Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
New York : Penguin Press, 2006.
Description
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.… (more)
Media reviews
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
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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. Show Less
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
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together by a clear message that others can unscramble without mental meltdown. Show Less
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
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David Foster Wallace, no novelist has proven more sui generis than Pynchon since his debut with “V.” in 1963. Show Less
"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,
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encyclopedic, nonpareil of a novel to reduce it all to something as small as the apocalypse. Show Less
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
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politics that the diligent book reviewer and his fact checker would like to substantiate but that are mainly unsubstantiable. Show Less
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
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without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex. Show Less
No American has won the Nobel Prize for Literature since Toni Morrison took home the $1 million prize in 1993, but every year when the usual suspects are listed, Thomas Pynchon is among them.
Against the Day is Pynchon's first novel since 1997's Mason and Dixon, and at 1,120 pages, it's a big
It's raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant, exasperating, and defies a simple summary.
Against the Day is Pynchon's first novel since 1997's Mason and Dixon, and at 1,120 pages, it's a big
Show More
deal, in more ways than one.It's raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant, exasperating, and defies a simple summary.
Show Less
Nearly 50 years into the Thomas Pynchon era, it's our failing if we don't understand the author's manner and method, which are inseparable from the artifacts he has produced. Despite the legendary slowness of his process, and his even more legendary "reclusiveness," Pynchon has delivered seven
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books, including four massive novels. Yet is there another contemporary "master" whose career is more routinely subjected to reassessment with each new work? Show Less
In May, Thomas Pynchon turns 70. Our mightiest, and most elusive, novelist reaches his biblically appointed three score and 10. It would be cause for alarm, the aging of such a perpetually youthful sensibility, except that Pynchon celebrates this momentous birthday early, presenting a gift rather
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than receiving one: his first novel in nine years -- and best in 33 (speaking of biblical numbers). Show Less
News of an upcoming Pynchon novel has the same effect on the literati that an unscheduled return of Halley's comet would have on astronomers. The Internet started humming with rumors last June, and, after five months of anticipation, the mammoth volume has arrived and is everything a Pynchon fan
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could hope for. Against the Day is his longest novel, his most international in scope -- from the mountains of Colorado to the deserts of Inner Asia -- and is perhaps his funniest. Show Less
Thomas Pynchon has always distrusted the sky. A technical writer for Boeing in early 1960s Seattle, he smuggled his knowledge of missile systems into "V" (1963) and "The Crying of Lot 49" (1966) and lambasted the depravity of air warfare in his great novel, "Gravity's Rainbow" (1974).
If I tell you that Thomas Pynchon's gloriously fizzy Against the Day is a 1,000-plus-page novel containing multiple subplots about multiple grand plottings to achieve power all over the globe, and that it's set at the turn of the 20th century with alternative versions of world history, mathematics
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crossed with mysticism, radical politics, and funny names and songs — well, you may react like one of the main characters, Lew Basnight, a detective and ''anarchist-hunter,'' who asks his friend Cohen, ''Could you get specific?'' Show Less
Maybe writers should avoid the light, whether describing its effect or analyzing its nature, and instead leave it to experts like painters and physicists to worry about. On the other hand, as the Bible points out, it was the Word that turned on the light in the first place, and perhaps that’s why
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Thomas Pynchon has written a Bible-length book on that and many other subjects. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member Widsith
The early reviews I read of Against the Day were all a little bewildered, and gave me the distinct impression that a lot of reviewers had tried to skim-read this huge novel so they could get their articles written in time. It’s not an easy one to write up at all. It’s very long, very busy, and
For people who have been following him over the years, it’s something of a change of direction. His last two books, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, seemed to show a new concern with characters, personalities and intimacy compared to the unreconstructed craziness of his earlier work. But Against the Day has much more in common with his earlier books – it most closely resembles Gravity’s Rainbow (the hipster’s long novel of choice), although there is a weariness, a kind of ironic distance at work here which points to an older author.
If it seems like I’m putting off the business of actually trying to explain what this novel’s about, it’s because I am. Ostensibly we are looking at a timeframe moving from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 to the years immediately after the First World War. Pynchon has always been much more interested than his compatriot writers in the world outside America, and here we get wonderful sketches of everywhere from Colorado, New York and Chicago to Siberia, London, Yugoslavia, Morocco, revolutionary Mexico, Constantinople, Venice and plenty more besides. The cast of characters is huge, though not as disorienting as some reviewers have made out. The main plot strand concerns three brothers from Colorado trying to avenge their father’s murder, though there is also a boy’s-own spy story involving British agents and unrest in the Balkans, not to mention a whole subplot about characters who are at least partly fictional even within the world of the novel.
It’s not even entirely certain whether or not these events are taking place precisely in our world. In the novel, not only do we have the new force of electricity changing the face of society, but we also have mathematicians and scientists devising machines which can make photographs move or allow for the possibility of time-travel. In many ways it’s written not as a historical novel but as a sci-fi novel might have looked written by someone in the 1880s. ‘By now,’ someone remarks at one point, ‘I know that your most deranged utterances are only conventional history prematurely blurted.’
At first that just seems like a cute conceit, but as the novel goes on it assumes a greater importance. There is always a suggestion that the world of possibilities shown in here somehow became our own world after some cataclysmic event, which is especially associated with the War. ‘This world you take to be “the” world will die,’ says one character, ‘and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.’
The upcoming war looms over everything, just as the Second World War did over Gravity's Rainbow. It is conceived as being so awful that it has stained time itself, affecting events long before it happened with an air of sinister disaster. It is the darkness behind everyday events, which is sensed preternaturally by almost every character in the book, and which allows Pynchon to give free rein to his delight in finding mystery and paranoia in otherwise normal events. Who else would, or could, describe a sunrise like this:
The sun came up a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnameable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment…its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence.
Here you can see all Pynchon’s trademarks – the long sentences, stacks of clauses skirting round some inexplicable sensation of mystery, a general feeling that you’re never totally sure what he’s going on about. It is this mood, rather than any event-based plot, which Pynchon is concerned with describing. And the writing is everything you’d hope for – I think he’s the best writer of sentences since Nabokov. Some of the turns of phrase stop you dead: a view from a hotel window of “long, moon-stung waves”; a rough night for someone who “didn’t so much sleep as become intermittently conscious of time”; or an emotional parting at a railway station, of which we are told: “though their kiss went on for what could have been hours, so little did it have to do with clock time, she was already miles away down those rails before their lips even touched.”
Looking back through my copy to pick out these passages, it’s telling that I can hardly remember now which characters are even being written about here. They seem less important than what he uses them to say. Some people might even call them types; you could certainly be forgiven for getting a bit suspicious about the way every single female character is a submissive nymphomaniac – though that certainly allows for a lot of fun along the way. The verisimilitude is also not helped much by the outrageous names everyone seems to have, like Professor Heino Vanderjuice or a musician called Chester LeStreet (hee-hee). It’s definitely a little disappointing after where he seemed to be going with the last couple of books, but still, there’s no doubt that by the end there are a core group of people who you really do care about.
And they can be fun too. One of the many pleasures of the book comes from the incongruence of people and places, like the grizzled American detective who finds himself working for a tarot cult among the upper classes in London. The Colorado boys in particular generate some fantastically gruff dialogue, including one of my favourite remarks: “Tengo que get el fuck out of aquí.” The women are intelligent and funny and, as I mentioned, permanently horny. He does sexy rather well. “Just can’t stay away,” whispers one respectable girl who has ended up all corrupted in a brothel out west, “…you’ve simply ruined me for everyday bourgeois sexuality. Whatever am I to do?”
The proliferation of characters is partly down to one of the book’s most important themes, that of doubling. Two of the cast, Renfrew and Werfner, are mirror-images of each other in more than just name; someone else finds himself wondering if he could be his own ghost. We hear much of the shamanic practice of bilocation, by which someone can be literally in two places at once, and there is also a preoccupation with Iceland spar, a kind of crystal which creates a doubling of light – and, by implication, of the world itself. Pynchon seems to have taken the advice of one of his characters: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Like a lot of Pynchon’s books, it starts off being a whole lot of fun with crazy jokes and weird sex and unnecessary songs, and yet again by the time you’re sucked in you can’t help feeling that something very important is going on. It seems to have to do with understanding what kind of person you might have been if some choices had been made differently, and what kind of world there could have been if some choices had been made differently. With some aliens, threesomes, tommyknockers, cowboys and meteorites thrown in.Have we been here before? Oh…maybe. Still, it seems a bit harsh to criticise him for producing more of the same when the same is so brilliant, so rich, and so full of complex and fascinating pleasures. Above all I was left feeling the sadness and the wonder of all the potential worlds I and everyone else could be creating, if we only had more time to stop and work out how. As one of the many walk-on reprobates points out:
…isn’t it the curse of the drifter, this desolation of heart we feel each evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for half a minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the likes of us, don’t you see, for we’re only passing through, we’re already ghosts.
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you come to it with all kinds of preconceptions, just because it’s Pynchon and although he’s only written a few novels they all seem to be masterpieces.For people who have been following him over the years, it’s something of a change of direction. His last two books, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, seemed to show a new concern with characters, personalities and intimacy compared to the unreconstructed craziness of his earlier work. But Against the Day has much more in common with his earlier books – it most closely resembles Gravity’s Rainbow (the hipster’s long novel of choice), although there is a weariness, a kind of ironic distance at work here which points to an older author.
If it seems like I’m putting off the business of actually trying to explain what this novel’s about, it’s because I am. Ostensibly we are looking at a timeframe moving from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 to the years immediately after the First World War. Pynchon has always been much more interested than his compatriot writers in the world outside America, and here we get wonderful sketches of everywhere from Colorado, New York and Chicago to Siberia, London, Yugoslavia, Morocco, revolutionary Mexico, Constantinople, Venice and plenty more besides. The cast of characters is huge, though not as disorienting as some reviewers have made out. The main plot strand concerns three brothers from Colorado trying to avenge their father’s murder, though there is also a boy’s-own spy story involving British agents and unrest in the Balkans, not to mention a whole subplot about characters who are at least partly fictional even within the world of the novel.
It’s not even entirely certain whether or not these events are taking place precisely in our world. In the novel, not only do we have the new force of electricity changing the face of society, but we also have mathematicians and scientists devising machines which can make photographs move or allow for the possibility of time-travel. In many ways it’s written not as a historical novel but as a sci-fi novel might have looked written by someone in the 1880s. ‘By now,’ someone remarks at one point, ‘I know that your most deranged utterances are only conventional history prematurely blurted.’
At first that just seems like a cute conceit, but as the novel goes on it assumes a greater importance. There is always a suggestion that the world of possibilities shown in here somehow became our own world after some cataclysmic event, which is especially associated with the War. ‘This world you take to be “the” world will die,’ says one character, ‘and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.’
The upcoming war looms over everything, just as the Second World War did over Gravity's Rainbow. It is conceived as being so awful that it has stained time itself, affecting events long before it happened with an air of sinister disaster. It is the darkness behind everyday events, which is sensed preternaturally by almost every character in the book, and which allows Pynchon to give free rein to his delight in finding mystery and paranoia in otherwise normal events. Who else would, or could, describe a sunrise like this:
The sun came up a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnameable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment…its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence.
Here you can see all Pynchon’s trademarks – the long sentences, stacks of clauses skirting round some inexplicable sensation of mystery, a general feeling that you’re never totally sure what he’s going on about. It is this mood, rather than any event-based plot, which Pynchon is concerned with describing. And the writing is everything you’d hope for – I think he’s the best writer of sentences since Nabokov. Some of the turns of phrase stop you dead: a view from a hotel window of “long, moon-stung waves”; a rough night for someone who “didn’t so much sleep as become intermittently conscious of time”; or an emotional parting at a railway station, of which we are told: “though their kiss went on for what could have been hours, so little did it have to do with clock time, she was already miles away down those rails before their lips even touched.”
Looking back through my copy to pick out these passages, it’s telling that I can hardly remember now which characters are even being written about here. They seem less important than what he uses them to say. Some people might even call them types; you could certainly be forgiven for getting a bit suspicious about the way every single female character is a submissive nymphomaniac – though that certainly allows for a lot of fun along the way. The verisimilitude is also not helped much by the outrageous names everyone seems to have, like Professor Heino Vanderjuice or a musician called Chester LeStreet (hee-hee). It’s definitely a little disappointing after where he seemed to be going with the last couple of books, but still, there’s no doubt that by the end there are a core group of people who you really do care about.
And they can be fun too. One of the many pleasures of the book comes from the incongruence of people and places, like the grizzled American detective who finds himself working for a tarot cult among the upper classes in London. The Colorado boys in particular generate some fantastically gruff dialogue, including one of my favourite remarks: “Tengo que get el fuck out of aquí.” The women are intelligent and funny and, as I mentioned, permanently horny. He does sexy rather well. “Just can’t stay away,” whispers one respectable girl who has ended up all corrupted in a brothel out west, “…you’ve simply ruined me for everyday bourgeois sexuality. Whatever am I to do?”
The proliferation of characters is partly down to one of the book’s most important themes, that of doubling. Two of the cast, Renfrew and Werfner, are mirror-images of each other in more than just name; someone else finds himself wondering if he could be his own ghost. We hear much of the shamanic practice of bilocation, by which someone can be literally in two places at once, and there is also a preoccupation with Iceland spar, a kind of crystal which creates a doubling of light – and, by implication, of the world itself. Pynchon seems to have taken the advice of one of his characters: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Like a lot of Pynchon’s books, it starts off being a whole lot of fun with crazy jokes and weird sex and unnecessary songs, and yet again by the time you’re sucked in you can’t help feeling that something very important is going on. It seems to have to do with understanding what kind of person you might have been if some choices had been made differently, and what kind of world there could have been if some choices had been made differently. With some aliens, threesomes, tommyknockers, cowboys and meteorites thrown in.Have we been here before? Oh…maybe. Still, it seems a bit harsh to criticise him for producing more of the same when the same is so brilliant, so rich, and so full of complex and fascinating pleasures. Above all I was left feeling the sadness and the wonder of all the potential worlds I and everyone else could be creating, if we only had more time to stop and work out how. As one of the many walk-on reprobates points out:
…isn’t it the curse of the drifter, this desolation of heart we feel each evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for half a minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the likes of us, don’t you see, for we’re only passing through, we’re already ghosts.
Show Less
LibraryThing member doogiewray
Just finished Against the Day (last eight pages read in a hot bubble-bath drinking a cold Margarita). Off the top of my head, I think it's really, really good.
Some of the reviews (one in the Pynchon Pandæmonium group called it "shit") make me wonder if the readers actually read the whole book.
For example, the (very) strange ménage à trois of Yasheem, Reef and Cyprian was incredibly touching as it developed from three completely different ("orthogonal" would probably be a word that Pynchon might use here) Walks of Life into one blended and complementary triad (x, y, and i (i.e., the square root of minus one)). Well, for me at least, Pynchon's writing brought clarity, understanding and deep empathy for these (and other) characters to the point that I was really rooting for all three.
Typically for Pynchon, other threads and characters were left up to you to decide what eventually happened to them (such as the Great Revenge Plot against Deuce Kindred (and Lake) (ah, but maybe Life was the Ultimate Revenge here, huh? - you'll have to read it to find out)).
Still, though, off the top of my Margarita-soaked brain, I felt that Against the Day was a really good yarn that had many, many brilliant exposés on today's political "situation."
The ending is one full of hope for that Day when we can all live in Grace with one another, as individuals and as a World. By the way, the Inconvenience (referred to below) is a dirigible that, over the course of the novel, evolves into some sort of spaceship/society, becoming, in the process, a metaphor for our own "spaceship/society."
"Never sleeping, clamorous as a nonstop feast day, Inconvience, once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination, where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have to be evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvience has yet observed any sign of this. They know - Miles is certain - that it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly to grace."
To Pynchon's final note, I add my own "may it be so, where we all, too, reach a time/place of mutual respect and kindness!"
Or, in the words of a popular song, "in the end, only kindness matters."
Some of the reviews (one in the Pynchon Pandæmonium group called it "shit") make me wonder if the readers actually read the whole book.
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Even the "professional reviewers" talk about one-dimensional, cartoonish characters, but that might be only valid for the first few hundred pages. Once the various threads start come together, things start to brew like a good pot of coffee. For example, the (very) strange ménage à trois of Yasheem, Reef and Cyprian was incredibly touching as it developed from three completely different ("orthogonal" would probably be a word that Pynchon might use here) Walks of Life into one blended and complementary triad (x, y, and i (i.e., the square root of minus one)). Well, for me at least, Pynchon's writing brought clarity, understanding and deep empathy for these (and other) characters to the point that I was really rooting for all three.
Typically for Pynchon, other threads and characters were left up to you to decide what eventually happened to them (such as the Great Revenge Plot against Deuce Kindred (and Lake) (ah, but maybe Life was the Ultimate Revenge here, huh? - you'll have to read it to find out)).
Still, though, off the top of my Margarita-soaked brain, I felt that Against the Day was a really good yarn that had many, many brilliant exposés on today's political "situation."
The ending is one full of hope for that Day when we can all live in Grace with one another, as individuals and as a World. By the way, the Inconvenience (referred to below) is a dirigible that, over the course of the novel, evolves into some sort of spaceship/society, becoming, in the process, a metaphor for our own "spaceship/society."
"Never sleeping, clamorous as a nonstop feast day, Inconvience, once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination, where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have to be evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvience has yet observed any sign of this. They know - Miles is certain - that it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly to grace."
To Pynchon's final note, I add my own "may it be so, where we all, too, reach a time/place of mutual respect and kindness!"
Or, in the words of a popular song, "in the end, only kindness matters."
Show Less
LibraryThing member paradoxosalpha
On finishing my read of Against the Day, I believe I have read all of Thomas Pynchon's published fiction--all his books, anyway: the novels and the Slow Learner collection. This one took two attempts: I halted the first circa 2007 at the midpoint of the novel, and I returned to read the whole thing
It is strange that my first attempt at this book was while I was living in Chicago, and my second has been in Colorado. It begins in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and several characters travel from Chicago to Colorado--while Colorado is also the disseminating point for the Traverse family, whose various members trace many of the book's persistent plot threads. Ultimately, the geography of the book is all-encompassing, featuring London, Venice, Vienna, Mexico, Shambahla, and the Hollow Earth, among other locations. It includes a typically Pynchonian cast of thousands, with names like Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin and Bevis Moistleigh.
The title phrase appears several times in the text, each with a different contextually-driven meaning. In addition to these, I understood it to be an Englishing of contre jour: the technique of giving focus to a backlit subject in photography and painting. This notion relates to inventor-character Merle Rideout's photographic career with its through-line intersecting both the early and late parts of the novel, and to the physics of light that is centered in many different passages, as well as the sense of opaque futurity in the lead up to the Great War and the subsequent totalitarianisms of the 20th century.
As always, Pynchon is very funny, littering the book with jokes to take the edge off of a palpable anger. Among the many digressive episodes, some exalt genre conventions from less "literary" species of fiction, such as the terrific weird horror passage recounted by the explorer Fleetwood Vibe (138-148). Sex is frequent enough in the early parts of the book, and somewhat surprisingly seems to increase in the later ones. Altered states of consciousness and metaphysical indeterminacy create ambiguities and introduce unreliability into the third-person omniscient narration.
Some quick notes regarding my "completed" and iterative consumption of Pynchon's works (in no particular order): Having read Inherent Vice I saw the movie during its initial release, and I think Gravity's Rainbow needs to inspire a grand piece of musical theater. V is at the top of my list of Pynchon to re-read. I have now read Mason & Dixon twice and Against the Day one-and-a-half times--they were each worth it.
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this year. Straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, I think it is Pynchon's longest book. It descends from a rarified world of "boys' adventure" in airships, through anarchist struggle, family revenge, state espionage, sexual compulsion, academic intrigue, and mystical conspiracy, to meditations on light, number, and time. It is strange that my first attempt at this book was while I was living in Chicago, and my second has been in Colorado. It begins in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and several characters travel from Chicago to Colorado--while Colorado is also the disseminating point for the Traverse family, whose various members trace many of the book's persistent plot threads. Ultimately, the geography of the book is all-encompassing, featuring London, Venice, Vienna, Mexico, Shambahla, and the Hollow Earth, among other locations. It includes a typically Pynchonian cast of thousands, with names like Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin and Bevis Moistleigh.
The title phrase appears several times in the text, each with a different contextually-driven meaning. In addition to these, I understood it to be an Englishing of contre jour: the technique of giving focus to a backlit subject in photography and painting. This notion relates to inventor-character Merle Rideout's photographic career with its through-line intersecting both the early and late parts of the novel, and to the physics of light that is centered in many different passages, as well as the sense of opaque futurity in the lead up to the Great War and the subsequent totalitarianisms of the 20th century.
As always, Pynchon is very funny, littering the book with jokes to take the edge off of a palpable anger. Among the many digressive episodes, some exalt genre conventions from less "literary" species of fiction, such as the terrific weird horror passage recounted by the explorer Fleetwood Vibe (138-148). Sex is frequent enough in the early parts of the book, and somewhat surprisingly seems to increase in the later ones. Altered states of consciousness and metaphysical indeterminacy create ambiguities and introduce unreliability into the third-person omniscient narration.
Some quick notes regarding my "completed" and iterative consumption of Pynchon's works (in no particular order): Having read Inherent Vice I saw the movie during its initial release, and I think Gravity's Rainbow needs to inspire a grand piece of musical theater. V is at the top of my list of Pynchon to re-read. I have now read Mason & Dixon twice and Against the Day one-and-a-half times--they were each worth it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member lwobbe
Was it worth it? Yes. But not like Mason & Dixon worth it. It wanders. You have no idea what the book is about for hundreds of pages at a time. Then you'll reach a section that is a frantic page turner for hundreds of pages. You think it is going so down the toilet that you are afraid to read what
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comes next. You run to the reference sources to see if there really was an event like that - yes! there was: Tesla, Etc. So, that has to be a Pynchon experience if there ever was one. Show Less
LibraryThing member stillatim
If you're reading this, you might want to read the book; if you're sensible, you'll be a bit wary of diving right in, because, as every review is contractually obliged to note, it's a bit long. So here are some books I'm really glad I read before this:
i) The World that Never Was, by Alex
ii) Anarchism, by George Woodcock
iii) Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution/Capital/Empire
iv) Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (American West in the 19th century)
v) Henry James, in general (for the American abroad theme)
vi) various popular science books, particularly about maths.
Here are some books I really wish I'd read:
i) The Struggle for Mastery by AJP Taylor
ii) unpopular, difficult histories of maths
iii) a history of American labor organizations
iv) HG Wells, The Time Machine
If you mix all of that in with previous Pynchon, you get this book. If you've read it all, I bet this thing would be a breeze. Kind of.
***************
I put off reviewing this for a long time, because I've been trying to finish the wikipedia plot summaries. But I can't put it off any longer. Those plot summaries take a *long* time.
A lot of people read this book as a more or less Manichean tract about the evils of the day/light/people who don't believe in conspiracy theories and the good of the night/darkness/people who do. Thankfully, it's much more and much better than that. There are few hard and fast good guys or bad guys: only one or two people fail to undergo some kind of enlightenment, and nobody who does undergo enlightenment becomes undeniably heroic afterward.
The book's structure is surprisingly tight. There's a kind of frame narrative, a pastiche of Boys Own adventure stories; as the novel progresses, the heroes of that story (The Chums of Chance) move from being more or less the unthinking but charming patsies of shadowy higher powers, to being autonomous, married human beings: in other words, they're little boys who grow up, and in so doing become more conscious of their own place in the world.
Within this is the main tale: a family of anarchists is being hunted and then hunting the capitalists in turn. On the book's release, much was made of its sympathy for terrorists, so it's worth noting that only *one* non-anarchist is intentionally killed by an anarchist, and that's in direct revenge for the murder of said anarchist's father. Just to complicate matters, it's unclear that the vengeance-taker is much of an anarchist anyway. On the other hand, and with historical accuracy, the capitalists murder or otherwise do away with dozens of people. The point of the book is not that terrorism is okay, it's that small acts of 'terrorism,' like bomb throwing, differ from large acts of destruction, like war or factory lockouts, in a small but important way: the bomb throwers lack the resources to do anything else. The war-makers and factory owners have all the resources they need, but want to squeeze ever more out of the rest of us.
In good picaresque fashion, a series of tales branch off from these two main tales. Most of them have in common some sort of opposition to quotidian life, which is either shown to be successful as an alternative, or (more often), unsuccessful. Characters come to realize that they're being used by powers beyond their control, and take it upon themselves to change their lives as best they can. Usually this is by travel (therefore, picaresque).
The book shows us two worlds: one that we see every day, and a kind of shadow world set slightly to the side of our own. The shadow world is sometimes good, sometimes not so good; but the moments of good that it holds are very much worth striving for. The trick is to do that without getting co-opted by capitalists or imperialists, which is no easy task at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Here the content matches up with Pynchon's form: any time the shadow world breaks through, for better or worse, the generally realistic narrative is also interrupted by surrealism, fantasy, science-fiction, horror, abstract mathematics, mysticism or philosophy. These small breaks in the novel's realistic fabric are often genuinely confusing, and that's precisely the point: thinking of another world is difficult and confusing. There's no need for conspiracy theories to explain this fact, you only need to recognize that the power and money is held in a very few hands.
Despite the huge difficulties faced by the various characters, the book ends, beautifully, with the Chums of Chance on their airship, "where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us," and there's no sign of that. Nontheless, "they fly towards grace." Even within the book's frame, the Chums of Chance are more or less fictional. It's on board fictions like 'Against the Day' that we, too, can fly towards grace, without pretending that we've already got it.
i) The World that Never Was, by Alex
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Butterworthii) Anarchism, by George Woodcock
iii) Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution/Capital/Empire
iv) Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (American West in the 19th century)
v) Henry James, in general (for the American abroad theme)
vi) various popular science books, particularly about maths.
Here are some books I really wish I'd read:
i) The Struggle for Mastery by AJP Taylor
ii) unpopular, difficult histories of maths
iii) a history of American labor organizations
iv) HG Wells, The Time Machine
If you mix all of that in with previous Pynchon, you get this book. If you've read it all, I bet this thing would be a breeze. Kind of.
***************
I put off reviewing this for a long time, because I've been trying to finish the wikipedia plot summaries. But I can't put it off any longer. Those plot summaries take a *long* time.
A lot of people read this book as a more or less Manichean tract about the evils of the day/light/people who don't believe in conspiracy theories and the good of the night/darkness/people who do. Thankfully, it's much more and much better than that. There are few hard and fast good guys or bad guys: only one or two people fail to undergo some kind of enlightenment, and nobody who does undergo enlightenment becomes undeniably heroic afterward.
The book's structure is surprisingly tight. There's a kind of frame narrative, a pastiche of Boys Own adventure stories; as the novel progresses, the heroes of that story (The Chums of Chance) move from being more or less the unthinking but charming patsies of shadowy higher powers, to being autonomous, married human beings: in other words, they're little boys who grow up, and in so doing become more conscious of their own place in the world.
Within this is the main tale: a family of anarchists is being hunted and then hunting the capitalists in turn. On the book's release, much was made of its sympathy for terrorists, so it's worth noting that only *one* non-anarchist is intentionally killed by an anarchist, and that's in direct revenge for the murder of said anarchist's father. Just to complicate matters, it's unclear that the vengeance-taker is much of an anarchist anyway. On the other hand, and with historical accuracy, the capitalists murder or otherwise do away with dozens of people. The point of the book is not that terrorism is okay, it's that small acts of 'terrorism,' like bomb throwing, differ from large acts of destruction, like war or factory lockouts, in a small but important way: the bomb throwers lack the resources to do anything else. The war-makers and factory owners have all the resources they need, but want to squeeze ever more out of the rest of us.
In good picaresque fashion, a series of tales branch off from these two main tales. Most of them have in common some sort of opposition to quotidian life, which is either shown to be successful as an alternative, or (more often), unsuccessful. Characters come to realize that they're being used by powers beyond their control, and take it upon themselves to change their lives as best they can. Usually this is by travel (therefore, picaresque).
The book shows us two worlds: one that we see every day, and a kind of shadow world set slightly to the side of our own. The shadow world is sometimes good, sometimes not so good; but the moments of good that it holds are very much worth striving for. The trick is to do that without getting co-opted by capitalists or imperialists, which is no easy task at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Here the content matches up with Pynchon's form: any time the shadow world breaks through, for better or worse, the generally realistic narrative is also interrupted by surrealism, fantasy, science-fiction, horror, abstract mathematics, mysticism or philosophy. These small breaks in the novel's realistic fabric are often genuinely confusing, and that's precisely the point: thinking of another world is difficult and confusing. There's no need for conspiracy theories to explain this fact, you only need to recognize that the power and money is held in a very few hands.
Despite the huge difficulties faced by the various characters, the book ends, beautifully, with the Chums of Chance on their airship, "where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us," and there's no sign of that. Nontheless, "they fly towards grace." Even within the book's frame, the Chums of Chance are more or less fictional. It's on board fictions like 'Against the Day' that we, too, can fly towards grace, without pretending that we've already got it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member GarySeverance
Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Reader’s Dimensions
Thomas Pynchon’s epic novel, Against the Day, is an odyssey in four dimensions, and more. The reader is introduced to this imaginary space during the first pages of chapter one. The boys’ group, “Chums of Chance,” discuss the
The reader realizes early on that the reading time of Against the Day will be different from other novels, longer and shorter. In the novel, the path of light is followed as it travels through the 1085 pages at a constant velocity. Yet it is always changing over time, illuminating evolving territories and imaginary borders, and shining on the people who are both grounded and accepting of fantasy. The reader’s view of history and individual destiny is guided by Pynchon’s descriptions of light as they create a time-territory-personality matrix.
I started reading the book in November in tropical Hilton Head and finished it in February in the Ohio winter, on a personal odyssey. It was a wonderful exercise in translation, discovery, challenge, enlightenment, cynicism, slapstick, and wonderful insight. Surrounded by dictionary, laptop, atlas, and a bright reading lamp emitting waves and particles, I developed new points of view. Taking time to look up and study vocabulary, historical references, mathematical concepts, philosophical ideas, and psychological theories is required for understanding the novel.
The reader can make use of the two dimensional space of the page, scribbling notes in the margins. The notes get more complex as additional dimensions are perceived in terms of mental longitude and latitude. Cartesian coordinates emerge as the author explores the three dimensions of the novel’s settings. Then as the characters transcend geography and time imaginary dimensions are created, like images reflected in mirrors (reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass). Pynchon shows the reader that the number of dimensions is potentially infinite. So the novel’s characters can be here and there at the same time (bilocation) and can assume multiple points of view.
The ordered chaos of the chapters bring the reader to observation points that create insight, but then the points vanish. A new location in vector space is established by the author’s quaternion prose (look it up!). Yes, the reader begins to “see” a changeable, imaginary space. It is not an “aha” experience but more like a “wow” hallucination. But, have no fear; whatever is in that vector space is created by the reader’s own mental dimensions.
Major themes emerge from this imaginary time-space. One of them describes the human genius and folly as seen in the historical record. Pynchon shows the reader that ideas begin as fantasy. Mathematicians translate these fantasies into arbitrary symbols using an arcane logical system. Scientists use the symbols in their experiments attempting to ground them in quotidian reality. Leaders of commerce take the realized ideas and create marketable products. Politicians corner the markets and carve up the land for power and defense.
The novel describes paths for the secondary characters parallel to the historical record, but different. Unlike history, the lives of many of the background characters do not flow continuously. Some stay as children in the world of fantasy. Some get bound up in symbols and never find the ground. Some characters are caught up in science without anticipating the applications that will be made of their discoveries. Other characters spend their lives in commerce fighting for wages or using tactics to maintain the dominance of wealth. The politicians look at the earth in terms of artificial geographic borders, defending their domains while encroaching on the property of others.
The primary characters are anarchists of fantasy, mathematics, science, commerce, and politics. They challenge the frontiers in each of these dimensions. The reader comes to an understanding of the driving force and goal of anarchy through the conscious and unconscious choices the characters make. The reader then has choices. Do we stay as children in fantasy, or do we take on adult responsibility? Are we satisfied with a symbolic description of the world or do we live in it? Can we make a living by the economic rules but also free ourselves from materialism? Do we ascend to political power or resist borders that require defense and foster encroachment? Is there a Shambhala, a vanishing point on this earth where we can approach perfect, boundless, infinite, multi-dimensional peace?
Take your own personal odyssey as you read Against the Day. Experience the fantasy but go beyond it. Do the math but learn to apply limits. Explore science but prevent its use in evil applications. See how to earn a living but avoid the traps of being owned by your possessions. Become aware of political power and fight against the immoral if necessary. And above all, when down becomes up, explore the frontiers of your life looking for Shambhala.
Thomas Pynchon’s epic novel, Against the Day, is an odyssey in four dimensions, and more. The reader is introduced to this imaginary space during the first pages of chapter one. The boys’ group, “Chums of Chance,” discuss the
Show More
altitude of their dirigible with the conclusion that if they keep going up into the lighted sky, they’ll be going down. How can rising become falling? All of the key characters in the tale ask themselves similar questions. The reader realizes early on that the reading time of Against the Day will be different from other novels, longer and shorter. In the novel, the path of light is followed as it travels through the 1085 pages at a constant velocity. Yet it is always changing over time, illuminating evolving territories and imaginary borders, and shining on the people who are both grounded and accepting of fantasy. The reader’s view of history and individual destiny is guided by Pynchon’s descriptions of light as they create a time-territory-personality matrix.
I started reading the book in November in tropical Hilton Head and finished it in February in the Ohio winter, on a personal odyssey. It was a wonderful exercise in translation, discovery, challenge, enlightenment, cynicism, slapstick, and wonderful insight. Surrounded by dictionary, laptop, atlas, and a bright reading lamp emitting waves and particles, I developed new points of view. Taking time to look up and study vocabulary, historical references, mathematical concepts, philosophical ideas, and psychological theories is required for understanding the novel.
The reader can make use of the two dimensional space of the page, scribbling notes in the margins. The notes get more complex as additional dimensions are perceived in terms of mental longitude and latitude. Cartesian coordinates emerge as the author explores the three dimensions of the novel’s settings. Then as the characters transcend geography and time imaginary dimensions are created, like images reflected in mirrors (reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass). Pynchon shows the reader that the number of dimensions is potentially infinite. So the novel’s characters can be here and there at the same time (bilocation) and can assume multiple points of view.
The ordered chaos of the chapters bring the reader to observation points that create insight, but then the points vanish. A new location in vector space is established by the author’s quaternion prose (look it up!). Yes, the reader begins to “see” a changeable, imaginary space. It is not an “aha” experience but more like a “wow” hallucination. But, have no fear; whatever is in that vector space is created by the reader’s own mental dimensions.
Major themes emerge from this imaginary time-space. One of them describes the human genius and folly as seen in the historical record. Pynchon shows the reader that ideas begin as fantasy. Mathematicians translate these fantasies into arbitrary symbols using an arcane logical system. Scientists use the symbols in their experiments attempting to ground them in quotidian reality. Leaders of commerce take the realized ideas and create marketable products. Politicians corner the markets and carve up the land for power and defense.
The novel describes paths for the secondary characters parallel to the historical record, but different. Unlike history, the lives of many of the background characters do not flow continuously. Some stay as children in the world of fantasy. Some get bound up in symbols and never find the ground. Some characters are caught up in science without anticipating the applications that will be made of their discoveries. Other characters spend their lives in commerce fighting for wages or using tactics to maintain the dominance of wealth. The politicians look at the earth in terms of artificial geographic borders, defending their domains while encroaching on the property of others.
The primary characters are anarchists of fantasy, mathematics, science, commerce, and politics. They challenge the frontiers in each of these dimensions. The reader comes to an understanding of the driving force and goal of anarchy through the conscious and unconscious choices the characters make. The reader then has choices. Do we stay as children in fantasy, or do we take on adult responsibility? Are we satisfied with a symbolic description of the world or do we live in it? Can we make a living by the economic rules but also free ourselves from materialism? Do we ascend to political power or resist borders that require defense and foster encroachment? Is there a Shambhala, a vanishing point on this earth where we can approach perfect, boundless, infinite, multi-dimensional peace?
Take your own personal odyssey as you read Against the Day. Experience the fantasy but go beyond it. Do the math but learn to apply limits. Explore science but prevent its use in evil applications. See how to earn a living but avoid the traps of being owned by your possessions. Become aware of political power and fight against the immoral if necessary. And above all, when down becomes up, explore the frontiers of your life looking for Shambhala.
Show Less
LibraryThing member fourbears
I started reading this in January and put it down for other projects. I started again this summer and found it much easier to read the parts I'd already read. Now I really feel like starting all over again and maybe and tracing down every reference. I once read Ulysses like that, with a concordance
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in one hand the Ulysses in the other. A more experienced reader, I got lots of references now (most focused on the science and history on the late 19th and early 20th century) and enjoyed doing so enormously. But I just discovered a Pynchon Wiki which explains references page by page. I also liked it because Pynchon plays constantly with the idea of time travel, a fun subject for me. There are zillions of characters with funny names. The novel starts at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 and moves to Colorado to Mexico to New England and New York, to England and Germany and France to Italy, to Central Asia and and Siberia and back to Istanbul and Bulgaria and Italy and California. The novel begins with the "Chums of Chance" who have "adventures" like the Hardy boys only in a hot air ballloon that increasingly as the novel progresses "escapes" this world for other worlds that may be parallel universes.... One of the difficult things is that there's not really a main character, though I found myself "hooked" when I looked forward to the next segment on the several characters that I really liked. NOW I can read the article I printed out on Against the Day and time travel! Show Less
LibraryThing member setnahkt
I initially encountered Thomas Pynchon when Gravity’s Rainbow was reviewed in the Science book section, a rare event for fiction (the only fiction I remember making such an appearance was Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series). Pynchon’s novels are full of mathematical references –
Pynchon does interesting sex scenes, running through an almost complete gamut of perversions (gang rape in V., adultery in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow; coprophagia, necrophilia, underage sex, S&M, bestiality (with an octopus) and stocking fetishism in Gravity’s Rainbow (as an example of his mathematical bent, Pynchon notes that the curve described by the top of a stocking held up by a garter belt is a catenary); and transvestitism, spanking and gay and Lesbian S&M in Against the Day. I have to say though that none of the sex scenes are there for the titillation value; in every case there’s a sound plot reason for the characters to do what they do and nothing seems forced (although I will say that character’s in Against the Day probably engage in an anachronistic amount of sex for the time, but the novel is obviously not intended to be historically accurate). Gravity’s Rainbow was rejected for the Pulitzer even after an unanimous recommendation by the jury because the Pulitzer board found it “obscene”; the objectionable passage is tiny part of a long book.
My most recent exploration of Pynchon is the aforementioned Against the Day; this is his longest novel (so far) and, although the jacket blurb describes it as “his most accessible”, is as complicated and confusing as the rest of them – but also as fascinating. It has all the normal Pynchon problems – an immense number of characters, many of whom don’t seem to have much to do with the plot – what there is of it – and lack of character depth (I can form very little mental image of what any of Pynchon’s characters look like. To be fair, I can’t imagine any of Jane Austen’s, either, and there’s nothing wrong with her novels). He’s also experimenting with his own variation of “magical realism”, in this case what you might call science fiction realism; the novel starts in 1893 but includes a number of futuristic elements. One of the subplots follows The Chums of Chance, a sort of Horatio Alger/Tom Swift bunch of boys who fly around the world in an airship, communicating with headquarters by a Tesla transmitter; the British navy operates a sort of mechanical mole vessel in the Central Asian desert; there’s a plot interlude involving a sort of Mountains of Madness adventure in the high Arctic; and there may or may not be some sort of quaternion weapon (the Q-gun; this might be yet another obscure science fiction reference as a “Q gun” appears in the “Doc” Smith Lensman series) that might or might not be responsible for the 1908 Tunguska event.
That brings us to another Pynchon characteristic – leaving plot questions unresolved. In V., we never learn who “V” is; The Crying of Lot 49 ends before we learn who bids on the counterfeit postage stamps; I’ve read the last third of Gravity’s Rainbow three times without being able to figure out what’s going on; the exact mission of the schooner Golden Fang never gets explicated in Inherent Vice, and Against the Day finishes without the Traverse family resolving their vendetta against their father’s murderers (although the Chums of Chance do get to hook up with a group of flying girls in the end).
Keeping track of plot and characters in Against the Day is difficult but challenging and worth the effort. Aside from the aforementioned lack of denouement – which is, after all, part of Pynchon’s style – my only minor criticism is the anachronistic insertion of 21st century politics into a book set across the turn of the 20th century. Pynchon has his Traverse family heroes make a couple of references to “Republican Christer capitalists”. Not only is “Christer” rather pejorative and highly out of time, but the people who would be most accurately described by that term at the time of the novel were mostly Democrats – William Jennings Bryan, for example. There’s not a lot of this; just enough to cause a twinge or two – but it represents an annoying trend of people projecting modern politics back into history (I’ve mentioned before a modern Marxist historian who decided that because the Earp brothers were Republicans and the Clantons were Democrats, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was an example of Wall Street oligocrats violently dispossessing progressive pastoralists).
I haven’t yet read Pynchon’s most recent, Bleeding Edge; of the others, Inherent Vice is probably the funniest; The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason&Dixon the most accessible; V., Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day bedside labyrinths; and Vineland the least interesting although still very good. I think I have to recommend them all.
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Gravity’s Rainbow includes the Poisson distribution definition in the text (since it describes V2 impact sites). Against the Day not only includes the Riemann zeta function, but a major plot element is conflict between quaternion enthusiasts and vectorists over which is the best technique (including a love affair between proponents of the opposing camps). Both Pynchon and I attended Cornell (Pynchon initially majored in Engineering Physics but, after a stint in the Navy, returned and graduated with a degree in English), both of us have a weakness for puns (one of the characters in Against the Day is a Uygur rabbit hunter named Al Mar-Fuad, who mispronounces “r” as “w”). Pynchon also is a Star Trek fan; the later novels usually include some reference – characters in Mason&Dixon and Against the Day find occasions to give a hand gesture with the palm raised and the second and third fingers spread, and there’s a series of references in Vineland to a science fiction television series where the entire spaceship crew is black except for the red-headed communications officer, Lieutenant O’Hara. The Star Trek franchise has apparently returned the favor; detailed freeze-frame examination of some of the engine room equipment on the Enterprise shows the logo of Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, after the fictional aerospace company Pynchon invented for V. and The Crying of Lot 49.Pynchon does interesting sex scenes, running through an almost complete gamut of perversions (gang rape in V., adultery in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow; coprophagia, necrophilia, underage sex, S&M, bestiality (with an octopus) and stocking fetishism in Gravity’s Rainbow (as an example of his mathematical bent, Pynchon notes that the curve described by the top of a stocking held up by a garter belt is a catenary); and transvestitism, spanking and gay and Lesbian S&M in Against the Day. I have to say though that none of the sex scenes are there for the titillation value; in every case there’s a sound plot reason for the characters to do what they do and nothing seems forced (although I will say that character’s in Against the Day probably engage in an anachronistic amount of sex for the time, but the novel is obviously not intended to be historically accurate). Gravity’s Rainbow was rejected for the Pulitzer even after an unanimous recommendation by the jury because the Pulitzer board found it “obscene”; the objectionable passage is tiny part of a long book.
My most recent exploration of Pynchon is the aforementioned Against the Day; this is his longest novel (so far) and, although the jacket blurb describes it as “his most accessible”, is as complicated and confusing as the rest of them – but also as fascinating. It has all the normal Pynchon problems – an immense number of characters, many of whom don’t seem to have much to do with the plot – what there is of it – and lack of character depth (I can form very little mental image of what any of Pynchon’s characters look like. To be fair, I can’t imagine any of Jane Austen’s, either, and there’s nothing wrong with her novels). He’s also experimenting with his own variation of “magical realism”, in this case what you might call science fiction realism; the novel starts in 1893 but includes a number of futuristic elements. One of the subplots follows The Chums of Chance, a sort of Horatio Alger/Tom Swift bunch of boys who fly around the world in an airship, communicating with headquarters by a Tesla transmitter; the British navy operates a sort of mechanical mole vessel in the Central Asian desert; there’s a plot interlude involving a sort of Mountains of Madness adventure in the high Arctic; and there may or may not be some sort of quaternion weapon (the Q-gun; this might be yet another obscure science fiction reference as a “Q gun” appears in the “Doc” Smith Lensman series) that might or might not be responsible for the 1908 Tunguska event.
That brings us to another Pynchon characteristic – leaving plot questions unresolved. In V., we never learn who “V” is; The Crying of Lot 49 ends before we learn who bids on the counterfeit postage stamps; I’ve read the last third of Gravity’s Rainbow three times without being able to figure out what’s going on; the exact mission of the schooner Golden Fang never gets explicated in Inherent Vice, and Against the Day finishes without the Traverse family resolving their vendetta against their father’s murderers (although the Chums of Chance do get to hook up with a group of flying girls in the end).
Keeping track of plot and characters in Against the Day is difficult but challenging and worth the effort. Aside from the aforementioned lack of denouement – which is, after all, part of Pynchon’s style – my only minor criticism is the anachronistic insertion of 21st century politics into a book set across the turn of the 20th century. Pynchon has his Traverse family heroes make a couple of references to “Republican Christer capitalists”. Not only is “Christer” rather pejorative and highly out of time, but the people who would be most accurately described by that term at the time of the novel were mostly Democrats – William Jennings Bryan, for example. There’s not a lot of this; just enough to cause a twinge or two – but it represents an annoying trend of people projecting modern politics back into history (I’ve mentioned before a modern Marxist historian who decided that because the Earp brothers were Republicans and the Clantons were Democrats, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was an example of Wall Street oligocrats violently dispossessing progressive pastoralists).
I haven’t yet read Pynchon’s most recent, Bleeding Edge; of the others, Inherent Vice is probably the funniest; The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason&Dixon the most accessible; V., Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day bedside labyrinths; and Vineland the least interesting although still very good. I think I have to recommend them all.
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LibraryThing member Lapsus16
Not as good as Gravity's Rainbow, but close. You will need a good semester to go through this, and a lot of internet/Wiki help. But at the end you will be a better person, more optimistic and more knowledgeable. Which is a lot to ask for from any book!
LibraryThing member Sandydog1
This one's my first attempt at Pynch. It's a 1100-page postmodern amalgam of historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, obscenity (not erotica; I knows it when I sees it), travel-adventure, violence, greed, anarchy, allusions, capitalism, surrealism and early 20th century zaniness.
It was a real
It was a real
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tough slog, but certainly well worth a re-read at some later date. Show Less
LibraryThing member abirdman
Pynchon's newest novel, and brilliant the way Gravity's Rainbow is. This is a (ginormous) book that runs on the pure energy of the joy of writing. More or less the history of the world from the Chicago Exposition in the 1880's to World War One, covering politics, science, populism, mathematics,
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Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, and the Wild West. Show Less
LibraryThing member billiecat
A Pynchon novel is not a "quick read." It took me ten years to finally work my way through "Mason & Dixon," having several false starts. It took me a couple of months to work my way through "Against the Day," even though it was not nearly as difficult. Pynchon's word-play, dense structure, his
In fact, I loved "Mason & Dixon," which added a layer of humanity on the work of an author whose writing sometimes seems as cold and inhuman as anything he must have written while he worked for Boeing. In "Against the Day" he returns more or less to his emotionally austere form, however, with a sprawling novel that moves from Colorado mining towns to Mexican revolutions to London, Vienna and Venice, to pre- and post-war Europe, and, as Pynchon says, "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all." One does not read Pynchon for deep character development (although "Mason & Dixon" broke new ground with its titular astronomer and surveyor), but it is expected that there will gobs of people with strange names, and Pynchon does not disappoint.
Indeed, this book as a whole does not disappoint. While not as good as "Mason & Dixon," "V." or "Gravity's Rainbow," it features the breadth of Pynchon's talent and is a worthy addition to his oeuvre.
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allusive prose-style, and sudden shifts in perspective and narrative focus mean a casual read is out of the question. Yet, despite the difficulty, I still enjoy Pynchon's novels. They are full of wit, some wisdom, and a lot of scope, always looming out there the Big Questions - like, where are we going, what are we doing here, and just what, after all is this book about?In fact, I loved "Mason & Dixon," which added a layer of humanity on the work of an author whose writing sometimes seems as cold and inhuman as anything he must have written while he worked for Boeing. In "Against the Day" he returns more or less to his emotionally austere form, however, with a sprawling novel that moves from Colorado mining towns to Mexican revolutions to London, Vienna and Venice, to pre- and post-war Europe, and, as Pynchon says, "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all." One does not read Pynchon for deep character development (although "Mason & Dixon" broke new ground with its titular astronomer and surveyor), but it is expected that there will gobs of people with strange names, and Pynchon does not disappoint.
Indeed, this book as a whole does not disappoint. While not as good as "Mason & Dixon," "V." or "Gravity's Rainbow," it features the breadth of Pynchon's talent and is a worthy addition to his oeuvre.
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LibraryThing member nog
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,
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?
It's too bad. When I was 20 years old, I read my first Pynchon,
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"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?
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LibraryThing member shawnd
Maybe 2 stars if an unknown author had written it. Pynchon's flow which has worked so well in other books, for me especially Mason Dixon, seems to be contrived and split apart formally into the different threads. I found myself resisting the unbelievable, fantastic and almost comic-book trials and
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travails of the boy heros traveling in the air balloon, while I loved the thread about the bad cowboy killer. I couldn't finish it; I found myself skipping the basically boring storylines trying to find the good ones--fortunately they didn't interconnect. Please don't read this as your first Pynchon because it might not make you come back for more. Show Less
LibraryThing member mabroms
Came out the other side and had only one dominating thought....please Thomas, at least one more epic novel.
LibraryThing member Vermilious
Complex and inspiring, Against The Day provides every novel you might think existed in the American Tradition of the early 1900s with a fair shake and some pages. A crew of boys flys an airship, saving the world from mysterious danger. An anarchist becomes a dynamiting hero, while his children
Written with Pynchon's typical humor and lyricality, Against The Day becomes a novel obsessed with Time and math, with the beginning of cinema, the Mexican revolution, and any number of other subjects. Spies and secret societies abound, as does paranoia, and anarchism.
The book is simply too much to sum up without these phrases. It sprawls, intimidates, but offers excitement and adventure to those willing to stick it out. Be prepared to reread occasionally, and come to terms with the fact that you cannot remember every character. I have never met a book so full of ideas, a book where a phrase prompts me to be lost in thought roughly once every 10 pages. Let the tidal wave of Against The Day wash over you, and emerge, feeling refreshed and afraid, smarter for the experience.
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struggle with his legacy. A British soldier saves a young girl, who is maybe more gifted than she seems. The plot weaves between these elements and more, following from the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago to The Great War and beyond. Characters travel in time, and we travel with them, rewinding to live moments again and again. In. This, the reader understands not only the complexity of time, but genre.Written with Pynchon's typical humor and lyricality, Against The Day becomes a novel obsessed with Time and math, with the beginning of cinema, the Mexican revolution, and any number of other subjects. Spies and secret societies abound, as does paranoia, and anarchism.
The book is simply too much to sum up without these phrases. It sprawls, intimidates, but offers excitement and adventure to those willing to stick it out. Be prepared to reread occasionally, and come to terms with the fact that you cannot remember every character. I have never met a book so full of ideas, a book where a phrase prompts me to be lost in thought roughly once every 10 pages. Let the tidal wave of Against The Day wash over you, and emerge, feeling refreshed and afraid, smarter for the experience.
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LibraryThing member zip_000
I don't exactly remember when I started reading this book, but it seems like a long, long time ago. My first impression of the book is that it is massive - a bit over 1000 pages. My most recent impression is that it was quite a good book. Of Pynchon's novels, it is probably the most easily
I think one of the reasons for its size, as well as one of the reasons for its accessibility, is that it is really more like 4 or 5 books - in as many styles - than one book. There is a boys adventure story, there is a western revenge story, there is a noire detective story, there is a European espionage story, there is an oriental mysticism story. Of course all of the stories and styles are all mish-mashed together. Reading other reviews, it seems that many people came to this looking for a message or some meaning, but I really doubt that there is any coherent take away from a book like this.
I'd like to write more because it was such an amazing book, but I'm not feeling terribly inspired at the moment.
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accessible with the possible exception of Vineland.I think one of the reasons for its size, as well as one of the reasons for its accessibility, is that it is really more like 4 or 5 books - in as many styles - than one book. There is a boys adventure story, there is a western revenge story, there is a noire detective story, there is a European espionage story, there is an oriental mysticism story. Of course all of the stories and styles are all mish-mashed together. Reading other reviews, it seems that many people came to this looking for a message or some meaning, but I really doubt that there is any coherent take away from a book like this.
I'd like to write more because it was such an amazing book, but I'm not feeling terribly inspired at the moment.
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LibraryThing member Tracy_Tomkowiak
This book sits on my bookshelf, having only read about a hundred pages. Lost interest and gave up, but hope to return to it one day.
LibraryThing member ShanLizLuv
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."
LibraryThing member emed0s
First of all let me tell you that despite the low rating I've read this book from end to end, hoping to get to like as most people seems to do.
I was disappointed from the very beginning when I found that this book could be categorized as fiction but also as fantasy, all the "magic" flying ships,
And then there's the over-crafted language, I recognize that Pynchon is really good at writing but plenty of times it just felt like pseudointellectualism for me, fabricating really complex descriptions or conversations that don't serve any purpose.
The book is long enough to have parts where my main complains are not present but then the lack of both deep characters and a cohesive story kept me away from enjoying the reading.
I was disappointed from the very beginning when I found that this book could be categorized as fiction but also as fantasy, all the "magic" flying ships,
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time travel ...And then there's the over-crafted language, I recognize that Pynchon is really good at writing but plenty of times it just felt like pseudointellectualism for me, fabricating really complex descriptions or conversations that don't serve any purpose.
The book is long enough to have parts where my main complains are not present but then the lack of both deep characters and a cohesive story kept me away from enjoying the reading.
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LibraryThing member jlawshe
Maybe I'm getting too old. Or maybe the fact that I've started writing fiction in earnest is changing my reading tastes. Or maybe I just don't have time for these doorstops now that I'm out of school.Whatever the case, I'm starting to feel a little disillusioned with Pynchon. I still really love V.
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and Gravity's Rainbow, but TRP's random hyper-referential stylings are starting to wear me down. And yet, every time he comes out with a book, I have to read it. Like it's my duty. At least the next one (Inherent Vice) is short. Show Less
LibraryThing member Katong
I'm just about to drop this... but it's not without trying. I got 250 pages in, before losing patience. The pyrotechnics are there and very pleasing page-to-page, and there are plenty of gags. But I find myself less amused by the Victorian boys-own conceits and the Moonstone pastiche. I'm starting
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to get a "what's it all for" little voice urging me to put it down. Will I continue? Watch this space... Show Less
LibraryThing member matthue
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.
LibraryThing member DrLed
Story Synopsis: Young men fly around in a hot air balloon having adventures. Another person raises a daughter after his wife leaves him.
Review: After approximately 200 pages, I still was not invested in the story enough to finish the book. There didn’t seem to be much point to the overall story
Review: After approximately 200 pages, I still was not invested in the story enough to finish the book. There didn’t seem to be much point to the overall story
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or to any of the sub-stories. This is supposed to be a classic book, but I found it verbose, dull, and uninteresting. Show Less
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Massive but engaging and readable tome about the world before the Great War.
Subjects
Awards
The Morning News Tournament of Books (Quarterfinalist — 2007)
Bad Sex in Fiction Award (Shortlist — 2006)
Booklist Editor's Choice: Adult Books (Fiction — 2006)
The New York Times Notable Books of the Year (Fiction & Poetry — 2006)
Locus Recommended Reading (2006)
San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year (Fiction — 2006)
Language
Original publication date
2006-11-21
Physical description
1085 p.; 25 cm
ISBN
159420120X / 9781594201202