Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.89 You Save: $9.11 (51%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.92 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Against the Day
Book Review: an experience
Summary: 5 Stars
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.Book Review: here's your reward for working so hard
Summary: 5 Stars
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----Book Review: literary free jazz
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
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.
Book Review: pelicans for hire
Summary: 4 Stars
Reading 'Against the Day' felt like a possibly well-deserved act of intellectual self-flagellation. It hurt real bad...but maybe in a constructive manner. I'm too confused to tell. Researching many of the concepts in the book, my brain...my humorously feeble brain...imploded and is now a tender wedge of unsightly flesh (roughly the size and texture of a goldfish).
Though I can now tell you what a quaternion is...I cannot tell you WHY a quaternion is. Because of The Jesus? A non-tangential supposition: "god is dead", and the vacuum of his leaving exploded Tunguska. It exploded Tunguska real good. Trees fell. Shambhala had its privacy fence knocked down. Sad for all. Wait, I should have added "Spoiler Alert!" before saying that. Anyway.
I do get sick of complaints regarding the novel's length. The phone book is not only long, but tedious...and they reprint that one constantly. I've never heard anyone say, "Christ, this phone book is loooong". This criticism: invalid. Besides, excessive page numbers provide great examples of strong technical writing. Kids today...they need examples.
In closing: do read Against the Day. Do not understand Against the Day.
Pynchon Tip #427: once the spine of Against the Day is sufficiently crinkled, leave it at a conspicuous location on your bookshelf. The ladies go crazy for this sort of thing. Throw in an obscure quaternion reference and the wooing can't be stopped. (Mix with booze as needed).