---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: My review of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon at Berfrois

wordpress_id: 1931
wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/2012/02/24/my-review-of-the-cambridge-companion-to-thomas-pynchon-at-berfrois/
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categories:
- Literature
- Thomas Pynchon
- Academia
tags:
- Pynchon
- review
comments:
- id: 6649
  author: Hal Espen
  author_email: ''
  author_url: http://twitter.com/HalSF
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  content: ! 'Excellent review, and thanks for the link. This radio piece cropped
    up today as well so it was a good Pynchonite morning:


    http://www.studio360.org/2012/feb/24/aha-moment-gravitys-rainbow/'
- id: 6650
  author: Martin Paul Eve
  author_email: martin@martineve.com
  author_url: https://www.martineve.com
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  content: Thanks for this extra material! I'm not convinced about how hopeful The
    Counterforce's prospects are and I'm not sure that Pynchon sees any salvation
    in organic chemistry, but good reading nonetheless.
---
<p>I have a guest post over at the excellent <a href="http://www.berfrois.com">Berfrois</a> in which I <a href="http://www.berfrois.com/2012/02/pynchonite-generosity-martin-eve/">review the newly released Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon</a>. The piece is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, so I could post the entire thing here, but I'll let you read the entirety over at their site. For now, here's a taster:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Cambridge Companion series has become, in academic literary circles, the equivalent to the Hollywood walk of fame; it comes with connotations of canonization, recognition and acceptance. It would seem somewhat surprising, then, to see Thomas Pynchon, the most notoriously elusive author of the twentieth century, a figure who has consistently subverted award ceremonies and rejected honours, bestowed such insider recognition. Of course, the fame is not here heaped upon the man, but as the editors themselves note, in light of the fact that Pynchon’s writings, in their infamous complexity, bind readers and critics together as a community.</p>
<p>This volume, published on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of V. [1963], brings together seventeen of the foremost heavyweights from over forty years of Pynchon criticism in a work tailored  for those “who study and teach Pynchon […, to] the non-academic fan” (2). The editors here propose the common reader’s Pynchon, a disentanglement from the various Wikis, obsessive mailing lists, close textual analysis and scholarly works for “advanced researchers”. It is against these ambitious self-imposed standards, then, that the work must be judged.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.berfrois.com/2012/02/pynchonite-generosity-martin-eve/">Continue reading at Berfrois</a></p>
<p><i>Featured image by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomswift/">TomSwift46</a> under a CC-BY-NC-ND license</i></p>