I think the stories are better then the intro, that's just me

Як і передмови, післямови, ці кілька оповідань - як вигуки в автобусі на ямах, коли заплутується язик, боляче закусується зубами - а в голові рояться думки. Так хочеться висловитись у цей несприятливий час - нетямущий учень! Приїхали!

So as not to reiterate what many reviewers said already, I will just give some very brief notes on Slow Learner.

Most critical is that one read the introduction after (it should absolutely be an afterword). Beyond that, most of the stories feel like test runs with ideas and genres and characters that Pynchon later brought to captivating life later in his career. My favorite, by a long shot, has to be "The Secret Integration," in which we discover that Thomas Pynchon has feelings.

Other fun facts: he hates hegemony, racism, and hypocrites. He loves jazz, math, and all-purpose silliness. He also loves to do his homework. If you're not ready for some serious in-depth education about almost any topic (the Tarot, sea shanties, and European politics come to mind as good examples), then maybe Pynchon is not the guy for you.

This shouldn't be your introduction to Pynchon. I'd recommend Against the Day for the more patient reader or The Crying of Lot 49 for a quicker reading experience. Slow Learner is best read after having read and enjoyed most of his other work.

Diese Kurzgeschichtensammlung von Thomas Pynchon ist vielleicht nicht unbedingt essentiell für den Pynchon-Profi - mir hat sie sehr gut gefallen. Sehr interessant ist die vom Autor selbst verfasste Einführung, in der er Gedanken über sein Frühwerk äußert, die einen Einblick in den Schreibprozess am Anfang seiner Karriere geben. Pynchon lässt kaum ein gutes Haar an seinen frühen Schreibversuchen, dies aber auf sehr ironische und unterhaltsame Weise.

Auch wenn sie in den Augen des Autors nicht ganz so gut wegkommen, ich habe die Geschichten gerne gelesen. Besonders gefallen haben mir die 3 letzten Geschichten - "Entropie", "unter den Siegeln" & "die heimliche Integration". Ersteres, weil mir der Begriff der Entropie aus dem Studium (wohl?)bekannt ist, oder besser - sein sollte ;) Die zweite Geschichte nimmt einige Begebenheiten seines darauf folgenden Romans "V" vorweg, "die heimliche Integration" ist eine Reflexion über die in den 50er und 60er Jahren (und immer noch) allgegenwärtige "Rassen"frage in den USA.

Demnächst werde ich mir "V" vornehmen, was schon geraume Zeit in meinem Regal darauf wartet, gelesen zu werden

These stories are proof that Thomas Pynchon was once not the behemoth of a writer he is now. Even though, 'The Secret Integration' was oddly sweet which is a story about a few little kids in post-segregationist America. Also, the introduction was very funny. I didn't care so much for the other stories. They were still very Pynchonesque except not fully developed. After these, Pynchon went on to write 'V.'. Wow!

I read Pynchon's intro weeks ago on a sample. That's pretty much the best thing in this book; still it's interesting to watch development in style and motifs through these stories, which were first published 1960-1964.

The Small Rain A lot of this is a pretty conventional short story, not a bad one though, about an army battalion sent to clear up after a natural disaster. Presumably a semi-autobiographical element: some of the main characters are rank & file soldiers their comrades think are more than smart enough for other work. An amazing few sentences almost summarise why I like Pynchon, as well as being an idea close to my own heart.
What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real. While outside, all up and down the land, there are these wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on.
Most books feel to me like they're stuck in that one place. Reading Pynchon is being on the road and seeing all the other spectacular stuff, - though with someone who seems to share some of the same opinions and neuroses, and apparently contains much of one's own general knowledge plus that of a few friends with different specialties.

Low-lands Another fairly conventional story, about an ex-Navy guy and his drinking partners (one with the fabulous name Rocco Squamuglia, Squamuglia later making an appearance in Lot 49 as a fictional Italian city-state) – though it's more anarchic than 'The Small Rain' and in the last few pages spills into a fantasy section reminiscent of a children's book. One of the things I've really enjoyed about Pynchon so far is that his writing actually distracts me from a lot of the stuff other books make me dwell on, and so it is much more fun. 'Low-lands' was an exception as I found myself yet again tiresomely mulling over old relationships.
(I thought Cindy was pretty intolerant; the relationship I had which worked best for the longest time was with someone who sometimes disappeared on multi-day drinking binges and might turn up a couple of hundred miles away. Other people would have soon thought about each of us “I've had enough of this shit” but we rarely thought of it as shit and accepted stuff, just as we each tended to accept other people who were quite weird. However, rather like Miriam in what seems like a satirical scene in the next story 'Entropy' – albeit without breaking windows - I was upset by the same ex's views on philosophy of science. Though we still remain friends fourteen years after first meeting.)

Entropy The whole thing must be intended to represent entropy; it meanders and moves in a way that would be easier to draw as a shape or a graph than to summarise with words. Partly an account of an anarchic lads' house party from the Beat era when jazz was the coolest thing. In other scenes a couple named Aubade and Callisto, apparently living in a greenhouse in the garden, ponder various cultural and scientific phenomena. It's very rare I even consider applying the word pretentious – to those scenes I did. Though A&C are still rather sweet.
A development of immersive digression, fantasy blurring with reality and, well, entropy from the previous piece. There are a couple of paragraphs here better appreciated by someone with a thorough knowledge of physics. As it was, I wasn't sure whether a character's idea followed, or if it was a mystical/pseudo tangent from the science. Like quantum mysticism only with thermodynamics.

Under the Rose Late Victorian British Empire spy spoof with a minor robot presence – another part of the case for “Pynchon invented steampunk”. Most of it was somehow uninvolving and a chore, and I kept wishing I was reading more John Le Carre instead – even though the idea of this story sounds great and there are some marvellous character names, including Hugh Bongo-Shaftsbury.

The Secret Integration Pynchon writes Peanuts. This story, three years and the other side of V from its predecessor, is so much better. Also it's longer which gives the author more space to freewheel. There isn't exactly a beginning, a middle and an end. A bunch of nice and well-meaning pre-teen mostly boys of varying degrees of eccentricity (including reluctant child genius Grover as the brains of the operation) – not to mention their dog - get up to various escapades in a middle American town including home made explosives, pranks with water balloons, being an Alcoholics Anonymous buddy to an old jazz musician, and trying to thwart local racists including their parents. Really really charming.

These stories aren't amazing, a bit of a fans-only thing. Saw one post mentioning they'd been a set text on the reviewer's course – I'm not sure why a tutor would set an author's poorest work. But they were good enough that I enjoyed them as a break from the duller parts of the contemporary novel I was also reading, The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner.

La introducción es sencillamente genial. El propio Pynchon, va desmenuzando, cuento por cuento, con veinte años de distancia, todos sus aciertos y errores, anécdotas de sus procesos de escritura, obteniendo unos inmejorables nostálgicos consejos de escritura. Demostrando que siempre es mejor intentar y fallar que rendirse. Pero él de fallar, ni de cerca con estos cuentos (salvo quizás los dos primeros) bueno... en el primero sí creo que falla.
Eso sí, contradictoriamente, pienso que es mejor leer la introducción después de los cuentos. Quizás sea por mala costumbre mía, pero no me gusta enterarme mucho de qué va la historia de un libro, más bien me gusta sorprenderme, para bien o para mal (sorprenderse siempre es para mejor); prefiero no entender nada al principio y armarme una idea por allí, a medio camino. Detesto las sinopsis y los textos en la contraportada o cosas así. Y en ese sentido creo que es un error partir por la introducción (aunque suene ilógico) porque limita la capacidad de asombro. Aunque se entiende que puso el texto al principio como unas disculpas anticipadas, un parche antes de la herida.

Dudo poder decir algo más interesante de lo escrito por Pynchon en su prologo. Y, contradiciéndome con lo dicho hace poco, ni lo intentare. Solo diré lo evidente:
Son cinco cuentos escritos en un periodo de seis años por un veinteañero Pynchon. Y al estar ordenador de forma cronológica se aprecia con claridad el aprendizaje del autor. Es indudable que cada cuento supera al anterior. También se percibe como el surrealismo comienza a incorporarse en la narración del autor, al principio de forma irregular, pero integrándose de forma orgánica a la prosa de Pynchon hasta convertirse en parte inherente de su estilo.

Agradecido, señor Pynchon.

5 stories ranging between 3 and 5 so 4 is the score --- ...struggle down the long, inexhaustible network of some arithmetic problem where each step led to a dozen new ones. Nothing ever seemed to change; no "objectives" were taken that didn't create a need to start thinking about new ones, so that soon the old ones were forgotten and let slip by default back into the hands of grownups or into a public no-man's land again, and you would be back where you'd started.

I had already read the secret integration beforehand which was amazing however as Pynchon states himself in the introduction these are simply mediocre. Interesting but don’t have the same spark as his other works

Indeed, a 'slow learner'. The stories get better as one goes along. The earliest ones read more like juvenalia (most were published while he was at Cornell), instead of work that you'd want the general public to read.

However, the introduction Pynchon writes is demure, not quite self-hating but certainly self-questioning the younger version of himself. The intro gives you a bit of insight into mistakes, mishandlings, etc of subject matter, characterization, accent, detail, and even writing theory. For that and the showcase of 'examples' of these mistakes, like a book of case studies, Slow Learner is a curious book. Which is unsurprising from this author.

Also, this book might be proof that Pynchon has read Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, as I expected!!!

Of this book's five stories I give five stars to "The Secret Integration" - one of the best stories I ever read - the one picked by other readers - the one I therefore started with. Then read the introduction - all of twenty-four pages, a bit too long - in which the writer himself elaborately puts down the other stories written twenty years previously when in college: ' It is only fair to warn even the most kindly disposed of readers that there are some mighty tiresome passages here, juvenile and delinquent too.' So I picked the one he himself felt least bad about, "Low-lands", and indeed, although another example of this writer's delightfully bizarre imagination (it is about a gypsy tribe living in tunnels beneath a garbage dump), the story drags: two stars. So I refrained from reading the others. Suggest you do too.

Five stars for the intro, and three for the stories.