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here's your reward for working so hard
“This is our greatest living author's best book. If you give a damn about contemporary fiction, you'll read it; if you know how to slow yourself down and savor outstanding prose as if it were--as it is--poetry, you'll be reading Against The Day for the rest of your life. But what matters much more than that is this: almost no one this smart is this kind. I envy you not having read it yet and about to----”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-13. -
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
“Like a toothsome fruitcake, Pynchon once again creates a world of dense and flavorful characters in the fast evolving lead up to the 20th century. At the very foundations of air travel and electricity, we fly headlong into the future. The international forces of money and evil pitted against a new era of high minded science and new world philosophy. This is not a fast read, but it is compelling. The most apt comparison would be to call it the Moby Dick of Victorian technology.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-29. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
an experience
“Thomas Pynchon is probably the best writer of all time. Yes, I'm prejudiced toward loving this book. And I did love it. Completely. It's all chaos, yet it all adds up to a consistent whole. It's very readable, but it doesn't lose any of Pynchon's style or wit. The characters are allowed to act on stages ranging from Mexico during the revolution to a religious refuge in the far east. It's a beautiful novel. It romanticizes the anarchist, but it gives him a voice and a reason. The individual anarchist is his own individual; he is not united under one cause past his own freedom to think. Pynchon speaks for the lost and abandoned, and he embraces the chaos of the world as what makes it important. Forces of order act all around us, but it is the forces of chaos, perhaps violent, perhaps not, that are really working for the freedom of the individual in finding himself within himself and the world. We are meant to interpret the chaos of the world, as well as this book. ”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-03-18. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
Difficult read made engaging
“Having recently finished Thomas Pynchon's 1,000+ page book AGAINST THE DAY and think it to be an equal to his famous GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, I am now taking the impulse to immediately reread it but this time in book-on-audio format. The chaotic and wholly unpredictable flights of fancy amidst a rigorous structure (explore the underlying symmetry of the central chapter where Kit and Dally meet) and unfathomable depth (some issues seem grander than any single individual can contemplate) make this an early important literary achievement of the 21st century. But the CD, as read by the most extremely talented "vocalist" (for lack of a more laudatory title) Dick Hill, is immensely helpful where the book comes up a bit short. The producers of the book have taken pains to clarify the dialog passages and enhance the comedy, and have found a talent equal to their purpose who blithely moves from Brooklyn accent, East Indian, Southern black, country Western drawl, to Finnish broken English, etc. with amusing ease. One drawback of the CD, which can be blamed on the layout of the book, is that there is no sense of chapters (the book does not number or title the different chapters but does acknowledge them with page breaks; the CD does not do that). But that is a minor point and not worth any diminution of its 5-star value! I am astonished that the publishers see any profit in releasing an audio version of a tough book by a difficult author. But I am so glad they did! It may in fact payoff as it is easier to get at Pynchon's world this way.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-01-06. -
18 of 20 members found this review helpful.
literary free jazz
“Having at long, long last reached the end of this monster--with, on my own part, quite as many diversions, side-trips, digressions and submissions to entropy as the Traverse clan and their cohorts experienced--I feel fully entitled to say at the end of the very long day (and "Day"): mmmmyehh.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-09-10.
Other reviewers have sufficiently rehearsed the plot, such as it is (and the whole point of the book is: "it isn't"). Open the book at random--and you may as well, for there's little to be gained from reading it sequentially--and you're almost guaranteed to find, on any given page, a startling turn of phrase, a striking metaphor, an inspired simile, or a rapturous, descriptive prose-poem. Which is to say, all these years on, Pynchon's gift for the English language is undiminished. Joyce, Nabokov and Gaddis are really his only peers in the last hundred years.
Alas, all these years on, his vices are also undiminished. I come to Against the Day having read V. the year before (and having read all Pynchon's other novels at various times prior to that) and what strikes me is that here is an artist who has completely failed to develop over the years. Everything he does well, he did equally well in 1963; everything he does poorly (plotting, characterization, pacing, editing) he still does very poorly. Indeed, the similarities between V.and AtD are so striking--both concerned with the Great Game, woo-woo metaphysics and pseudoscience, and an imminent apocalypse--that they often read as if the one were a rewrite of the other.
Is it so unreasonable to expect a little artistic development in 45 years? I, for one, don't see it. In AtD, Pynchon gives us exactly what we've come to expect...and this, to me, is not the hallmark of a great artist, it's the hallmark of a one-trick pony. It's a hell of a trick--one that kept me entertained for several years--but at this point it's time to learn a new one.
Too, except for Pynchon cultists, I defy anyone not to be bored for long stretches of this bloated opus. The Virginia Quarterly reviewer hit the nail squarely on the head when he called Pynchon a "pub bore": someone who has half-digested mountains of random facts at his disposal and is determined to blow your mind with his erudition. Think: Cliff Clavin on steroids and crystal meth. For every genuinely interesting bit of period (1893-WWI) arcana that he's unearthed there must be a dozen of interest only to historians and steampunk obsessives.
Still, just when I'd get fed up, I'd get drawn back in. Parts of the book are certainly as splendid as anything he's ever written...and if there's a lot of the twee, the tedious, and the inane to wade through in between flashes of inspiration and insight, no adventure worth its salt--as the Chums of Chance might have it--is free of its dangers and doldrums. Pynchon fans will read it as a matter of course. Pynchon newbies, however, would be well-advised to get their feet wet with V., Gravity's Rainbow, or Mason & Dixon. ”
