I read it and liked it - in two weeks, which was about 100 pages a day. I read widely and kept seeing W&P cited as the greatest piece of literature ever. Youth and timing! I dropped out of college after my 3rd semester. It’s writing you definitely have to read at your own pace. I can definitely see why it wouldn’t work as an audiobook however. I also really enjoy the rhythm of Pynchon sentences. On the one hand, it’s a fairly serious book about the end of the counterculture and what the election of Nixon meant for the American dream but on the other hand it’s also a book in which a community of living-dead has its own radio station, one hundred pages in the middle of it concerns a woman training to be a lethal ninja and perfecting a delayed assassination technique and Godzilla makes a cameo and despite all of that the whole things feel coherent and properly jointed. I think he perfectly nails the mix of serious and zany. I have only read short stories by Foster Wallace, didn’t really like his style and had no interest in the themes explored in Infinite Jest so I am probably never going to try reading it. I can’t help you with the Infinite Jest comparaison. (Again, IDK what actually happens in the scene.) In ‘Chernobyl’, one such moment is when a woman goes against a committee of bureaucrats and tells them how wrong they are. I'm gonna bet, though, that execs in ‘Chernobyl’ are close-ish to Krymov of ‘Assa’, at least as I will see them.īy the way, funny thing: in a podcast by Russian cinema critics on Western films about Russia, someone remarked that no matter how much effort the crew puts into researching details, something always gives away the fictional and foreign nature of the work. USSR functionaries weren't forgotten of course, but their portrayals flipped upside down-there isn't a single point of view on the Soviet time, and ‘Chernobyl’ likely just has a different perspective. ‘Assa’ is essentially a fantasy about the zeitgeist. ![]() ![]() There were a lot of movies in the late 80s and the early-mid 90s about the life of lower-class people in the crumbling USSR/Russia of that time: from simple depressing realistic depictions to surrealistic transgressions, simply because all these kinds of expression became permissible. I haven't seen ‘Chernobyl’ yet, but I doubt I'm gonna see many Perestroika youth among the people at the plant. ‘Assa’ is about the end of the Soviet era and the coming of Perestroika youth.
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