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Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
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Bleeding Edge (edition 2014)

by Thomas Pynchon (Author)

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1,6215510,890 (3.55)65
New York City, 2001. Fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO and discovers there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left of the tech bubble.
Member:eBardX
Title:Bleeding Edge
Authors:Thomas Pynchon (Author)
Info:New York: Penguin Books, 2014
Collections:Your library
Rating:***1/2
Tags:fiction

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Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

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English (48)  French (2)  Swedish (1)  Italian (1)  Spanish (1)  German (1)  Dutch (1)  All languages (55)
Showing 1-5 of 48 (next | show all)
Thomas Pynchon does Neal Stephenson. ( )
  dabacon | Mar 14, 2024 |
An interesting read: the first time I've ready Pynchon writing in an era that I lived in. That makes his wacky characters and odd setups feel harder to swallow, because I'm matching them against a reality. (An older reader of Pynchon would probably feel this as normal.)

At the same time, beautifully crystalline moments come up out of the prose, a Pynchon trademark, and they need the wacky around them to make them shine. ( )
  JasonMehmel | Feb 9, 2024 |
3.5/5 ( )
  jarrettbrown | Jul 4, 2023 |
Perfect references to: Psyduck, Daikatana, "I dropped the screw in the tuna," MGS, Nelly....the same guy who wrote GR perfectly captured 2001, pre and post you-know what, especially l33t culture, with of course plenty of paranoia, insane specificity, and New York in 2001, perfectly encapsulated. Maxine is a great heroine. I can't give the plot five stars, but it would be wrong to give the whole thing any less. America's greatest living writer, almost 50 years running. ( )
1 vote Adamantium | Aug 21, 2022 |
Its so sweet that Pynchon wrote a book filled with references to his sons favorite childhood media ( )
  bluestraveler | Aug 15, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 48 (next | show all)
[I]n Bleeding Edge Pynchon is prepared to handle material even chancier than Anti-Life or creature-feature cheese. As the organ reverberates, at the end of chapter nine, after someone in the summer of 2001 tells a nervous little New Yorker whose father works in the building that the WTC is built like a battleship, Pynchon declares his paradoxical readiness—under special, limited circumstances—to abandon irony entirely. At this moment—when innocence, irony’s eternal patsy, needs to be protected—the postmodern deflector shields buckle, then collapse, bathing the USS Bleeding Edge in a burst of parental love and remorse.
 
No doubt a good genre book is worth more than a bad literary one any day, but when a writer with real genius squanders so much of his energy on clowning – and for an audience it's not at all clear he respects – it's worth asking what's going on. The idea that jokes are a defence against intimacy is a cliche – perhaps they can also be a defence against close reading.
 
Pynchon depicts the world as he sees it, riddled by the depredations of greed, conspiracy and intolerance, of entropies both human-engineered and cosmically imposed. But his novels take the form of the world as he wishes it, hence their mighty powers of consolation. The freedoms and duties Pynchon assigns himself are those he desires on our behalf — lasciviousness, punning inanity, attention to the routinely sublime but also to the inevitability of suffering, love for the underdog and a home in our hearts for the dead. Also, license to attempt disappearance into some radical space adjacent to history, and to daily life — what the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey has called “Temporary Autonomous Zones” — even if the costs of such jaunts are, in the end, punishingly high.
 

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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Pynchon, Thomasprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Gunsteren, Dirk vanÜbersetzersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
New York as a character in a mystery novel would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn't going to tell it.

--Donald E. Westlake
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It's the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, though some still have her in their system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school.
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Genau, mal was anderes. Was war denn jetzt die Alternative? Sie ist wieder ganz in Anspruch genommen von der täglichen Routine, sie tut, als wäre alles wieder normal, sie hüllt sich gegen die Winterkälte der Eventualitäten zitternd in eine fadenscheinige Decke aus Bilanzen für das erste Quartal, Schulkomiteesitzungen und fehlerhaften Rechnungen der Kabelgesellschaft, aus Arbeitstagen voller Leute mit jämmerlichen Phantasien, für die "Betrug" ein oft zu elegantes Wort ist , und den Bewohnern der Wohnung über Ihr, für die das Abdichten des Badewannenabflusses ein abwegiges Konzept darstellt, aus Symptomen der oberen Luft- und unteren Darmwege, und das alles in dem rührenden Glauben, dass man sich mit Versicherungen und Sicherheitsausstattungen, mit Gesundheitsdiäten und regelmäßigem Training darauf einstellen kann, und dass das Böse nie aus heiterem Himmel herabstürzen und mitten in jedermanns hoch aufragender Verblendung, man sei davon ausgenommen, explodieren wird...
Wenn Du wissen willst, wie die Zukunft des Films aussieht: immer größere Übertragungsraten, immer mehr Videodateien im Internet, irgendwann ist es dann so weit, dass alle alles filmen - viel zu viel, um es sich anzusehen, und nichts davon wird mehr irgendwas bedeuten. Wenn es so weit ist, danke daran, dass ich es prophezeit habe.
Ja, und das Internet war ihre Erfindung, dieses Zauberding, das wie ein Geruch noch in die letzten Winkel unseres Lebens dringt, das Einkaufen, die Hausarbeit, die Hausaufgaben und die Steuererklärung erledigt, unsere Energie verbraucht und unsere kostbare Zeit frisst. Und darum gebt es da keine Unschuld. Nirgends. Hat es nie gegeben. Das Internet ist aus Sünde geboren, aus der schlimmsten Sünde, die es gibt. Und während es gewachsen ist, hat es nie aufgehört, diesen bitterkalten Todeswunsch für den Planeten im Herzen zu tragen, und glaub bloß nicht, dass sich daran irgendwas geändert hat-
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New York City, 2001. Fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO and discovers there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left of the tech bubble.

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