The sentences are structured in an uncommon way. They make sense, but they aren't the common, simple way you or I would write them and are used to reading. So your brain has to work harder to make sense of them. Think of it like how you can kind of turn your brain off while driving a route you've driven regularly but you need to pay attention to a new route. There's also not a lot of transitional or explanatory text, e.g. "Slothrop put down the paper hat his was folding and walked to the window." Instead, it's like, "Newsprint words layer on themselves forming cyrillic patterns that translate to nothing but soon headwear, maybe some sunshade for his poor eyes, Front Moves Again headlined at his eyebrows, his face no story at all but a translucent ghost of itself in the glass, looking out over the streets of London." Also, Pynchon is just straight up taking wild ass liberties with narrative and pov and time everything else and all that can be a little avant garde and difficult to parse sometimes.

It's not really hard — as you say, it just requires focus.

brandon

2 months ago

That itself, can be hard. So thats a point.

0Reply

For me it was the relentless nature of just about everything in the book. It is always on at a 10: sexually, sarcastically, encyclopedically, sometimes philosophically. It never really slows down. You have to keep pace with the conspiracy and paranoia of the book while sometimes needing to slow down and appreciate the little gems (ex. the government papers covering some character's desk described as "bureaucratic smega") scattered throughout his prose. I think there are some brilliant conceptual aspects of the book, but some do feel like they could just be a middle finger to the literary establishment and it isn't always clear which is which.

With GR there is some uniqueness in the way he lays out the prose so that passages blend into each other and that can be harder to keep track of. The level of technical detail in some of the asides probably turns some readers away, even though the verisimilitude is part of Pynchon's main appeal. Infinite Jest is actually way easier to read than GR because the subject matter is presented in a straightforward way, as accented exposition; whereas GR gets pretty metaphysical and it's not always clear what the thrust is.

One thought is the plot phases into something completely different without warning and a lack of reference on the timeline of events. You'll be following a mom and her child, then suddenly go deep into an unrelated topic without going back to the mom and her child until you forget what was happening with her.