Мейсон мен Диксон: Томас Пинчон романы

1997 novel by Thomas Pynchon

Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by American author Thomas Pynchon, published in 1997. It presents a fictionalized account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in the Dutch Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States. The novel, written in a style based on late 18th century English is a frame narrative told from the focal point of Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy who, on a cold December evening in 1786, and in 1978 he was reported to be in England researching the lives of Mason and Dixon. Until the release of Vineland, it was long rumored to be his next novel following Gravity's Rainbow. It was formally announced by the publisher in October 1996 with a first printing of 200,000.

Mason & Dixon was one of the most acclaimed novels of the 1990s. According to Harold Bloom, "Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected." Bloom has also called the novel "Pynchon’s late masterpiece." John Fowles wrote: "As a fellow novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces." In his review for The New York Times Book Review, T. Coraghessan Boyle wrote, "This is the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all. Mason & Dixon is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature " New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani said, "It is a book that testifies to [Pynchon's] remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller, a storyteller who this time demonstrates that he can write a novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." During a conversation with Leonard Pierce of the A. V. Club, Harold Bloom said, "I don't know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century it would probably be Mason & Dixon, if it were a full scale book, or if it were a short novel it would probably be The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon has the same relation to fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is beyond compare." John Krewson, also writing for A. V. Club, observed, "Whatever meanings and complex messages may lie hidden in Pynchon's text can, for now, be left to develop subconsciously as the reader enjoys the more immediate rewards of the work of a consummate storyteller. Pynchon is one, and he never quite lets you forget that while this might be an epic story, it's an epic story told to wide eyed children who are up past their bedtime." In contrast, Walter Kirn of Slate described the book as “tiresome mind games”, criticizing Pynchon’s brand of humor (including anachronisms and flatulence) as unfunny and stating, “The low part of the higher mind that Pynchon so pyrotechnically appeals to (the same part that responds to Escher drawings, PDQ Bach, and perspective switching holograms) is not a part of myself I’m in touch with, nor do I particularly long to be. I admire Pynchon; I’m wowed by him at times; but the truth is I’m happy leaving him to the experts whose academic labs gave birth to him.“

Mark Knopfler wrote a song about the book called "Sailing to Philadelphia,” originally performed as a duet with James Taylor.