Mason & Dixon

English language

ISBN:
978-1-101-59464-3
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4 stars (12 reviews)

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair--one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic--from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

6 editions

incredibly good

5 stars

This was probably one of the hardest and best books I've ever read. A deliberately ahistorical historical novel, it tells the story of two men, one an astronomer, the other a surveyor, about whom very little is actually known, in the form of a picaresque tale that tells a story within a story, with some digressions into even deeper layers of narrative. All sorts of absurd episodes about talking dogs, flying magicians and the hollow earth are interwoven. Nevertheless, you learn a lot about history, including historiography and how much you can trust it, but also about colonial America, slavery, astronomy, seafaring and much more, and of course about the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line, which was an engineering achievement at the time and is still regarded as the dividing line between the northern and southern states of the United States. The novel is at times terribly funny and at …

Must Read

4 stars

Thomas Pynchon has reimagined their story, which includes a lot of caffeine abuse, ripped bodices, naval warfare, erotic and political conspiracies, and Native Americans and frontier folk. Our journey takes us on a grand tour of the dark hemisphere of the Age of Reason, as we follow the mismatched pair—one rolling, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic—from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America, and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives.

Over all, the book was worth it, I also tried to find it on other online book platforms too, but I didn't get it.

Relax I will not tell the spoiler part. haha! enjoy it!

Mason & Dixon

5 stars

Mason & Dixon est le cinquième roman du romancier américain Thomas Pynchon paru en 1997

Mason & Dixon suit l'histoire des deux personnages éponymes, Charles Mason et Jeremiah Dixon, l'un astronome l'autre géomètre, restés dans l'histoire pour avoir été chargé de tracer par la Royal Society la frontière entre la Pennsylvanie et le Maryland dans les tumultueuses années 1760 au moment où l'ouest de l'Amérique était en pleine conquête.

Mason & Dixon est un roman qui, comme ses protagonistes, trace des lignes. Des lignes droites, des cercles, des spirales, des branches et des racines qui se croisent, rebouclent, se confondent et finissent par s'éloigner sans qu'on puisse les rattraper.

Le tracé de la frontière par le duo d'Astronome Géomètre devient en effet rapidement une trame d'arrière plan. Car, si le roman est un trésor d'érudition, collant de très près au véritable journal de l'expédition et convoquant nombres références historiques contemporaines, …

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