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Loading... Against the Day (edition 2006)by Thomas Pynchon
Work InformationAgainst the Day by Thomas Pynchon
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) kevinkevbo | Jul 14, 2023 |  I haven't read any other criticism of this novel yet. Personally, I don't have a clear sense of what Pynchon is on about here. At first I thought he was playing with genre - ATD includes steampunk, historical fiction, Western, adventure, noir, detective, etc. The large swath of the story that takes place in Europe during the lead up to World War 1 seems too baggy and incoherent, with whole sections (in Venice and Bulgaria, for example) that read like travelogue more than narrative fiction. My peak frustration came in the Bulgarian section, wherein Cyprian Latewood joins a nunnery. What is the relevance of Cyprian to the story? He is a secondary character that becomes central and then reverts to the background. There are many many characters like this, who pop out of the woodwork. I was tempted at some points to create a spreadsheet of characters, just to keep them straight. ATD exemplifies the problem I have with a lot of postmodern fiction. In the end, the idea of a fragmented narrative that reflects the way life really unfolds, seems to make sense. In practice, it feels self indulgent. Pynchon's attitude seems to be that "life is long and confusing, so I will therefore write a long and confusing novel." It doesn't work as satire, because its narrative threads are so diffuse and meandering that any insight on human nature or society is lost. (  ) jonbrammer | Jul 1, 2023 | Es de lectura obligada para cualquier escritor que quiera apuntar a hacer unanovela total, un monstruo de muchas cabezas que se coma a los lectores menos preparados, pero que quienes disfrutan de la prosa, las técnicas de narración menos comunes, y la enorme colección de datos históricos (y chistes de cultura popular muy bien disimulados) que conforman este tapiz, no podrán dejar pasar. Definitivamente no decepciona. Si bien carece de un cierre argumental (son un conjunto de cierres temáticos/epocales) definitivo, el esfuerzo imaginativo y el periplo de sus múltiples personajes lo hacen de lectura indispensable, si bien algunos pueden hallarlo denso por momentos. Es un libro para disfrutar con tiempo, leyéndolo por las noches un par de páginas a la vez, disfrutándolo como un buen coñac (y si se lo acompaña con uno, mejor). (  ) marsgeverson | Jan 12, 2023 | It seems like Pynchon had a lot of ideas and decided to just throw them together without any plan for resolving or connecting things, like writing six novels at the same time and just separating them by chapters. Each narrative has a different style/genre which is fine as long as the writing is good, but the endless encyclopedic details that fail to advance setting, character, or plot are just tedious. It reminds me of a kid in high school English trying to impress a teacher with a photographic memory. It seems like Pynchon wants to emulate War and Peace or Life and Fate. But the astute reader realizes the man behind the curtain is no Tolstoy, at least not in this novel. Each part should have been able to stand on its own, but too frequnetly they didn'. I found the whole Eurasian TWIT parts to be the worst part, full of badly written eroticism and wandering nowhere, just like the characters. I'm sure the literati see this blender full of words as brilliant and perhaps experimental but I think the emperor has been caught with his pants down. All that said, it was at times a very funny and shocking book and Pynchon has a talent for the wry metaphor and an interesting narrative. (  ) Gumbywan | Jun 24, 2022 | ) jwhenderson | Jun 24, 2022 |
 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. IN “Against the Day,” his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years. But this time his fevered reveries and brilliant streams of words, his fantastical plots and encrypted references, are bound together by a clear message that others can unscramble without mental meltdown. 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. Is contained inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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 No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.06)
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