We start aboard the good (sky)ship Inconvenience, heading for Chicago to take in the World’s Columbian Exposition. Ah happy days before the Bears or Cubs… 1893? Well, they wouldn’t have been called the Cubs anyway, they were probably the Gravy Boats or some damn thing. BID (But I digress. I have a feeling it’s going to happen a lot. Caveat lector.)
The first thing that strikes me is the narrative voice. It is not, I think, like the voice of any other Pynchon novel. It seems to be period—it’s not quite like Dickens, and not (though I’m shakier here) like the English picaresques (Smollet, Defoe, Sterne), who always come to mind with TP.
BTW, here’s a great web site on Tristram Shandy.
There is a finicky delicacy to the voice that makes me think of Austen, but that’s not quite right either…
Oh, there’s a dog on p.5 reading “Mr. Henry James”. Of course there is. Mystery solved, more to come.
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I was thinking of Victorian-era gay-90s sci-fi, Jules Verne, maybe?
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