Mason & Dixon

Thomas Pynchon's book Mason & Dixon clearly is one for the ages. 700 pages, including extremely well-researched historical details and expounded-upon stories as well fantastical and absurd deviations on, i.e., flying mechanic ducks with (too many) feelings. The title of course refers to the surveyors that established the to-become-infamous Mason-Dixon line that divided the slave-holding South and the - less slave-holding - North of the United States. Pynchon describes Mason & Dixon's work together - and separately - before they came to America but especially once they are there. His is a bombastic book that I fail to find words for, that is impossible to get a grip on properly, which doesn't even suck one in, because it is too complicated for that, but which one is incapable of properly putting down either, and which, especially, stays with one; its stories, its absurdities.