Mason & Dixon eBook PDF

User Reviews

Geoff

Rating: really liked it
What to say or where to start saying things about this book? Pynchon’s language is unceasingly beautiful; Mason and Dixon are as endearing and animated with pure character as any creations you’ll meet; the book perfectly balances cartoonish absurdity with gently profound melancholy in a rich musical vocabulary; the page is to the prose as air is to music played; the book is inhabited by dream-beings and ghosts and the fantastic, because its realm is pure story; story into story into story; I would want it to go on forever, but it ends in the most perfect stretch of pages; I’ll quote another Goodreads reviewer “Thomas Pynchon just broke my heart”; it stayed with me when it was closed and I mentioned Mason and Dixon, as people, to people I spoke to; I went to the Atlantic Ocean (this really happened three days ago) and saw a sign for a trailer park right as we crossed the border into the Delaware marshes, when the sunset was lighting them all on fire, that read “Mason-Dixon”; secret thrills were given me because I was born and raised in the Old Line State; it perfectly caught like lightning bug light that feeling we have when under the night sky and the stars are bright and numberless and that reminds us of all the space out there for dying or forgetting or for thinking of ages past or passing; because it was long, it felt like reading lifetimes; because it had such depth I lost myself in concentrating on it; it is a perfect novel about friendship; I came across passages of staggering beauty abutting slapstick buffoonery; the book is geminiacal, bipolar, its fabric is opposites, twins, mates, the vast or minuscule space that acts as their boundaries and borders, what separates their bodies and separately gives them form and identity; it is a loping colloquy between Faith and its mate Reason, Free Will and its mate Fate; I read in it that I should make my way West to go with the day, with Time, maturation, aging, having children, the coming of the next generation, the slow fading and dispersal at sunset- and East if I wish to go against the day, into the past, toward morning, the smokeless altars of memory, to youth… where we can’t ever stay for long, because the terrain has started to go missing, there is less firm land under foot to hold and lift us, and our Lines must again resume their inexorable Westerly course...

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Violet wells

Rating: really liked it
It's constantly awe-inspiring how much mental vitality and agility Pynchon has at his command. Awesome also how extensive and detailed is his research. His immersion in his subject is all-consuming and watertight. It tells the story, in picaresque form, of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the British surveyors and astronomers who mapped out the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland in colonial America, the line used to divide the North from the South. In the novel Pynchon takes riotous and sometimes hilarious exception to the validity of any kind of boundary - Mason and Dixon share a bond that sometimes reminds one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza - though this boundary, of course, is peppered with violent omens. America is very much a central character in this book, and we get a evocatively convincing and insightful depiction of the country's childhood and how its personality was formed.

The narrator of the novel is the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke sitting with his family around a drawing room fire. More often than not he is recounting incidents he could not possibly know in such detail. Essentially he has virtually no authority to be telling us this story. But this is the lynchpin of Pynchon's jibe at official histories: "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."

I loved all the fun he poked at the recounting of history. Having just finished Hamnet with the strong suspicion that O'Farrell's Agnes bears as little similarity in reality to Shakespeare's wife as I do to Eva Braun I was left with the feeling that to write historical fiction about real people you either have to acknowledge your mischief making and make it a weave of the narrative or perform a kind of all-consuming spiritual possession of your subject. Hilary Mantel succeeded at the latter; Pynchon opts for the former and, in this regard, does a fabulous job.

But this book, more difficult to read than anything I've tackled since Finnegan's Wake, was ultimately just a little too bonkers for my taste. So often it resounds beautifully with poetic authenticity but Pynchon being Pynchon we also get an invisible amorous mechanical duck, a talking dog and a talking clock, giant vegetables, a restless golem, conspiracy theory and alien abduction.
At times, brilliant; at other time times, exhausting, like any long tortuous excursion up towards the realms of thinner air.

Luís

Rating: really liked it
One of the best novels I have read. It is quite a monument of literature, and I think we will realise it when Pynchon dies. Its description quality is fascinating; it details the places and characters so well that one would think of oneself equipped with a camera (somewhat anachronistic) with the honour of being allowed to witness the story as a privileged spectator.
The vibrant and very sharp language is sometimes necessary to call upon the dictionary, and one will not complain about it. But, unfortunately, so many books lower our vocabulary level; for once, I come across one that brings me considerable wealth.
They organise dialogues; they are funny and bring a rhythm, an unusual cadence, and poetic and theatrical. And what humour, when it is not absurd, it is ironic and subtle. It is a lovely novel that knows how to combine these two forms of fun; they are so rare.
And what a story, it's a fantastic odyssey, an adventure where many literary genres mix. The book is long, not enough for my taste, too much for many, but I never wanted it to end. I love and hate this feeling; moreover, when I have the impression that I feel like an orphan at the end of the book, I enjoy reading. There it was. I loved it!!!

Ian "Marvin" Graye

Rating: really liked it
All Due Regard to Length

Let's get the length of "Mason & Dixon" out of the way first.

Lauding fiction on the basis of its maximalism alone might gratify those who derive satisfaction from this one feature of big fat books, but it inevitably deters readers who might enjoy the (other) merits of the book.

I was a little apprehensive about the length of this novel when I began. However, the preoccupation with its length obscures what a pleasure it is to read (and why).

Here, Thomas Pynchon gives us the essence of both challenging and rewarding literature, but on a grand scale: immaculate sentence construction, authentic world-building, engaging story-telling and belletristic narrative meta/heterogeneity, all delivered with a sustained Rabelaisian energy and sly quixotic eroticism. Write on, Tom!

Up to His Usual Mischief

Whatever the intellect that went into the construction of this fiction, it's still and always a joy to read. This is what, for me, differentiates Pynchon from his peers. He's fun, playful, cheeky, mischievous, sometimes even outrageous.

From time to time, his work might be matched by John Barth and Robert Coover, but you have to question whether the sheer literary inventiveness of Pynchon's oeuvre as a whole (book for book) could ever be surpassed by any of the other Post-Modern American poster-boys, the ones who continually and hyperblurbally get wheeled out as the Greatest Writer or the Greatest Sentence-Fabricator of their Generation (somebody please remind me why we're always being told who is the Greatest and/or Longest by white male pundits, discoverers, spruikers, list-makers, proclaimers and long lost book club members, when perhaps the word "favourite" would do).

Sometimes it's the way you praise Caesar that buries him.

Surface Breakdown

Yes, it feels like you're holding a compact brick at first.

It's just over 770 pages long, but there are 78 chapters of more or less 10 pages each. Hence, you can read and digest each one quite quickly. Immediately, you want to move onto the next, like links in a chain. No sooner would I look at the page number than I would find I'd read 40 or 50 pages. Pretty soon, I was trying to finish 100 pages a day.

It Was Fun While It Lasted

The language is that of the late 18th century. Sentences are long, but neatly divided by commas and dashes into phrases and clauses that propel you along.

Once you get into the rhythm of the writing, you forget about its archaisms, and you start to recognise and enjoy the abundant wit and humour. It's fun, in anybody's time, space and language. As Pynchon conveys in verse:

"It...was...fun
While it lasted,
And it lasted,
Quite a while..."

In other words, maximalism is better served with merriment and whimsy than earnestness and self-absorption.

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The Mason and Dixon Line

You don't have to know anything about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to appreciate the novel. Equally, if you learned about them at school and don't want to know any more, then the novel can still be entertaining.

Throughout its expanse, the Mason and Dixon Line is an extended metaphor for the artificial boundaries that divide and conquer people:

"To rule forever, it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People, - to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em..."

When England colonised America, its proprietorial approach to the Earth (enclosure on the inside, exile on the outside) made a transition to its new colonies.

Mason and Dixon embarked from a still quarrelsome Royal Society in London to solve a boundary dispute between two of the American colonies, by using their combined skills in astronomy and surveying.

Their solution still stands, even though they developed it shortly before the American War of Independence.

While it consisted of lines, barriers and separation, ironically their experience of America was quite the opposite.

Infinite Wilderness

What they, and through them, Pynchon, admire about America is the fact that at the time it was a wilderness that offered infinite challenges and opportunities.

Thus, at its heart, "Mason & Dixon" documents Pynchon's love affair with America. It's a Baroque hymn to the majesty and wonder of a native, unspoiled America.

"Gravity's Rainbow" witnessed Americans discovering the Europe of World War II. In contrast, "Mason & Dixon" consists of two Englishmen exploring and mapping America.

The story might be set in the past, but what Pynchon finds appealing is those parts of the past that are still reflected in the present. Thus, this is equally a love story about the America of the present, and the parts of it that have transitioned or survived from its past.

Separated Not by a Line, but an Ampersand

While there's a long list of characters, Pynchon primarily tells his tale through the eponymous Mason and Dixon (as witnessed and related by an "untrustworthy Remembrancer [nevertheless possessed of] Authorial Authority", the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke).

They commence as strangers, occasionally have their disagreements, maintain their distance (they "could not cross the perilous Boundaries between themselves", although at the end Mason & Dixon are separated only by an ampersand), become rather fond of each other in an English public school boy way, and end up resolving to become "old Geezers" together.

When finally one is the first to die of old age, the other's son excuses his father's sentimental response:

"It's your Mate. It's what happens when your Mate dies."

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The Stars Are So Close

For all their differences, Mason and Dixon are joined by their experience of the American wilderness. For them, it was an adventure, albeit one that took them away from their families for extended periods of time (as does reading the novel!).

Nevertheless, their sense of wonder was infectious, and their children inherited it via their fathers' fantastic story-telling. In the end, it's their children who reiterate to them:

"The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope. The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick. We'll go there. We'll live there. We'll fish there. And you too."

This is an America that above all inspires the imagination, it's a canvas upon which to paint a picture, a sheet of paper upon which not just to draw lines, but to write words and map out visions.

Against the Great Wind of Oblivion

Pynchon captures and verbalises these fantasies, so that they don't just die an ephemeral death:

"How much shapely Expression...is simply fading away upon the Air, out under the Door, into the Evening and the Silence beyond...Why not pluck a few words from the multitudes rushing toward the Void of forgetfulness? [Words which else would have been lost forever to the great Wind of Oblivion.]"

At the same time that the novel eulogises America, it suggests that there's something greater than one nation alone. "Mason and Dixon" is concerned with transition: the Transit of Venus, the transmission of values from one country to another, what occurs between two people(s), the last ferry ride across the River Styx:

"Betwixt themselves, neither feels British enough anymore, nor quite American, for either Side of the Ocean. They are content to reside like Ferrymen or Bridge-keepers, ever in a Ubiquity of Flow, before a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition."

A Great Tangle of Lines

This is the dual significance of the lines that they draw: latitude and longitude represent a flow, a ch'i, an energy force. There is much wisequackery and semi-jocular allusion to ley-lines, meridians and feng-shui (not to mention talking dogs, flying pigs and mechanical ducks):

"Mason and Dixon step out of the Perimeter, into the Wild...lur'd by promises of forbidden Knowledge, in the Care of an inscrutable Druid..."

"Earth, withal, is a Body, like our own, with its network of Points, dispos'd along its Meridians [much like the Human body, where the flow of Chee may be beneficially strengthen'd by insertions of Gold Needles]..."

There is also frequent intimation that Native Americans know something that the Europeans might never:

"What in the Holy Names are these people about?...Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their Souls when they came?"

We, on the other hand, might have lost touch with our past and our ancestors. We need to learn how to draw the line between them again, only a line that joins people rather than separating them:

"...there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever, - not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, - rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common."

Fugitive as in a Dream

For Mason and Dixon, there are no grand egotistical dreams of wealth and fame (although you share their frustration at being locked out of membership of the Royal Society).

Theirs is a much more modest manifestation of liberty:

"[We] wish'd but for a middling Life,
Forever in betwixt
The claims of Lust and Duty,
So intricately mix'd, -
To reach some happy Medium,
Fleet as a golden Beam,
Uncharted as St Brendan's Isle,
Fugitive as a Dream."

Mason and Dixon are fugitives from arbitrary lines, boundaries, barriers, distinctions, divisions, divisiveness.

Ultimately, this is why "Mason & Dixon" is not just a story about the 18th century, but an allegory for today.

(view spoiler)

Paul

Rating: really liked it
This is a magnificent novel, immense in its scope. It is not an easy read being set in the eighteenth century; Pynchon uses the language, idiom and spelling of the day. Hence very careful reading is required; it is more Fielding than Richardson. The story involves Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason (of Mason/Dixon line fame and follows them from England to South Africa (Transit of Venus) to St Helena, on to America to map the aforesaid line, back to Britain and so on.
Pynchon mixes real historical figures with fantastic creations, oddities, rumour, and myth and in the centre of it all is the portrayal of a friendship in the form of a glorified road movie. The narrator is a Revd Wicks Cherrycoke, an offbeat and slightly disreputable clergyman. The choice of names is truly amazing (anyone met a Mrs Eggslap?).
Historical figures slip in and out of the story; Boswell and Johnson towards the end, Washington (our heroes smoke pot with him), Jefferson, Maskelyne (Astronomer Royal and something of a villain), Franklin and Emerson, to name a few.
The odd and fantastic populate the pages with some abandon. There is a museum devoted to the War of Jenkins Ear (1739, I remember this from A level history); complete with ear. A talking dog pops up on several occasions, as does a talking mechanical duck! The Lambton worm even makes an appearance.
This is a people’s history and Pynchon draws in all levels of society, including slaves and Native Americans, and all have a contribution. America seems full of Jesuits and the Chinese. There is much musing on religion, life after death (Mason sees the ghost of his wife), Feng Shui (I kid you not), lots of Astronomy (as you would imagine), suggestions of alien abduction, myth from a variety of cultures. The part concerning the giant vegetables reminded me of the Biblical story of the promised land flowing with milk and honey, where everything grew prolific(k)ally. Normal human activities also take their place; there is plenty of drinking, carousing, fighting, cooking, eating, sex, seduction and lots and lots of coffee.
The language is stunning and the start of the book is beautiful “Snowballs have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Side of Outbuildings” and so on. Some of the phrasing can be surprising and very clever, “imps of apprehension”.
Pynchon asks lots of interesting philosophical questions; there is a passage about enlightenment and trees linking Adam and Eve, Buddha and Newton. A mere review cannot do this justice and eventually (probably when I retire) I will have to read it again.
At heart it’s a simple tale of two friends and the birth of a nation narrated by Cherrycoke (very American!) and laced with fantastical humour and philosophical musings

Andy Marr

Rating: really liked it
Easily one of the best books I've ever read. Pynchon's blending together of fact, fiction and fantasy is utterly exquisite, and the characters he has created are unforgettable. It's an absolute beast of a book, but every page was pure magic.

Vit Babenco

Rating: really liked it
Mason & Dixon is a Christmas story…

Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starred the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,— the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stockinged-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peeled Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,— the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coaxed and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults. This Christmastide of 1786, with the War settled and the Nation bickering itself into Fragments, wounds bodily and ghostly, great and small, go aching on, not every one commemorated,— nor, too often, even recounted.

Yes, Mason & Dixon is a Christmas tale and as every magnificent Christmas tale should be it is full of adventures, festivity, merriment, mysteries and miracles.

When Brae, once, and only once, made the mistake of both gasping and blurting, “Oh, Aunt,— were you in a Turkish Harem, really?” ’twas to turn a giant Tap. “Barbary Pirates brought us actually’s far as Aleppo, you recall the difficult years of ’eighty and ’eighty-one,— no, of course you couldn’t,— Levant Company in an uproar, no place to get a Drink, Ramadan all year ’round it seem’d,— howbeit,— ’twas at the worst of those Depredations, that I took Passage from Philadelphia, upon that fateful Tide . . . the Moon reflected in Dock Creek, the songs of the Negroes upon the Shore, disconsolate,—” Most of her Tale, disguis’d artfully as traveler’s Narrative, prov’d quite outside the boundaries of the Girl’s Innocence, as of the Twins’ Attention,— among the Domes and Minarets, the Mountain-peaks rising from the Sea, the venomous Snakes, miracle-mongering Fakeers, intrigues over Harem Precedence and Diamonds as big as a girl’s playfully clench’d fist, ’twas Inconvenience which provided the recurring Motrix of Euphrenia’s adventures among the Turks, usually resolv’d by her charming the By-standers with a few appropriate Notes from her Oboe,— upon which now, in fact, her Reed shap’d and fitted, she has begun to punctuate her brother Wicks’s Tale, with scraps of Ditters von Dittersdorf, transcriptions from Quantz, and the Scamozzetta from I Gluttoni.

But Thomas Pynchon recounts Christmas stories his own way so all the escapades and mishaps are peculiarly edgy.
Every incredible tale, even the tallest one, boasts its modicum of truth however.

J

Rating: really liked it
Bored with the Edna St Vincent Millay of Savage Beauty and tired of the endless formality of complete names in Love in the Time of Cholera, I fished Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon out of the box it came in weeks ago. Sat down, stirring sugar into the tea I intended to drink while I read, and dropped my spoon.

Page 1: What kind of madness is this?? Oh My God. I’m tingly. No, this is not erotica. I don’t think. I don’t know what it is. But I think I like it. A lot. Dear God. Is the whole thing like this? I can’t tell if I love it or hate it. If it goes on this way till the end I may come to loathe it.

Page 773: Yes. This (thus far) lovely torture is intended to continue. And yes. I read the last page. What of it? With writing like this I’m unlikely to remember it more than seven hundred pages from now anyway.

First sentence, I kid you not:

Snow-balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware, - the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking’d-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel’d Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar, - the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax’d and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.

I am speechless.

Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it

This was my favorite Pynchon novel. I know most folks will say that Gravity's Rainbow or the more accessible The Crying of Lot 49 were his great works, but I felt that M&D just was such a beautiful story. The coming together of these two most opposite personalities and their adventures across the native forests and rivers and wildernesses that because what we now know as America was compelling and fascinating. I was not bored for a minute but rather was entertained and felt buoyed by the 17th/18th English syntax - it helped me escape and feel I was watching the story as an omniscient observer. In terms of narrative, it is one of the most straightforward of Pynchon's works (and believe me, that is saying something for one of this length!), and has a great host of characters and high-flying adventures of all sorts. Perhaps, if you have never read Pynchon, this one may be too big a chunk to chew on for the first time (perhaps Lot 49 would be more appropriate), but once you have that one and or GR under your belt, don't deprive yourself of the joy of reading Mason&Dixon.

Sue

Rating: really liked it
I have wanted to read this book for a long time...and it definitely lived up to anything I could have hoped for. Actually, I never could have imagined the novel as it actually exists. This is a combination of 18th century history, fantasy, a dollop of things magical and mysterious, a touch of poetry, astronomy and possibly astrology. Just about everything is present in this large novel. It's grand in all senses of the word.

I will acknowledge that this may not be for every reader but those who like an epic, enjoy historical fiction with the add-ons I mention above will have a reading experience unlike any other. If you read through my status updates, you will get a flavor of the dialect used and some of the story. I really can't give you adequately a taste of the outrageous humor and vignettes sprinkled throughout this novel, but, believe me, some of them are laugh-out-loud funny. Particularly "the duck." Anyone who has read Mason & Dixon will never forget this very different fowl!

The vision of international and American colonial history immediately prior to the revolution is fascinating. What else is there to say. Well, I made the decision early on to read the book slowly and this worked well for me. Some sections read more quickly than others and I read this in company with other books. I came to look forward to returning to it and picking up Charles and Jeremiah's journeys to track the Transit of Venus, to perform various surveys, and then for their ultimate task, the line that is still marked and which I recall crossing on a trip several years ago.

This is highly recommended to those who enjoy an epic with a very definite difference!

Michael

Rating: really liked it
Pynchon has been, for me, an acquired taste, but like fine wine, once you acquire it, you wonder how you missed the beauty for so long. Sure, there are still moments (mostly the jokey ones) that I find a bit flat, but here in Mason & Dixon, his first work after a long publishing hiatus, Pynchon is at his best. It's written in a made-up "Olde Style" of writing (it's impossible to do it justice in a review), but it actually works. At least it worked for me. I found the story utterly engrossing and a real intellectual joyride.

Hugh

Rating: really liked it
This is only my second Pynchon novel, after Gravity's Rainbow, and it shares some of the same characteristics, but in some ways is a much more polished work. Once again it is a brillantly erudite mixture of fact and entertaining fantasy, and the story of Mason and Dixon, the two English surveyors who fixed the lines defining Maryland's borders with Delaware and Pennsylvania that still bear their names, is one which is full of fascinating historical details but uncertain enough to offer the license Pynchon needed for his wilder inventions.

The style is interesting - a pastiche of 18th century fiction which is surprisingly easy to read, mostly because the archaisms and occasional neologisms are used sparingly, either to describe technical aspects or for comic effect, and the words which are now spelled differently are familiar enough to follow.

The book is mostly narrated by the facetiously named Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, as a fantastic tale to entertain his young nephews and nieces, in 1786. Pynchon places Cherrycoke in a role similar to that which Boswell performed for Johnson, a neutral but not entirely reliable observer of events he plays little part in.

The story is mostly chronological. The first part Latitudes and Departures, starting in 1761 with the pair's first joint expedition to observe the Transit of Venus. The planned destination Sumatra is abandoned after a sea battle with France, leaving them to conduct their observations from Cape Town, where they first meet the narrator. After this they sail to St Helena, where Mason meets the future Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne and assists him in his observations of lunar distance.

The second part America accounts for more than half of the book, and covers their adventures in America from 1763 to 1768, and the short final part Last Transit summarises what happened after they returned to Britain.

The factual framework tells only a small part of the story, as Pynchon throws in all kinds of ideas and fantasies - peripheral characters include Vaucauson's mechanical duck, a Learned Dog, a golem, an electric eel, a Swedish axeman Stig who relates stories of the Vikings in Vineland and a mysterious Chinese adventurer Zhang, along with alien abductions, a hollow earth and some anachromistic 20th century theories on ley lines, all of which satirise and deliberately question the accuracy of what is normally accepted as the historical record. The prose story is leavened with quotes from a fictional verse epic, Timothy Tox's Pennsylvaniad, and occasional returns to Cherrycoke's family as he tells the tale.

Having said that the book is fairly easy to read, I did find myself looking up quite a lot of words, at least two of which were invented by Pynchon - my partial list included calathumpian, cilia, corf, desuperpollicate, dodman, elutriation, enigmata, fuliginous, levigation, loxodromic, machicolation, mephitic, mucilaginous, nidor, pollication, pygephanous, quaquaversal, quotinoctian, ridotto, stichomythia and stob.

I'll finish with a quote in which the blunt Northern Quaker Dixon describes himself and Mason:
"Thy uncritical Worship of Kings, with my inflexible Hatred of 'em, taken together, we equal one latter-day English Subject.

Infinite Jen

Rating: really liked it
From the vault of James O. Incandenza.

The Fantastical Fractionated by a Freudian Feng Shui: Liaison of Lines. Year of the Character Limit Neural Prosthetic Alert Device. Mixed Martial Arts Eschaton tournament expressing ideological hostilities along lines of rational and romantic interest, taking place in assiduously reconstructed, and still highly flammable, library of Alexandria. w/color commentary from Rev Wicks Cherrycoke (Quantum Superposition of Joe Rogan Deep Within Blackbox Sensory Deprivation Chamber) (Joe Rogan)) and The Human Torch (Johnny Storm (Joe Rogan)); 35mm; running length approximate to the amount of time necessary for a sole victor to emerge; full color w/ visceral olfactory enhancement courtesy of accompanying scratch and sniff anatomical figurine; full sound with live orchestra performing O Fortuna; conducted by Venerabilis Inceptor aka Doctor Invincibilis (Sir William of Ockham). Filmed before a live studio audience consisting of one half loquacious, emotionally incontinent, spoken word poetry addicts and one half, abstraction addled, lugubrious, pure mathematics professors, all armed with climbing pitons, later distributed through samizdat style Zip drives; by former disgruntled employees of the Kellogg’s corporation who were fed up with the myth of breakfast.

*Orchestra commences on signal from gentle bratwurst susurrus*

“O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
ever waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
playing with mental clarity;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.”

Reverend Cherrycoke (Quantum Superposition of Joe Rogan Deep Within Blackbox Sensory Deprivation Chamber) (Joe Rogan)) is wheeled into officiating position by several muscular individuals wearing only executioner hoods and athletic cups (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, Mark William Calaway, Jocko Willink, Gene Lebell (played by David Hasselhoff)). Obsidian sensory deprivation chamber looms. An unsettling obelisk. It’s shadow bifurcating the gladiatorial spectacle.

Pan to melee on library floor. Benjamin Franklin (Stellan John Skarsgård) executes flying arm bar on Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Tim Curry) who is heard above the din to say: “Fye Thee to Timbuktu, Wretched Lech!” Before his arm bends impossibly with a sickening crack. “Break! Break! Break!” Screeching like a grave wight and pantomiming actions with injured arm resembling deboned fish. Nearby, Alexander Pushkin (Hugh Jackman), roars into the fray and discombobulates Walt Whitman (Sean Connery), who he mistook for Karl Marx, (Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) (Body Doubled by Martin Bayfield))), with a vicious running lariat to the back of the neck, sending the man sprawling to the Bibliotheca’s floor like a sack of pubic cement. Sensing his mistake, Pushkin (Jackman) veers into housings of ancient papyrus in bizarre act of contrition.

Revered Cherrycoke (QSJRDWBSDC (JR)): If our ontological commitments are to remain commensurate with the progress of scientific reasoning, we must hereby renounce all boundaries as purely arbitrary fictions! For is it not the case that all matter is a result of fluctuations in fields which permeate space like a cosmic mandolin? And we, condensed forms of vibrational virtuosity, represent fixed oscillations of catgut, seemingly discrete, but actually continuous with the whole of the universe’s beautiful melody? Tis only our amplitudes, and only for a short while at that, which peaks here and now. A stubbornly persistent illusion of solidly, wouldn’t you say Mr. Storm?

The Human Torch (Johnny Storm (Joe Rogan): “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned!” Hahahahahaha!

“Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.”

Wordsworth (Patrick Stewart) and Thomas Jefferson (Mario Lopez) tumble to the ground and engage in a Brazilian Jujitsu chess match, with Wordsworth (Stewart) trying and failing to secure a triangle choke, opting instead for an attempted arm bar. Lopez, with great strength (and arguably an unfair advantage in terms of age and wrestling background) lifts Wordsworth (Stewart) from the floor and slams him violently back down, knocking over a brazier in the process. Hot coals tumbling. Emily Dickson (Maureen Ponderosa (Catherine Reitman)), having been scalded by embers, shouts mysterious invective: “Hooptitously Drangle Me In Crinkly Brundlewurddles!” Losing concentration and receiving a radium enriched spinning back fist from Marie Curie (Ronda Rousey).

Revered Cherrycoke (QSJRDWBSDC (JR)): And so here we are, both discrete and continuous, as we are persuaded most ardently to believe by the mystifying results of the Double Slit Experiments. And yet, do we not consider ourselves a Doric column of stability? Do we not parse our experience as like unto peas and not potatoes of the mashed variety? This systemic error that we commit, a heuristic which delineates the objects of the world with a paucity of percept...

The Human Torch (Johnny Storm (Joe Rogan) using his combustive body to light a duBois starts violent reaction with particulates in the air.

“Fate is against me
in health
and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong,
everyone weep with me!”

This book is Pynchon making sweet love to the primeval wilderness of America afore the people fully discharged their Cartesian climax across the face of her doe-eyed map in a bukkake-balkanization-sesh. ‘Ole Tom is diving deep into primordial waters with his gooch clenched tightly with eukaryotic enthusiasm, while maintaining, along the taint, a stiff prokaryotic posture. Examining the nature of boundaries and their porousness. This is Pynchon doling out such perfect prose that, if you’re one to ensconce your favorite little ditties in neon mnemonics, will have your book resembling the aftermath of a Crayon Krakatoa. How someone can manage to produce a work of such mirth, mayhem, and melancholy without it collapsing like a failed chimera with an orangutan’s face where its pelvic bowl should be, I can’t begin to say. Though my running theory is that it’s a result of monozygotic magic in which, having reabsorbed the spiritual essence of his potential sibling, Tom was able to bedevil Beelzebub with a twofer and thus gain the square of a normal bargain. Pynchon, in addition to bringing the big dick maximalist energy to his work, is also not afraid to do what is unthinkable to many of the cock diesel chordate phylum who relieve themselves by encephalizing a book until the binding girth is sufficient to delimit the realms of Middle Earth - be entertaining - Tom is nuttier than a fucking mud-bug and nary a bit shy about displays of eroticism so egregious that it has left certain Victorian sexualities so seminally scarred that they’ve took to eating cat food, huffing glue, and chugging beer in ritualized quantities in a sad attempt to regain a cerebral chastity long absconded.

If you enjoy gorgeous writing, then this 18th century/idiosyncratic styled work of genius will wallop you with every page, and would be worth the price of admission just for the prose experience alone. But if you also love absurd humor. Amazing characterization. Deep metaphors entwined with dick jokes. And moving experiences which will stay with you long after you’ve lost control of your bladder. Then, in the immortal words of a stranger who once said to me (after seeing me eating a giant chocolate chip cookie) -

“Buddie, get’che a bite ‘o the middle, ‘ats where it’s at.”

Maciek

Rating: really liked it
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were British astronomers and surveyors, most famous for journeying to North America to resolve the boundary dispute between British colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Their work took four years - from 1763 to 1767 - and the result became known as the Mason-Dixon line, which today stands as the cultural boundary between the northern and southern American states. The duo inspired the reclusive Thomas Pynchon to write this novel, which in turn inspired Mark Knopfler to write one of hist best known songs, the beautiful Sailing to Philadelphia.

To summarize this rolllicking and picaresque novel about two surveyors in pre-revolutionary America is a pointless task; unlike the Mason-Dixon line it is occupied with defying boundaries, and exploring contrasts. It is certainly a remarkable book, deserving attention for its prose alone: it is written entirely in a style which borrows works written in the 18th century, and yet remains uniquely its own; strange spelling variants and everpresent capitalization abound in its long and dense sentences, each meliticulously crafted with great attention - enormous effort went into writing this one, and it's difficult to resist mimicking it in personal correspondence. It's really a joy to read on textual level alone - to see the words, the way they're written and the sentences they form, and how the sentences combine to form a narrative.

Although the novel begins with Mason's and Dixon's voyage to the Cape Colony in South Africa, where they observe the transfer of Venus - and in the meantime encounter a talking Norfolk terrier, who calls himself "The Learned English Dog" (and is a character whom I felt was grossly underused) and the Cape family of Vrooms, which seems to be composed entirely of nymphomaniacs - it is not until their arrival in colonial America where the reader is exposed to a galore of, well, everything. The novel itself is like a new and yet unexplored country: untamed and wild with danger, but rich with promise and opportunity. The reader becomes an explorer of this land: he has to create a map of a narrative to serve as a guide through the wilderness of ideas.

Mason & Dixon explores dualism and dualities, and its ideas are like hot and cold currents. Each idea and theme is accompanied with an opposite, and the novel is focused on exploration of boundaries between them: how such boundaries come into being, how they are crossed and how the two different entities mix with one another, and how the boundaries which held them separate eventually disappear - and what is the result of all this. The still present elements of the mystic are contrasted with the age of reason and enlightement; melancholic and meditative Mason is contrasted with jovial and euphoric Dixon, and like Laurel and Hardy or Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa they venture to explore the weird frontier of America, where they meet a selection of historical characters, which at the time were not famous - but in history they will be: Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, who enjoys being accompanied by women of suspicious reputation and entertains his guests with conversation; George Washington of Virginia, who is partial to smoking hemp and munching on cookies baked by his wife, Martha, and enjoys being entertained by Gershom, his wisecracking slave servant; Thomas Jefferson is in the right place to overhear Dixon's toast to the "pursuit of happiness", and ask if he might borrow it.
The colonies are contrasted with a nation at the height of its imperial powers - growing differences in ways of thinking and hostility to the governing power will lead to a war, and eventually gain them independence. Jefferson, Washington and Franklin, among others, will form a nation of their own - one where all men are created equal, and can enjoy life, liberty and pursue their happiness, and view the destiny of their nation to spread these values beyond the thirteen colonies, from coast to coast. These noble ideas are in turn contrasted with reality and the way they're implemented - the effective theft of a continent from its native inhabitans - forced removals, killing and disregard for their life and happiness. How can it be the land of the free where all men are created equal, when its liberty and prosperity will be built with the hands of enslaved people, captured and brought there from another continent? The work of Mason and Dixon - the physical definition of boundaries in America - is at the same time an act of creation and division of the country; as the boundary between the frontier and civilization shrinks, one of the characters remarks that "Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a line". These words prove to be prophetic, as it the Mason-Dixon line will serve as a division between the North and South, and will split the infant nation in two and catapult it into the bloody civil war. The Mason-Dixon line can be seen as the symbolic line that started the uncountable dividing lines which put boundaries across America; the line of income inequality, of racial division and fear - turning the grand Cities into a dangerous frontier populated by various minorities, and forcing white settlers to flee to the safety of the suburbs.

The unsung hero of this tale is the reverend Wicks Cherrycoke (Ha Ha! Get it?), who is the narrator of the novel and tells the story of Mason and Dixon to his family in Philadelphia, in 1786 - 21 years after they finished their line. The narration, too, is dualistic - the narrated events take place before the American Revolution, and there is an enormous sense of it brewing - but are narrated from a perspective of ten years after the event. The book both anticipates the Revolution - and contemplates upon it.
Cherrycoke is a clergyman of questionable theology and a shameless moocher, sponging off his relatives who agreed to let him stay with them as long as he keeps their children entertained - if he won't perform then out with him to the streets ruled by harsh Philadelphia winter! Reverend Cherrycoke tells his tales to the twins, Pitt and Pliny - as it could not be agreed which one was born first, so each got a choice to be called "Elder" or "Younger" - who have heard him spin yarns about the faraway Indies and the faraway land of Hottentots, and request a tale about America. Cherrycoke claims to have met Mason and Dixon and accompanied them on a number of occasions, and tells the twins their story - which he liberally spices up with a heavy dose of invention, often describing events he couldn't have seen and people he has never met. Since his staying in the warm Philadelphia home depends completely on satisfaction of his listeners, Cherrycoke often changes his story according to their demands; jumping from one character to the other, using more action and fantastical elements to satisfy the boys - including a nod to the Canadian poet James McIntyre and a dramatization of his Ode on the Mammoth Cheese, stories of an amorous mechanical duck (which was based on a real invention - Jacques de Vaucanson's
The enormous lenght and many, many tangents of Mason and Dixon might discourage many readers, it remains highly readable and will benefit from revisiting. Although the honor of being Thomas Pynchon's best book is commonly bestowed upon Gravity's Rainbow, I would argue that Mason & Dixon is an equal, if not better, candidate for the title. It's an ambitious epic which is a show of satire and farce and mixes the fantastic with the historic to great results, filled with countless puns and jokes, with characters randombly breaking into bawdy songs. With all that, it is also a work of melancholy: ruminations on the lost influence of mysticism and religion - and imagination as well. The loss of the final frontier and man's conquer of the beauty of wilderness and is subsequent replacement with contemporary civilization - endless streams of condos, parking lots and shopping malls. In a country found on unity and cooperation, Red and Blue powers take sway over land and people, each trying to grasp more than the other.
But all this is seems like just a background to a simple story: one of two unlikely friends going on an adventure. The growing warmth between Mason and Dixon and the bond they form is presented with genuine affection and they become real, and so do their hopes, feelings and dreams, provoking genuine emotions. The final chapters, where we see them for one last time in their old age, are particularly touching.

I don't think that any review could do this novel true justice: there are simply too many ideas, themes, gags and jokes that academic essays could be written on it - and were. As for me, I can only give 5 stars for the novel and 5 stars for the novelist who had the balls to write it, first thinking of it in 1975 and finally publishing it in 1997, when he turned 60. Approach without fear: there is much to be found and savored here, and time spent on reading it is definitely time not lost.

Stian

Rating: really liked it
First read 15. May - 1. June, 2014.
Reread from 1. July - 14. July, 2018.

This time around the silly puns and references, like Bill Clinton's non-inhaling and whatnot, though funny, took the back-seat to the delightful atmosphere and remarkable writing. This book is a rollicking, fun, and just absolutely refreshingly charming novel. Nevermind all the fun and hilarious puns and situations and ridiculous and fantastical things that occur, not to mention all the historical characters that (obviously and necessarily) appear in historically distorted ways, all of which are hilarious and great and wonderful,-- here, Pynchon evokes smells and images and feelings of coffee, tea, stuffed and smoke-filled pubs and bars filled with various and diverse characters and charlatans and sailors and humans and talking dogs and werewolves and humans-turned-into-aggressive-beavers, winter- and Christmastime, spices and herbs, summer and discovery (reminding one of Ishmael's quote: "As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts")--; the atmosphere of dreary journeys across both the seas and of various landscapes followed by the magical moments of arrival and reprieval before further hardships, described in the greatest prose I have come across as only Pynchon can write,-- a glorious novel about friendship and memory and love and life,-- where the essential undertone appears to be, don’t take any of this seriously because none of us gets out of it alive.
This enchanting novel is the first one that pops into my head when people ask me, “what’s the best book you have ever read?”

------------------------------------------------
Original review from 2014 below:

I am Jeremiah Dixon
I am a Geordie boy
A glass of wine with you, sir
And the ladies I'll enjoy
All Durham and Northumberland
Is measured up by my own hand
It was my fate from birth
To make my mark upon the earth.

He calls me Charlie Mason
A stargazer am I
It seems that I was born to chart the evening sky
They'd cut me out for baking bread
But I had other dreams instead
This baker's boy from the west country
Would join the Royal Society.

I was listening to one of my favourite albums of all time ( Sailing To Philadelphia ) when I got the idea that maybe I should read some more Pynchon. I read Inherent Vice some time ago and found it to be pretty fun. Having recently bought most of his books, I was wondering which one to read next. I wanted to (and still will) wait with Gravity's Rainbow, but the rest of his works were all interesting. Just as I was about to pick out Vineland, I hear the beautiful guitar picking of an F# chord from Mark Knopfler, an Aadd9 (or something like that) and then some sort of E-chord... and then the singing begins -- which is quoted at the top here. And that was that: Mason & Dixon it is!

(After having read about 200 pages, I came across an interview with Knopfler where he talked about this album, and it turns out the song is in fact inspired by the book. For some reason this made me terribly happy...)

The book itself is a tough nut to crack. It's written in the style of the time it's set it: 1761-1786. We follow the melancholic Mason and the life-loving Dixon as they meet up in Portsmouth, journey to see the transit of Venus, and then eventually go to America to draw their line. The book is chock-full of references and allusions -- there is even a reference to Bill Clinton's pot-smoking (but of course not inhaling!), a possible reference to Flowers for Algernon, and a cool little reference (I think) to Ray Charles's song What'd I say. Of course tons more.

It's also filled with odd and often hilarious occurrences. They meet up and smoke marijuana with George Washington; they meet a skirt-chasing Benjamin Franklin; and they meet a talking dog called the Learned English Dog. And then there is some talk of gigantic vegetables and possible giants...? I think. I'm not sure. Oh, and did I mention the mechanical duck that suddenly springs to life and apparently gets supernatural powers and then occasionally terrorises our two heroes?

The book is described on the cover as a "rollicking picaresque tale... playful, erudite and funny." I think that's a pretty succinct way to describe it. It's fun to read, albeit challenging and awfully dense at times.

I also came across this on wikipedia, and thought I could add it to my review:

"John Krewson, writing for The Onion's A. V. Club observed, "Whatever meanings and complex messages may lie hidden in Pynchon's text can, for now, be left to develop subconsciously as the reader enjoys the more immediate rewards of the work of a consummate storyteller. Pynchon is one, and he never quite lets you forget that while this might be an epic story, it's an epic story told to wide-eyed children who are up past their bedtime."

PS: You can hear the song I referred to in the beginning here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrLdK...

PPS, 03.07.2015:

It's been over a year since I read this, and I don't think there are any other books out there that I think of with such fond memories as I do of this one. Retrospectively, I'm tempted to say that this is my all-time favourite book -- trumping even The Brothers Karamazov. The more I think about this book, the more I love it. It helps, of course, that I still love the Knopfler song, and listen to it several times a week. At every listen, it evokes the same feelings as the book did. It's amazing when works of art go hand in hand like that.

Detail

Mason & Dixon

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