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Loading... Against the Dayby Thomas Pynchon
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 1,000 pages...it will take me awhile to work up the courage to start in on it. Every year I read something this long though (2007 = Infinite Jest / 2008 = The Recognitions).   phette23 | Oct 19, 2009 |  Why did Pynchon write this book? None of the positive reviews in the press have enlightened me. Is there anything important being said here? At times self-parodying, at others self-indulgent, I think this book is just a big mess. It's too bad. When I was 20 years old, I read my first Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow" (this was in 1973, by the way). I thought it brilliant then, and still do. But I have to call 'em as I see 'em, and this one misses by a lot. Yes, I've read some things about themes, bilocation, etc. It's that what themes there are, are half-baked ideas, not terribly well-executed, coherent, or comprehensible. One of Pynchon's weaknesses has been the inability to define his characters as fully-formed, believable persons. They usually represent one or more attitudes, or more likely, afflictions in the service of the bigger picture. He got away with that in "Gravity's Rainbow", because the overall message was powerful and disturbing. Here, I was waiting for the payoff. Where is it? (  )1  nog | Jul 16, 2009 | There's finally warmth under the clever. But you have to look for it and it's not where you'd expect to see it. A+. (  )1 AlizarinT | Jul 9, 2009 | Finally!!! Not his best, but I've waited soooooooo long for a new Pynchon. And let's be honest, "not his best" from Pynchon outdoes most writers' "top-notch." (  ) ShanLizLuv | Feb 10, 2009 | i've only read the first hundred pages or so -- which, considering the edition i was reading was 1200 pages, is barely a scratch -- but i'm sold. as soon as i come across another copy. ( ) matthue | Jul 11, 2008 | 
 Thomas Pynchon's new behemoth of a book, "Against the Day," is likely to have readers responding in one of two ways; either they will think it is one of the greatest novels ever written, or they will see it as a vainglorious head trip from an author notorious for being difficult to read. The truth of the matter actually lies somewhere in between. "Against the Day" is probably the most brilliant book most people will never read. The reason it will probably fail to garner much of an audience is that at almost 1,100 pages it is, to put it bluntly, the novel as literary whirlwind, cryptically dense and unrelenting in its demands on the reader. On the American literary scene – that hodgepodge – a new book by Thomas Pynchon is unarguably a major event, and here he comes again. His sixth novel, “Against the Day,” runs to 1085 pages, but never creeps and assuredly never drags. Though he has a disciple here and there, most notably David Foster Wallace, no novelist has proven more sui generis than Pynchon since his debut with “V.” in 1963. "Against the Day" -- the phrase seems to allude to the apocalyptic conditional: In the familiar scriptural locution, the day itself was the eventual one of "judgment and perdition of the ungodly men." But let's not make too much of it. There is simply too much going on in this wide-ranging, encyclopedic, nonpareil of a novel to reduce it all to something as small as the apocalypse.  There is a striking moment in Thomas Pynchon’s enormous new novel that threatens to get lost, like many of the striking moments in his novels, in all the other moments: of overly wrought prose, of names so memorable that you can’t remember them, and of quasi-historical accounts of science and politics that the diligent book reviewer and his fact checker would like to substantiate but that are mainly unsubstantiable.  Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.
Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 159420120X, Hardcover)Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them. Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck. --Thomas Pynchon (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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