears, through some desperate magic, kept gelid at her lower lids, because she would not let them fall, not till he had left her sight.

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This entire Lew Basnight section feels like when Dave Sim decided to go on his Oscar Wilde or Ernest Hemingway tangents and write long sections of Cerebus in the style of the writer with which he was currently obsessed. These descriptions of their loss of love and the terrible destruction of Lew's reputation feel straight out of Middlemarch, Bleak House, or The Age of Innocence (although written later, placed in Wharton's childhood days of the 1870s). These are just such great Victorian romance drama lines: "He could not bear her woundedness," and "she would not let the tears fall, not till he had left her sight." There's more florid descriptions of this heartbreaking interaction than I'm used to in Pynchon. But then I've only ever read three other books by Pynchon, so maybe this is something he loves to do?! How should I know? Re-read the description of my blog where I outright state I don't know enough about anything to be attempting this kind of project!

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