A wildly different historical novel, and can see why it's not the easiest of reads, its to be read slow and savored. Filled with wild travels, local foods and drinking establishments, mythology , Jesuits, ducks, and lots of surveying.

A through-the-roof masterpiece.

A fantastic book, and an epic story about storytelling. I'm still vibrating from the last chapter; probably the most intimate and beautiful prose Pynchon has written. TP loves contrasts: Mason & Dixon; Jesuit & Quaker; Earth & Stars; North & South; America & England; Slave & Master. Pynchon is never better than those periods and chapters where he is riffing about the recesses of the unspoken, the paths untaken, the caves unexplored. He is able to map the Cartesian coordinate of science and mythology with a language that folds the map, bringing the two opposite edges together in a kiss that explodes like a lightening strike.

Allora nemiche e nemici dello spoiler vi è andata male a sto giro perché è madame Storia che vi fornisce lo spoiler... Riusciranno i nostri eroi a tracciare la linea di confine, che tutt'oggi porta il loro nome, tra la colonia del Maryland e quella della Pennsylvania? La risposta è sì... Quindi puppatemelo... Quello che invece non potete sapere sono le avventure che hanno trascorso i 2 astronomi, in missione per conto del Re, per portare a compimento il compito (gioco di parole)... Faranno la loro comparsa George Washington Benjamin Franklin e gli indiani d'America... Quello è il tempo degli Stati Uniti d'America in cui ancora non esistevano quando ancora erano le 13 colonie sotto il controllo della Corona Inglese... correvano gli anni 1763 -1767

l'immagine in copertina sono gli USA, per vederli il libro va girato in senso antiorario

Había leído un par de cosas de Pynchon, pero nada de esta magnitud, nada que me conmoviera tanto. The Crying of Lot 49 me confundió y me impresionó. Inherent Vice me hizo reír y me entretuvo. Pero este libro tocó mi alma. Desde Don Quijote y Sancho que una pareja de personajes no me parecen tan entrañables, tan vivos.

Este libro tiene de todo: desde discusiones sobre astrología y el cambio de calendario, pasando por la naturaleza del tiempo mismo, de la muerte, hombres-castor y leñadores estrafalarios, aventuras a caballo con un maestro de Feng Shui y el fantasma de una esposa que se niega a dejar de amar, un pato mecánico y su idilio con un cocinero francés, sabios indios americanos y hasta un entrañable perro parlante. Charles Mason y Jeremiah Dixon se embarcan en el trazo de una línea recta casi imposible, que partirá en dos lo que después sería uno de los imperios más poderosos de la tierra.

Cuando cerré el libro, me costó creer que esta enorme y bella aventura se había terminado. Adiós, amigos. Intentaré quedarme donde ustedes están. Las estrellas estarán tan cerca que ni siquiera habrá telescopios. Los peces te saltan a los brazos. Los indios saben magia. Pescaremos juntos. Y tú también.

One of the most common and annoying misconceptions about experimental art is that its creators - which very definitely include Pynchon - only make it because they aren't good enough to make normal art. And while Pynchon thoroughly broke that rule with the heavily experimental opus Gravity's Rainbow, it's here that he disproves it in a way I think would be more readily evident to people who weren't that big into postmodernism.

After all, this is probably the most mature novel Pynchon ever wrote. It's not quite my favorite - I still prefer Gravity's Rainbow on account of being a bizarre, gut-busting opus that basically broke every rule that an author can reasonably break and still come out with a novel - but it has the most complete characters I've read in a Pynchon novel so far. The haunted, melancholy, timid Mason and the passionate, relentlessly cheerful, courageous Dixon really jump right off of the page and come to life, behaving as real people, and pretty cool people at that. Not only, but they share a charming and moving friendship that forms the core of this novel, every bit as much as the conspiracies and off-the-wall humor.

Because, Pynchon being Pynchon, there are conspiracies and off-the-wall humor here. Nothing as ridiculous as the central Lot 49/Gravity's Rainbow conspiracies, but still a nice combination of over-the-top and bone-chilling. To keep things from getting too heavy, there's also a talking dog, a vengeful robot duck capable of turning invisible, all matters of goofy songs, a grotesquely hilarious episode with an ear, scenes of our heroes smoking weed with George Washington, and a brief episode with Dixon mentioning the "pursuit of happiness" and a red-haired Philadelphian named Tom asking if he can use that phrase sometime in the future. With the possible exception of Vonnegut, Pynchon's sense of humor lines up with mine better than any other author I've read.

The last aspect of M&D I want to talk about, besides warning the prospective reader that the 18th century English can take some getting used to (although it was, ultimately, a brilliant decision) is the novel's two settings. Pynchon has this remarkable ability to bring a scene to life, which in my opinion just plain hasn't been discussed enough. And the mix of exoticism, hedonism, and kitsch that characterizes Cape Town makes it another one of Pynchon's great settings (see also: V's New York, the Crying of Lot 49's Southern California, [book Gravity's Rainbow]'s Zone), and the sense of excitement, mystery, outright strangeness, and borderline supernatural goings-on that characterize Pynchon's America is probably his #1, at least from what I've read so far. The confident, revolutionary buzz of the town combined with the bizarre, untamed, often inexplicable events that happen as soon as they step outside of them is fascinating.

So while it's not quite as good as Gravity's Rainbow, it's only trailing the slightest bit behind, and in some aspects is probably better. Out of every novel I read that was released in the '90s, the only one that I can reasonably say I liked more is good old Infinite Jest. And if that's not endorsement enough for you, I don't know what is.

Pinčonove romane zamišljam kao kofere koji pucaju koliko su prepuni stvari. Na carini mu kažu da ih otvore, pošto nešto sija na skeneru, i onda posle ne može da ih zatvori. Sve ono unutra izleti u svet.

Tako ovde postoje automaton patke sa fetišima, vanzemaljci, džinovska svesna uva, duhovi, kolonizatori napuštenih jedanaest dana, crni pakleni psi, golemi, feng šui džedaji, i mnogo drugog, sa sve Bendžaminom Frenklinom koga je struja udarila jedan put previše i Džordžom Vašingtonom kao trajno napušenim svodnikom. Plus divan rečnik i smisao za humor. Pinčon, ukratko.

Medjutim, ono što po mom mišljenju stavlja Mejsona i Diksona i iznad Duge Gravitacije (sl. prevod), jesu naracija i emocija.

Narativno, priču priča pinčonovski nazvan sveštenik Wicks Cherrycoke, kao jednu analogiju arapskoj Hiljadu i jednoj noći. On priča priču kako ga porodica ne bi izbacila napolje, na zimu; porodica podjednako životna kao i on sam, ali ne toliko mudra – jer samo kod Pinčona lik sa takvim imenom može da bude jedan od mudraca.
Viks je lično poznavao ubedljivo i toplo karakterisan naslovni dvojac – iako je to bilo na circa 5% njihovog ukupnog putovanja. Ali on ipak može da priča o svemu, jer, kako kaže: n  „Rather, part of the common Duty of Remembering, - surely our Sentiments,- how we dream’d of, and were mistaken in, each other,- count for at least as much as our poor cold Chronologies.“n

Emotivno, dosta je reći Mejson i Dikson.

I to je sve.

5+

Essential.

The past is a different country, but in Pynchon’s work it might as well be a different planet-- or at least a different reality. It is without a doubt someplace foreign, somewhere on the boundary of narrative and myth. Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon is, superficially, a historical fiction recounting the work of the British astronomers Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779), who observed the 1761 transit of Venus across the Sun from the Cape of Good Hope but are better known today for measuring the colonial boundary known today as the Mason-Dixon line.

Mason & Dixon had been recommended to me because of its treatment of the history of astronomy. And there is indeed some great historical astronomy in here. I tagged a passage for my introductory astronomy class to read to illustrate that much of what we know as astronomy in the eighteenth century had nothing to do with probing the nature of celestial objects but was instead a means of measuring position and distances on the Earth’s surface. The primary characters are historical personages, and the narration frequently alludes to Mason’s journals. I wish, however, Pynchon would have explained in either a prefix or an afterward exactly what his sources were that formed the kernel of truth behind what was in many respects a shifting landscape of surreality.

On the skeleton of a historical framework, Pynchon rears a sprawling, phantasmagoric edifice that belies any sort of easy classification. Early on in the narrative the main characters meet a talking dog. Things get stranger from there, and their travels include encounters with a sentient, robotic duck, erotic Jesuit assassins, a Jewish Golem as large as a mountain, ghosts, giant vegetables, and signs of a pre-historic advanced civilization among ancient burial mounds. Most of the action takes place in the wilds of colonial America, where Pynchon uses his stream-of-consciousness approach to paint a wilderness of our own national legends and myths. It is a realm where what we think of as “real” history blends with history-that-could-have-been, or should have been, or was once imagined.

Pynchon’s writing style doesn’t make it any easier for the casual reader. The first thing to master is the eighteenth-century spellings and capitalizations, carried throughout the work. To be fair, once you’ve gotten used to this, it is no longer quite so noticeable and indeed deepens the feeling that you’re actually experiencing life as it was lived and thought over two hundred years ago. The following passage gives a good feeling for Pynchon's stylistic approach. All of the ellipses are true to the text:

"What Machine is it," young Cherrycoke later bade himself goodnight, "that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling thro' another Day,-- another Year,-- as thro' an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight . . . we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Days, the Maidens, the Cards, the Claret,-- we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach,and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination, moreover, shall this Machine come abruptly to a Stop . . . gather'd dense with Fear, shall we open the Door to confer with the Driver,. . . no Horses, . . . only the Machine, fading as we stand, and a Prairie of desperate Immensity. . . ."

What is harder to come to grips with is Pynchon’s casual treatment of chronology. Dialogue between characters describing a past event will move without warning into a firsthand narrative of said event with no transition. Pynchon’s approach of presenting the entire narrative as a story being told as a recollection by one of Mason and Dixon’s traveling companions in post-independence Philadelphia and switching back and forth between the narrative and description of what’s happening in this Philadelphia drawing room-- frequent at first but falling away by the novel’s end-- is also disconcerting. All of these scene and temporal shifts come on top of the reality-surreality disjunction that runs through the entire work, contributing to a sense vertigo that makes the whole thing-- the primary extent of which chronicles the wanderings of the surveyors in America-- feel like an extended fever dream.

It was beautiful in many places, and the weirdness and wonder of the story itself hung nicely with the practice of astronomy during this period, often portrayed in other sources as dull and unromantic. Pynchon plays with connections between carving lines of latitude across a wilderness and early modern (and lingering) beliefs in lines of energy and occult forces across landscapes. (Dixon, we learn, spent his student years not only learning how to mark surveying lines but also using them to fly across the English countryside on a broomstick by night.) But the sheer volume of the tale and its dizzying arabesques of flashback and fantasy and story within story grew (for me) wearing. Maybe Pynchon was making us feel the grind of Mason and Dixon across the unexplored countryside, driving a carefully calibrated visto across America’s “dreamtime,” but all of their eastward and westward peregrinations started to blend together in my own mind. What was I supposed to find in Mason’s melancholy and Dixon’s tales under those strange stars?

The strongest aspect of the story was the relationship between the two astronomer-surveyors, which is played to an excellent effect in the novel’s beginning, during their time at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, loses momentum in the bulk of the novel, and only reappears after they have returned to England at the novel’s conclusion. In between, for much of the work, I was as lost as Pynchon makes it feel Mason and Dixon were themselves, with only their lenses and latitudes to guide them. It’s a journey with no real destination-- into the wilderness and back, and Pynchon shows you that not even the astronomers themselves were satisfied with it, leaving the reader with ghosts and narrative echoes: an imagined image of them continuing westward and Mason at long last returning (maybe?) from England to America to die.
 
"Meanwhile, there all of you are, accosting Strangers in Taverns, spilling forth your Sorrows, Gratis. One day, if it be his Will, God will seize and shake you like wayward daughters, and you will thenceforward give nothing away for free."

This typically stupendous, garrulous, and stylistically suave novel also contains sincere soul, typically in matters of love and death.
Its structure -- that often being one of the richest features of Thomas Pynchon's books -- appears geometrically planned. Gravity's Rainbow's narrative is famously shaped like a parabola, with a perplexing launch, busy middle, and chaotic descent. Mason & Dixon's's story is a ray: it begins with innocent planning and tinkering, picks up steam, and then extends to infinity, breaking a few frames along the way.
Unfortunately, that means nothing of much import is written for about 450 pages. I also can't help feeling that Pynchon fumbles some of the bigger ideas and reduces them to hokey curiosities or glib stances. Oh what I'd give these days for a Pynchon novel without the Pynchon: not just the ditties and whimsy and randy slapstick, but the narrow sensibility.
Nevertheless, this is one of his very best books.

The best praise I can give this book, really, is that I can’t let go of it. Here we have this 700-page postmodern doorstopper, written in a way that would make even English lit students tear their hair out, full of obscure references and linguistic mindfuckery that not even the Pynchon wiki can fully elucidate… and after three months of intense reading, intense commenting, intense brain-wracking, I still find myself coming back to reread parts of it.

A few caveats to explain where my fondness comes from:

I am a fantasy lover and an animal lover. Mason & Dixon might be historical fiction, based on the lives of the British astronomers who drew the Mason-Dixon line, but one thing is certain: Pynchon was never going for realism here. Between the Learnèd English Dog (who speaks), the giant Golem, the werewolf, the beaverman, the mythical carp (“Carpe Carpum”, folks! seize the carp, not the day!) and the infatuated Duck (my absolute favorite), Pynchon always managed to catch me off guard, and I have been repeatedly begging him (telepathically) to write a full-blown fantasy novel, preferably steampunk. Also, I love the weird, the esoteric, the mystical, and Pynchon provides plenty of that too. He basically made it his mission to sweep aside all this cartesian Enlightenment business, preferring to show the esoteric undertones of the 18th century. Jesuit conspiracies, Feng Shui, Christian cults, Native American shamanism, astrology, mysticism, no corner of the world was left untouched.

I also love science fiction. Does this book classify as science fiction? Honestly, it’s a big stretch. However, there is one technological wonder that absolutely stole the show – the Duck. Imagine a mechanickal Duck that shits (inspired by Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck, from which the saying “if it looks like a Duck…” comes from), but also talks, longs for a Duck partner (cue elaborate schemes for a date at the opera), and flies over the goddamn Atlantic to follow her beloved French cook to America (they have an enemies-to-unrequited-lovers story arc, it’s complicated). The Duck soon flies to other celestial realms. She may or may not have transcended time. It’s fine. But, before I got sidetracked by my favorite Duck, the reason I made this comparison to science fiction is the emphasis on science: the historically accurate interest in electricity, magnetism, gravity, and of course astronomy, but also Pynchon’s own wild theories about gravity, the nature of space and time, and some alternate universes in the storyline. I’m just saying, once Pynchon is done writing that fantasy novel I asked for earlier, I’ll request a science fiction trilogy, preferably with telepathic aliens and more of the same wacky physics theories.

I also love deep bonds in fiction, and Mason & Dixon’s friendship was the gift that kept on giving. Mason, the astronomer, is the “melancholick” one who routinely talks with the ghost of his late wife and hovers over the edge of madness. Dixon, the surveyor who hates open spaces (!), is more of a jovial and grounded kind of guy, though “grounded” might be the wrong word for someone who was taught surveying by flying – flying like a bird, that is, and I deeply regret that these flying lessons were not shown on page. Mason & Dixon had the most hairbrained adventures together, some of which were historically correct since Pynchon pored over their journals and the official records. And through all this: lots of banter, an unforgettable wider cast with improbable backstories, etc.

And speaking of friendships and camaraderie, I have to say that the buddyreading experience closely mirrored our heroes’ adventures. Sure, we did not have to fight the French at sea, nor did we hike our way through the American wilderness. But we did go through 78 chapters of some of the most challenging prose (Joyce excepted…), and I think that was only possible because we were all in this together. So, for this wonderful foray into the new, wild country of Pynchon’s writing, my deepest thanks to the unsurpassable coadjutors Athanasia and CM, without whom none of this would have been possible, or even 10% as enjoyable

Video review: https://youtu.be/DhZoK32YNRs.