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 Butterworth
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.

An amazing book, describing a time of turmoil and discovery, showing the best and worst of mankind and individual men and women. This multifaceted story begins at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and ends after the world altering events of World War I. The world is moving into new areas; armies on horseback are giving way to men with machine guns. The wide open West of the United States is being increasingly hemmed in by wealthy industrialists who hire "goons" with guns to break strikes. In Europe, the structure of the continent is changed by the outcome of WWI. And against this background, there is a large cast of characters living big lives. Anarchists around the globe strike out against those that would control them.

Then there are the metaphorical levels of the book.. Here the major motif is light in its many forms and applications: natural, man-made, possibly supernatural. Mentions of light occur constantly and light is the subject of some characters's work. Time and space also are constantly considered; I.e. slipping in and out of present time or space, etc. If the book were a bit shorter, I might consider a re-read to track these themes. One of the most spectacular instances of light is that of the Tunguska Event which unnerved people in a large swath of the world for some time.

As I neared the end, I began to think about the broad themes of this book: light (? as an entity in itself, as a force), light vs darkness, anarchy and anarchists, power, evil, war, money behind most evil and only limited good. And the characters, well they are geniuses and dummies, killer's and serial lovers, anarchists and strikebreakers, millionaires and peasants, dreamers and realists.... In short, they are all of humanity and some who may not be of this world.

Like Mason & Dixon, the other Pynchon book I've read (and recommend) Against the Day is historical fiction, fantasy, sci fi, a picture of a world on the brink of massive change--economically, politically, in the military, scientifically, geopolitically, essentially in almost every way. The only difference is the century. Pynchon has given us a work that in some ways is indescribable but is a wonder to read. As I have said before, I will readily admit: I do not understand much of it, but that didn't interfere with my enjoyment.

Like all great things, Against The Day refuses summary. By its length and complexity, the sheer amount of Time it takes to get through, the concentration it requires to keep track of its multitude of characters, its encyclopedia of settings and events, its fascination with emerging ideas, scientific advances, political movements, technologies, its exploration of a wide variety of metaphysics and religious ideas, its globe-spanning survey of world events at the turn of the last century, by its very form and nature and what it demands of its serious readers it consumes one as one consumes it- a dedicated reader must live with it and make it live with them. I found myself unable to read anything else while reading it. It tendrils itself into one’s being, and at multiple levels, for its vast intellectual wells, its deep humanity, its overt tenderness, its tendency to search out the ineffable anima of its characters, to locate the emotional node in a natural setting, often only by a fleeting observational note, how it errs on the side of the complex and the mind-bending and often absurd, how it is dedicated to not explaining its mysteries, while at the same time not shying away from lengthy digressions on mathematical abstractions and physical properties of minerals and light and space, might seem in contrast to the fanciful “boy’s adventure comic” framing device of the novel, its frequent low-brow wordplay and ridiculous jokes, and the many turn-of-the-century story cliches it employs, expands upon, subsumes into its cosmos- pistol-packin’ Westerns, hard-boiled detective novels, science fiction, prairie family dramas, etc.- but this is far from the case. The “types” employed that fill out this huge cast of characters and events are only more framing devices, tropes, daubs on the palette of a set of collective narrative tactics, a kind of collection of familiar apparitions used to set in motion Pynchon’s universe-sized epic.

This is one of those Big Books where it is arguable that the true “characters” of the novel are the mechanics of the universe. Light and Darkness, Time, the Stars, Gravity, Earth, Mathematics, Death, Rebirth, New Life. But this would be disregarding that the novel is really, simply, a drama of two families at the end of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century, living through its changes and disasters, its sociopolitical upheavals. And how perfect their names- Traverse and Rideout. Rideout and Traverse. One might also easily be persuaded that this is a pure fantasy novel, for it cares not for adhering to the rules of this universe, and the Chums of Chance, the aeronautic motivus of action in the book, transcend all rules of space, time, and physics. Ghosts and wanderers from the future dwell in its pages- psychics, seances, the Tarot, other-dimensional interventions are ubiquitous, impossible objects and geometry-defying buildings and landscapes abound. Within the world of ATD the fantastic lives directly astride the Real, parted only by a thin veil that is constantly leapt across. As well, one could be tempted to call ATD an historical novel (because it is pure historical fictioneering) for one of Pynchon’s great preoccupations here is the “singling up of all lines” of history into its inevitability- how the past, when it was present tense, shed all other possibilities to become the future it became. But he extends this and asks: What of the infinite possible pasts, and if their infinite futures were realized? What have become of and where are located the possible futures we have shed by narrowing down potentiality through choice and chance?- These other worlds, dimensions, or speculative universes are the true setting of Against The Day, and all the talk of Vectorists, Quaternions, Riemann surfaces, tesseracts, properties of the Aether, of Light, of Iceland spar and its double-refractive properties, are ways of asking a huge question, one we are caught in the very middle of in this experiment of becoming ever more conscious beings: Once, men sat and looked out on a flat plain and called that plain the world, and the world was thought flat and the center of the universe- then we built ships and set out, and found the world was round, and then we went further and found that the earth was not the center of the universe at all, but a speck in a cosmos unimaginably huge and complex- and so we built ships to attempt a crossing of that other ocean, the one not of water but of Space, and as we progress onward making discoveries and refining mathematics, it might follow that that first uncentering of the earth, the first rounding of the earth, might be the first of a long process of uncentering, of “rounding” the universe into its proper form and setting- maybe a thread, a membrane, or a spheroid amongst countless, uncountable other universes, maybe expanding forever into what we can’t conceive, and what might this mean, and who is out there living beside us, invisibly, each and every fractured moment of our lives? And are there other Selves out there, doubled, trebled, even uncountable versions of us living out lives across this multi-dimensional sprawl? What are their destinies? And, considering the unbearable tragedies of History personal and universal, what might have been?

Light and darkness, their ambiguities, how their antagonism creates our reality. Life and death, and the borderlands between, thin as a tissue, wavering in a gust of wind. Dreams and waking life, and what’s the difference and how would we know when we are within one and within the other? Identity, what we are at any given moment, the way we know ourselves to be ourselves. Mathematics, science, and religion, the development of how humans attempt to explain their strange presence here in this baffling realm, which seems made not to be bound in words and symbols, but always becomes so, more and more, each day, with each new sunrise, both more understandable and simultaneously more mysterious, unexplainable. The heart and the head. All lines of history, specifically at the turn of the last century, singling up into the slaughterhouse of WWI and its death-twin two decades later, hand in hand, devouring generations and echoing like the tolls of dead bells even now, remaining in toxic presences flitting in and out of our collective consciousness, what those events tell about our nature. The horror behind us, and what’s ahead? What might we make of the Time remaining? Love and absence. Family. Madness and revenge. Chance and determination. Free will or despotism. Anarchy and capitalism. These ideas, questions, problems, swirling around us in the aether, facets of mind and world- our Being is composed of how we confront these. Against The Day has somehow managed to map and tell a comedic epic of Being underneath these storm-skies, these cloud-form-phenomena that hang above us all, ready to let light in or rain down lightning and thunderous darkness. How does one possibly novelize questions like these, bring them into our terms and under the control of our language? However it is done, Pynchon has achieved that here.

And it builds and builds throughout its 1100 pages to the finale, and it is fun and funny the entire time, and it is packed full of adventure and danger and heros and villains, narrow escapes and love affairs, and it is deep and wide and tender and sad and strange and struck through with longing and loss and incomprehensibility, like existence. And like us it anticipates something parting the darkened sky, a vehicle of magic bearing “good unsought and uncompensated”, from some dimension better than ours, to deliver us, to carry us away in light- We of the Futurity of Narrowing Possibilities, we await our Chums of Chance. They fly toward grace.

I loved traveling along the four parallel storylines of this, the longest of Pynchon's books. I think I fell in love with Dahlia Rideout (sorry Kit). I wanted to be one of the Chums of Chance or at least read their books to my kid with the Hardy Boys. I wanted to have a whiskey with Lew Basnight (although I may have been terrified). I loved the bad guys and the good guys and really all the characters here. There was so much to enjoy, so much to think about, never a dull moment. Of all of Pynchon's books, this was probably the most fun (even if I preferred Mason&Dixon for its two main characters).

In retrospect, I find myself dreaming and pondering AtD more than GR or M&D. I have even developed a slight obsession with Dahlia Rideout as my favorite heroine of all time (am I alone of this particular fetish or have her beautiful eyes and sassy talk seduced other readers as well?) i wish that Brian Vaughn would do a comic of the adventures of The Chums of Chance (rather than The Escapist) as that was also an awesome and beautiful part of the plot. AtD makes me wish in vain that there was more Pynchon out there to read, but, alas, there is not.

Fino's Pynchon Reviews:
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n  n: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...

"Era difícil situar el acento de Dally en algún lugar concreto de América, se diría que era una voz del camino, de las que van y vienen, evocando ciudades que creías haber olvidado o en las que nunca deberías haberte aventurado, o incluso anunciando unas urbes de las que podrías haber oído hablar y a las que tenías pensado ir algún día.”.


Decidí no ponerle estrellitas a esta reseña porque no sé bien si me ha gustado o no esta novela de Pynchon, ni siquiera sé si la he pillado o no, porque hubo pasajes en los que estuvo a punto de sacarme de quicio por los momentos gratuitos y no sabía de donde salían tantos personajes y hacía dónde iban, y sin embargo, hubo otros momentos que disfruté muchísimo, así que cuando llegué al final, me encontré totalmente agotada por toda esa saturación pynchoniana de trucos literarios continuos que parecía estar sacándose de la chistera casi sin ton ni son... o eso es lo que me parecía mientras iba leyendo. He dejado pasar unos días antes de escribir este comentario y ahora tengo las ideas más claras aunque todavía no sé si realmente me ha gustado "Against the day", en España titulada "Contraluz", la he disfrutado por ciertos momentos aislados, más que por la visión de conjunto. Es todo muy desigual, desmedida e irregular, con historias que parecían callejones sin salida pero al mismo tiempo el universo que nos presenta es soberbio en su concepción y dependiendo del segmento que nos estuviera contando Pynchon, demuestra un talento asombroso de pasar del pulp a la novela de espías casi en un pestañeo, o de la novela de aventuras a la de ciencia ficción en otro pestañeo. Otro detalle que me ha impresionado es que es una novela que está en continua acción, in motion eterno; todos sus personajes se estan desplazando, moviéndose, viajando, huyendo o buscando. Es una mezcla rara la de esta novela, no puedo recomendarla pero al mismo tiempo tampoco la dejaría de recomendar :-).


“Durante mucho tiempo pensé que era una persona bastante profunda. Luego comprendí que estaba tomando por profundidad lo que solo era confusión. Como un lienzo que produce la ilusión de una dimensión más, aunque cada capa tomada independientemente es tan superficial que casi se transparenta.“.


Este es el tercer Pynchon que se cruza en mi camino y como ya he comentado en las reseñas anteriores, tengo una relación rara con Pynchon, no es que no me sienta cómoda con él sino que directamente sus momenos anticlimáticos me crean una necesidad de abandonarlo aunque son momentos aislados, porque ya digo que luego remonta y consigue volver a atraer mi atención. En Against the day, el problema se complica un poco porque es su novela más extensa, una novela entre histórica, sci-fi, fantástica con toques de western, novela de espías y steampunk, que reúne en más de mil páginas y casi 200 personajes, una trama dificil de resumir. Es un texto muy accesible, no tan complejo como "El arco irís de gravedad", por ejemplo, pero es tan extenso, hay tantas lineas argumentales y tantos personajes que es prácticamene imposible encajarlo todo de una tacada, ya que en un principio parece algo caótico el hecho de que hasta el ultimo momento de la novela esté creando personajes nuevos que parecen no aportar nada a la trama, personajes que aparecen y desaparecen ya para siempre, y otros que resurgen trescientas páginas después y el lector ya ni se acordaba de quién es quién. Hay varias tramas paralelas, suceden cosas en todos los frentes abiertos y al mismo tiempo Pynchon está continuamente mezclando géneros, parodiándolos incluso, creando escenas anticlimáticas en el sentido de que cuando más cómodo se encuentra el lector creyendo que ha pillado la trama, Pynchon le da un giro y cambia completamente el tono pasando de un párrafo casi poético a otro totalmente burdo en el que incluso los chistes no tienen gracia. Esta es otra, los chistes pesados y reiterativos, las canciones casi infantiles, las escenas de sexo totalmente gratuitas algunas de ellas y los diálogos entre machirulos, son otros aspectos que me me han hecho desconectar en varios momentos de esta novela; no termino de pillar ese tono gamberro porque no sé si es un mero capricho o es algo consciente o estudiado por parte del autor; es algo que en "El arco íris de Gravedad" parecía muy justificado y sin embargo en "Against the day" he tenido la impresión de que muchos momentos no estaban justificados, ni las bromas, ni el sexo y ni siquiera una cierta degradación en el tono de muchos diálogos. Hay momentos durante esta novela en los que incluso tuve la impresión de que Pynchon estuviera tanteando, creando una novela experimental bajo una pátina de novela de aventuras: inventando tramas nuevas continuamente, dando a luz otros personajes casi en cada página, para luego difuminarse a lo largo de la novela no aportando nada más al conjunto del texto. Son estos cambios de tono lo que me parece más dificil de encajar sobre todo en esta novela, cambios de tono que están definidos por una parodia a los géneros preestablecidos, intuyo que todo perfectamente orquestrado por su pluma para emparentarnos de alguna forma con la presión de los tiempos modernos.


"Hemos venido a establecernos entre vosotros buscando refugio de nuestro presente (que es vuestro futuro), una época de hambre en todo el mundo, de reservas de combustible agotadas, de pobreza terminal; el fin del experimento capitalista. Cuando acabamos comprendiendo la sencilla verdad termodinámica de que los recursos de la Tierra eran limitados, de hecho se agotaron muy pronto, la ilusión capitalista se hizo añicos.".


"Against the day" abarca una franja temporal de casi treinta años, desde la Exposición Universal de Chicago de 1893 hasta la época inmediatamente posterior a la Primera Guerra Mundial y Thomas Pynchon nos pasea por medio planeta siguiendo a sus personajes, desde la costa occidental de América hasta el interior de Asia, pasando por Africa, México y la Europa convertida casi en una bomba de relojería justo antes de la Primera Guerra Mundial, los Balcanes, Alemania, Austria.... “La peninsula balcánica es el restaurante de la casa de huéspedes de Europa, peligrosamente atestada, eternamente hambrienta, envenenada por los antagonismos. Un paraíso para los traficantes de armas y la desesperación de los burócratas.” En este aspecto es una novela apasionante por la forma que tiene Pynchon de entender la geopolitica, el dominio y el control de unas naciones sobre otras, los intereses creados, su obsesión por el poder colonial y muchas de las tramas inciden directamente en ciertos eventos históricos ya sobradamente conocidos, y aunque en este aspecto parezcan unos acontecimientos un tanto caóticos, todo va encajando (más o menos) a través de unos personajes centrales que van recorriendo estos mundos: aereonautas, anarquistas, matemáticos, viajeros en el tiempo, espías… una trama histórica que se va transformando en otra más fantástica porque las grandes potencias luchan por localizar la mítica ciudad de Shambhala en submarinos que recorren las arenas de los desiertos de Asia central. "Todos vosotros y vuestro repertorio de técnicas de evasión: negar el paso del tiempo, buscar una compañía cada vez más joven, construir pequeños entornos herméticos llenos de arte imperecedero…" Aunque yo diría que en el centro de toda esta amalgama gigantesca de personajes, estarían los Traverse, una familia americana en la que el padre, Webb Traverse, un minero de Colorado de día, y anarquista dinamitador de noche, es el eje central a través del cual se empiezan a bifurcar el resto de las tramas a lo largo de las mil páginas. Cuando Scarsdale Vibe, un plutócrata corrupto ordena el asesinato de Webb, dos de sus hijos, Reef y Frank convierten en el objetivo de su vida vengar la muerte de su padre.. El pequeño de ellos, Kit, sin embargo, un prodigio de las matemáticas, acepta el ofrecimiento del asesino de su padre para que le financie una beca en Yale, y su hermana Lake, directamente se fuga con uno de los asesinos de su padre. Una trama que puede parecerse a un culebrón pulp pero que no deja ser un culebrón pynchoniano :). A grosso modo se podría decir que esta sería la esencia de la trama central y a partir de la cual se moverán los mecanismos que hacen funcionar (más o menos) la trama del conjunto de la novela. Los hijos de Webb se desperdigan por el mundo, encuentros, conspiraciones, aventuras, amores, despedidas mientras Pynchon nos va presentando un mundo ya viejo descomponiéndose para ir dando cabida a la modernidad.


"Nunca había percibido grandes diferencias entre el régimen zarista y el capitalismo americano. Tal vez incluso fuera un poco peor para nosotros llegar a Estados Unidos después de haber oído hablar tanto de la tierra de los libres. Creyó que se había escapado de algo y se topó con que la vida aquí era tan miserable y fría como allí, con la misma riqueza sin conciencia, la misma pobre gente en la miseria...".


Paralelamente a este hilo argumental que emparenta a los Traverse en Estados Unidos, hay otros hilos argumentales que incluso se podrían llegar a considerar realidades alternativas a un paso del steampunk con sus máquinas del tiempo, y portales a esa otra realidad alternativa con emplazamientos reales como Venecia o figurados como Shambhala que dotan a esta novela de una atmósfera irreal. Hay segmentos que parecen sacados de una novela de aventura de Julio Verne, y otros tan existencialistas que realmente es difícil pensar en otro autor que sea capaz de este cacao maravillao, a veces glorioso pero en otros momentos de medidas desproporcionadas.


“Hay lugares que tememos, lugares que soñamos, lugares de los que nos convertimos en exiliados, sin darnos cuenta hasta que, a veces, ya es demasiado tarde.".

"There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late."



Se podría decir que esta novela es un texto de dualidades porque funciona siempre en dos sentidos: es novela histórica al mismo tiempo que novela fantástica, muchos personajes tienen su propio Doppelgänger, misterioso siempre, que parece la misma persona con el nombre cambiado, tienen incluso una misión de día y otra de noche, otros tienen la facultad de poder estar en dos lugares a la vez, la bilocación, un tema esencial en el transcurso de la novela, o el amanecer contrarrestado con el atardecer, que se repite una y otra vez en las descripciones de Pynchon, la noche eterna en la que la luz es necesaria: "Somos luz, sabe?, nada más que luz: somos la luz que se les ofrece a los bateadores de cricket al final del día, los ojos brillantes del amado, el resplandor de la cerilla de seguridad de la ventana del edificio alto, las estrellas y las nebulosas en plena gloria nocturna, la luna creciente a través de los cables del tranvía, la lámpara de nafta brillando sobre la carretilla del vendedor ambulante…" Además hay continuamente una fragmentación entre lo realista y la fantasía, entre el lenguaje histórico en algunos segmentos y el lenguaje científico, quizás lo que pretenda transmitirnos con estas continuas dualidades es que tras la realidad del día, es en la noche donde ocurre todo lo que es de verdad importante, lo fantástico es tan necesario como la realidad más cotidiana.


“Sé que resulta difícil para un inglés, pero por un instante procure imaginar que salvo en las formas más limitadas y triviales, la historia no sucede al norte del paralelo cuarenta y cinco. Lo que la Europa del Norte considera historia es en realidad bastante provinciano y de un interés limitado. Diferentes tipos de cristianos matándose entre sí y poco más. Las potencias del Norte se parecen más a administradores que manipulan la historia de otros pueblos pero no producen nada propio. Son agiotistas de la historia, las vidas humanas son su moneda de cambio. Las vidas que de verdad son vividas, las muertes que les ponen de verdad fin, todo está hecho de carne, sangre, semen, huesos, fuego, dolor, mierda, locura, intoxicación, visiones, todo lo que ha estado pasando aquí desde siempre, es historia real.”.


Lo que más me ha interesado de esta novela es el contexto histórico, del mismo modo que en El arco iris de gravedad lo que más me impactó fue la atmósfera de desesperación de una Europa de la posguerra, aquí en Against the day, aunque no me parece que esté tan bien conseguido, sí que es cierto que Pynchon demuestra un talento innato a la hora de describir lo que es el capitalismo más vampírico, las nuevas tecnologías ajustándose a un mundo en plena descomposición, o el control sobre los demás: “Las diferencias entre las religiones del mundo son de hecho bastante triviales comparadas con el enemigo común, las antiguas permanentes tinieblas que todos odiamos, tenemos y combatimos sin cesar.“ En Against the day también hay una guerra a las puertas de Europa, pero antes de que estalle, ya nos ha hablado de los intereses creados y de que todo forma parte de una puesta en escena perfectamente orquestada y y milimetrada. Esta planteando una realidad histórica que podría haber optado por otros derroteros, y el ser humano sin embargo opta por los juegos de dominación y sumisión como una metáfora del ejercicio del poder econónimo (por eso todas esas escenas sadomasoquistas por las que parece que tiene una fijación y que intuyo que funcionan como una especie de paralelismo con el mundo que está retratando), así que ese estilo caótico imagino que está perfectamente controlado en un intento por contagiarnos esta irracionalidad de los tiempos: el lector debe ser capaz de sentir que está sentado sobre un campo de minas.


“You have no idea what you are heading into. This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell.”.


En definitiva, Against the day es la novela que más me ha confundido de las que he leído de Pynchon porque esa aparente accesibilidad engaña. Es muy difícil en una obra tan extensa, poder mantener una regularidad, pero así y todo tiene atisbos magníficos, el problema es que también hay muchos segmentos que me han parecido muy gratuitos que no justifican la trama. Es cierto también que es una novela que desafía al lector continuamente obligándole a cambiar de registro y ajustarse a sus cambios de ritmo. El hecho de que Against the day sea aparentemente una novela de aventuras no nos puede distraer también del hecho de que Pynchon está jugando con nosotros, con los estilos de narración y con los géneros creando su propia propuesta, en este caso concreto tal como comenté al principio de este comentario, es un texto en continuo movimiento. No hay un momento de pasividad, es un viaje continuo a otros umbrales de este mundo.


“Las estaciones entraban una a una en el pasado. El túnel de Semmerging, el valle del Mur, castillos en ruinas, la compañía repentina de viajeros adictos a los balnearios, los tonos chillones de la moda vacacional, la inevitabilidad de Graz. Luego hacia el sur, a través de la llanura eslovena, y de nuevo colinas arriba, otros túneles, y Lubliana, luego por los parámos hasta la meseta de Karst, primer atisbo del mar, para descender por fin a través de Opcina hasta la estación del Sur de Trieste. Once horas y media en total, un viaje entre mundos.”.

♫♫ ♫ "The Trip" - Still Corners ♫♫♫

Pynchon non è un autore affatto semplice e anche questo imponente romanzo (tradotto magistralmente) lo riprova.
Non certo per la mole fisica di 1127 pagine, ma poiché ogni pagina, paragrafo, parola racchiude tutta la complessità della vita, un prisma di metafore e rimandi (interni ed esterni al romanzo stesso). Da un fievole nucleo si dipartono storie di personaggi e nazioni, relazioni politiche internazionali e rapporti umani segnati da tutto lo spettro dei sentimenti, vicende labirintiche e aggrovigliate delle quali spesso non è subito comprensibile il senso comune. Solo procedendo nella lettura, le fila vengono un poco dipanate. Solo un poco, sì. Infatti, in questo universo multiforme, nel quale − proprio come nel nostro − è facile perdersi (o smarrire se stessi), nemmeno nel finale si ha una chiosa rassicurante, risolutiva, consolatoria (perché, per dirla con Pirandello “la vita non conclude”).
Intrecciando storia reale e fittizia, in una miriade di collegamenti intratestuali e richiami a fonti esterne, seguendo lo scorrere del tempo storico ma non dando mai per scontata la possibilità di sovvertire le leggi della scienza e del tempo stesso, lasciando intravedere possibili utopie, con la consueta ironia venata d’amarezza l’autore racconta sotto metafora del nostro mondo e dei rapporti umani, cercando di svelarne i vizi più corrotti, le debolezze, le contraddizioni che mai possono separare nettamente bene/male o giusto/sbagliato, ma anche quegli spiragli di autenticità che danno la speranza e il coraggio di mettersi in gioco, di credere, di esistere.
E i perni simbolici di tutto questo gioco sono rappresentati dalla Terra rispetto l’aeronave della “Compagnia del Caso”, dalle città reali rispetto all’utopica città di Shambala.
Su tutto, simbolo dell’intera opera, il mitico Spato d’Islanda, minerale che è varco verso la conoscenza in tutta la sua complessità e sfaccettature, via mistica e scientifica tanto dei piani reali che di dimensioni altre, lente che svela la duplicità di tutte le cose (lo stesso Spato ha valenza positiva e non), le quali in sé però mantengono sempre un cuore imperscrutabile, di fronte al quale si rimane smarriti, senza risposta conclusiva. Forse a questa verità ultima può dare senso soltanto ogni singolo uomo, conferendole la sua propria interpretazione personale (mutevole e forse errata), che corrisponde alla rotta e al senso che ciascuno decide di dare alla propria vita.
Voto: 4,5/5.

https://pepperlines.blogspot.gr/2016/...

Fairly early on, I don’t remember what page, Pynchon, hero, drops this:

“The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way. Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin, blunt-fingered, downy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over, a busy development of small trailside shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged precision, herbs the wildcrafters knew the names and market prices of and which the silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet, knew the magic uses for. They lived for different futures, but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.”

He’s writing about Dally and Merle, and if there’s a better passage on love between a parent and child I don’t know it. It is, like all of Against The Day, the summa of Pynchon’s life’s work.

People far smarter than I have written extensively about the themes, techniques, references, mathematics, blahblah contained herein, especially its girding thesis of duality/binary/light v dark/illusory realities/predestination/other enchiladas. I recommend you read those, as some, especially old friend Geoff’s, are striking in their scholarship. I can add nothing to the conversation beyond this:

As an old hand at Pynchon, this is the work that gains the greatest relevance with age. Hell, I don’t even know how much you can relate to it in the flush of youth; it took TRP decades to get to the point where he was able to drop ink without digressional obfuscation so byzantine that any methamphetamine enthusiast would cook some lightbulb in respect. I’m just grateful to have had the chance to read it again, having become a father in the interval between to a kid soon aged to double digits, and to see how different my worldview is having spent the last near-decade factoring in another’s. Maybe that’s the duality that was meant for me this time: that the consequence of my actions may never make the page, but they did determine into this world a life whose parallelism with my own will increasingly and irrevocably diverge from my trajectory into the singular pathway that is wonderfully hers and hers alone. Just as it should be.

A bewildering book. Reading this is like standing on a sideline watching the turn of the century. Pynchon is right there beside you and flipping through the scenes showing you how the common people in that era behaved through his eyes. This is definitely not a history book yet there are real-life characters, e.g., Tesla, Kovaleskaya, and even himself (Pynchon), or real world events, e.g., 1893 Chicago World's Fair, World War I, etc. Still, the bulk of the story is fictional and only uses history as a backdrop. This book is an example of historiographic metafiction or those postmodernist works that are intensely self-reflective and yet paradoxically also claim to historical events and parsonages. (Source: Wiki).

Of course, I must admit that I did not understand half of what this book was saying. Yet it is enjoyable because it is different. Pynchon is a bully. He wrote this book to show his talent as a writer. He appeared to me as a boastful (yet he has the right to be) novelist who enjoys writing long novels to prove that he is a cut above the rest. I am different! I am better than you! He, for me, is a modern-day James Joyce; who wrote another book that I did not fully understand and yet I found beautiful: Ulysses. Although this book is more ambitious than that: it's scope is wider (for 1893 to the early 1920's) compared to just a day on Dublin streets. Against the Day also uses contemporary English and yet Pynchon, like Joyce, uses textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization that are shapeless and almost bereft of emotional impact. Like I said, reading this book is like standing on a side street watching the parade of images passing you by. The images can be blurry (because I am not familiar with those that Pynchon was trying to make fun about) or as sharp as a megapixel photo (because of the way he described them). However, at the end of my reading, they all seem to mix with one another and if I think through the possible theme - that main thin thread that passes through or binds the 1,220 pages - it is nothing but a show. There are many characters with names easy to remember: Sloat (my favorite), Deuce, Yasmeen, Miles, Chick, Lindsay, Randolf, Pugnax, Luca, etc. and yet I know that not one of these will linger in my mind like how Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus made an erasable imprint in my brain as fictional characters.

However, what made this unforgettable is the mere fact of reading it. It gave me headache and backache (no book has made my mind swirled as crazy as this) and yet you know that this is brilliancy at its finest. Mediocre novelists definitely don't compare. I mean who among the living writers can compose a beautiful novel with 1,220 pages and small dense prints? Publishers will be wary about the cost of publishing it if there is no guarantee that the book has captured readers. Pynchon has them. This being my 2nd book by him (my first was his thinner book, The Crying of Lot 49) I am happy to say that I will not think twice to someday read his other works like Gravity's Rainbow, V, Vineland and Mason and Dixon. All of them are door-stoppers but sure to be beautiful, well-crafted, first-class door-stoppers.

When I was younger and before my body started to let me down, I did a lot of running. As a runner I had a view that anyone who was interested in running and had no medical reason not to should run a marathon. I still hold to that view and I did run three marathons. I have a similar attitude towards Pynchon: anyone who enjoys reading and has no medical reason not to should read a Pynchon novel. I have now read them all and I believe this is going to sit alongside Mason & Dixon as my co-favourite. I say I believe because I do need to let it settle for a few days before I make my final call. But, and this is quite amazing, I think, this book is 1200 pages long and it DOESN'T FEEL LONG ENOUGH! How can that ever be true of a book?

No one writes like Pynchon. No one can craft such bizarre, poetic, convoluted, downright beautiful sentences like he can. No one can write sentences so long that you reach the end of them with no idea how they started like he does. I think the best way to enjoy Pynchon might be to read him out loud, but that just leads to strange looks from your wife, I've discovered.

What is this book about? Beats me! Actually, it would be easier to answer the question as to what it is not about as it covers so much ground. I guess there's a thread running through it about the Traverse brothers and their search for revenge. But is has sci-fi (and plain sci), too. And it has history. And anarchists. There's a monster on the loose at one point. And there's a dollop of bizarre sex. And so much more.

As I say, if you enjoy reading, you really should read a Pynchon novel. It's just an opinion.

[written 2008]

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 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. (OK, there's one major exception, but she's a dominant nymphomaniac.) 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.

“…if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” Psalm 139:8
If one mocks inanity, one is destined to become inane…

‘Hurrah! Up we go!’ It was amid such lively exclamation that the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting, carrying a five-lad crew belonging to that celebrated aeronautics club known as the Chums of Chance, ascended briskly into the morning, and soon caught the southerly wind.

Against the Day is obviously modeled on the style of comic strips. Thomas Pynchon generously sows erudition, exotics, mischief and adventure but the soil remains barren.
It is impossible to be in water and not to get wet so the novel isn’t capable to rise above a level of cartoon.
Against the Day is nothing but a lot of hot air.
“The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the Lord.” Proverbs 21:31
The Lord chooses not to care…