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My choice is Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
for a couple of reasons.
1) The prose. I love his prose, it's so detailed and so intricate, I feel like I could get lost in it. This is connected with ...
2) The imagination. I don't know what kind of drugs he was on but, Jeezus... in the opening chapters, a gigantic adenoid attacks London. 'Nuff said.
3) The insights he brings to bear through the lens of paranoia on the connections between Government, Big Business and the War.... he paints a confusing, conspiratorial but interconnected web, that's working for and against itself. It's not totally clear, but it's not meant to be. Gives me that same sense of "that's how the world works" I mention in reading Lobster. And not in some kind of "ha, this is it" David Icke way, just a vision of hidden machinations and complexity.
4) Again with the complexity. I didn't realise the extent of this till I brought a reader's guide to go along with my second reading, but almost every sentence has some kind of allusion that trips off into a new field of knowledge, suggests the novels hidden structures or sets up elaborate jokes and puns. At one stage, he spends several pages setting up a a pun on the phrase "forty million French men can't be wrong".
It's corking stuff. |
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