If you've been hoping that a major new novel wd come out that presents anarchists as heros, then this be it! &, after 5 or 6 wks of reading its 1,085pp off & on I FINALLY FINISHED IT TONIGHT. Now reading it isn't even remotely close to accomplishing something like getting Mumia Abu-Jamal out of jail, but it still feels like an accomplishment anyway. If Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" (1861) was the 1st novel w/ an anarchistic protaganist (the main character, Rudin, was drawn partly from the young Bakunin who Turgenev was friends w/), then we've already had a healthy history of 157 yrs of novels w/ at least somewhat positively presented anarchist characters.

These might include: Isabel Meredith (Helen & Olivia Rossetti)'s 1903 "A Girl Among the Anarchists", Frank Harris' 1909 "The Bomb" (about the Haymarket Martyrs), &, more recently, G. A. Matiasz's 1994 "End Time - Notes on the Apocalypse". I'd even be tempted to toss in Mario Vargas Llosa's 1981 "The War of the End of the World" but I can also easily imagine a case being made to vehemently deny that one!

Pynchon's, however, is even more epic than the Vargas Llosa, & definitely written from a pro-anarchist perspective. For me, reading it was sometimes uncanny. The 1st bk I read of his was "The Crying of Lot 49" - I probably read it sometime in the mid 1970s. I liked it, but I wasn't as enthralled by it as I might've been lead to believe I wd be by whoever might've recommended it. Then, in 1979, I was co-running an anonymous phone project called "TESTES-3" & a reporter named Franz Lidz wrote about it & compared it to the Tristero in Pynchon's novel.

15 yrs later, I was living in Berlin & reading Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" while spending much or most of my time in the whereabouts of the English Tiergarten where much of the novel's action was taking place. That seemed oddly synchronous.

NOW, being an anarchist & having finished writing a math bk (of sorts) several wks ago, I read Pynchon's latest about.. anarchist mathematicians (amongst many other folks too of course) & the synchronicity just kept kicking in right & left. One of the characters is going to a certain part of the world & I'm thinking something like: Hhhmm, I wonder if one of the people there will have the same name as my exgirlfriend from there? &, uh, Lo & Behold!, yes, there she is! One of the many threads running thru it all is ballooning - my 1st job in Pittsburgh was w/ a ballooning company. None of this tells you much about the novel, I'm just trying to explain my own resonance w/ it.

THE NOVEL: Well, of course, reading it requires a substantial investment of time that might be better spent in something more actively engaged w/ the world. Nonetheless, if you're going to read a novel, this wd probably be, IMO, considerably less of a waster of time than reading anything by Stephen King - something that 100s of millions of people do all the time.

The packaging of the bk is decorated w/ reviewer accolades who, for the most part, avoid telling their readership that the bk flagrantly supports anarchist assassinations of the genocidally power-hungry & the lot. That, in itself, interests me. Do they avoid it in order to bypass their more propaganda oriented publication's editorial strategies? To get past the editors? Or is it the editors who impose the restriction? Or do they somehow just not notice & see it as all good fictional fun? Because, while it is an entertaining bk set ca 100 yrs ago, its political message is still as relevant as ever.

its hard for me to give a proper review of this colossal book. between the math equations, weird kinky sex, old physics, spiritualism, and globe trotting you kinda just have to go along for the ride. its pynchon. you know what youre getting into.

when people say they wish pynchon wrote another gravity's rainbow, they frequently forget this book exists.

The review might contain minor spoilers (2012)

tThe day counter says it took me one year and 2 and a half months to finish this book. And instead of taking the fact as a disadvantage I'll do the opposite. I'll even suggest that the slow way is the proper way to read this book. One reason is you have to give yourself the time to immerse in it, to read and re-read paragraphs, to stop reading and think, to put down the book and watch a documentary on the Tunguska event, to google “quaternions”. I obviously love words, I want my time with them.

tThe other reason is that I believe this book is like real life. You don't get the easy way out: beginning-middle-end. You can't justify everything that happens or find a link between cause and effect. In this sense you get the feeling of this book better, if you extend its reading to time. You let it become part of your life. You let it become part of History.

tHistory is a big theme in the book. History vs Personal experience. History and Personal Responsibility. History and Perceived History. The person that makes History and History that affects the person. And all these controversies are not solid states, they are fluid and a person may find himself existing in all these states in his lifetime. The Traverse brothers often find themselves trying to cause History, then run screaming away from History and then stoically waiting for History's beating to stop. And we shouldn't forget the historiographer standing above everybody else.

tHow does the author / historiographer approaches an era he has no personal experience of? He reads about the era is the obvious answer. And then? How does he communicate the era to the reader? Pynchon's method is to write his novel mimicking many prevalent writing styles and themes of the era. Chums of Chance youth style adventures, G.H. Wells time travelling, even Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain towards the end of the book. He reproduces, without censoring, fin-de-siècle beliefs, philosophies, science, rumours, prejudices, lore. The reader suddenly finds himself in a world of quaternions, aether, magic light balls, bilocations, time travel.

tThat's not all Pynchon has in his writer's toolkit belt. Here, there's a metaphor. Now imagine the metaphor becoming literal. In a scale of 1 to 10 this is level 1 in what you'd be asked to do as a reader of Against The Day. Pynchon will not rest until he unearths and shuffles all the literary tools you are used to consider given and concrete. Metaphors will become literal facts (see the transformation of battleship SMS Emperor Maximilian), allegory will interpolate with reality (see Chums Of Chance), hyberbole will become dangerously tangible. You'll have to ask yourself: are dreams less important to human experience than reality? If no, then why should the writer treat them differently and wrap them in a smoke cloud? In the same way you'll have to wonder: are supernatural and occult beliefs less important to each person's psyche than, say, scientific truths, like gravity? If not, then why treat them with irony? There's a lot of work for the reader here. There's a lot of freedom too. It's not your usual take-you-by-the-hand-and-show-you-the-way-to-what-I-consider-important. You're free to wander in this fluid reality made of words. And you have to love words.

tHaving said that, I'd like to address two very common accusations readers often allege for Pynchon's writing: lack of characters and lack of realism.
Pynchon does not want lazy readers. He will abolish you faster than you can say quaternions. I strongly believe anyone who claims Pynchon's characters don't have real depth are the lazy kind. Punchon doesn't want you to follow him around like an obedient dog, he will let you free to explore the characters, he will not take stance, you will, it's your job. He will not make you see the narrative through the character's eyes, you decide how you do it. For example Reef, Yashmeen and Cyprian start their literary existence as iconic figures, each symbolizing something. Through the book you can't help but become attached to them, they take flesh and bones, you care. Not because Pynchon will spend words to help you see inside them, not even a paragraph is dedicated to Yashmeen's feelings. But through her journey you can't help but be mesmerized by her personality, not only hers, Reef and Cyprian's too, as they take the reader together at this journey on the southeast of Europe and the Balkan peninsula.
tPynchon's language is very vivid. You can't miss the atmosphere of Venice, the Balkans, fucking Thessaloniki for fuck's sake. I couldn't help but smile when Pynchon describes the Greek blue sky. The realism and the feeling of all the places was so intuitive and seemed experienced first hand. I imagined Pynchon taking a nice trip through the Balkans, walking the mountains, visiting the villages, writing about them. It's realism set in unexpected un-historical situations. And a factory floods with mayonnaise at some point, so what? Unreal? There are sentences that make you want to inhabit them. They are beautiful. Many times I caught myself unable to move from one page to another, mesmerized by words, reading them again and again. That's me. I love words.

“Lake arrived in the middle of these reflections with a couple armloads of laundry full of sunlight and smelling like the first day of the world”

“The days would then proceed to drag their sorry carcasses down the trail of Time without word one from Deuce.”

“a scent of daylight oil hung over the scene, as if phantom motor vehicles operated on some other plane of existence, close but just invisible.”

“For a moment a wing of desolate absence swept down across the garden tables here at Eisvogel’s, eclipsing any describable future.”

Just some of my highlighted notes on the reader.

Anarchists vs capitalists. There's the fight. Everywhere.
and who wins? Love over war? People over ideas? Pynchon seems to acknowledge the power of personal action of the small unit vs the existing ideological monster. Actions change the world. Small persons, feelings, love. Yashmeen, Reef and Cyprian are a trio in love. They are pursued by different heads of the capitalistic Hydra. Yashmeen by science, Reef by money and revenge, Cyprian by a religious belief in sensuality. All three anarchists in their own fields, they give the battle, they choose love, they choose creating a microcosm for themselves over fighting the bigger impersonal unreachable target. Is Pynchon such a romantic soul after all?

Scarsdale Vibe is the strongest capitalist persona in the book, yet he is the only puppet. Lifeless, a formation of money and power.
{...}still here’s this huge mountain of wealth unspent, piling up higher every day, and dear oh dear, whatever’s a businessman to do with it, you see.” “Hell, send it on to me,” Ray Ipsow put in. “Or even to somebody who really needs it, for there’s sure enough of those.” “That’s not the way it works,” said Scarsdale Vibe. “So we always hear the plutocracy complaining.” “Out of a belief, surely fathomable, that merely to need a sum is not to deserve it.” “Except that in these times, ‘need’ arises directly from criminal acts of the rich, so it ‘deserves’ whatever amount of money will atone for it. Fathomable enough for you?” “You are a socialist, sir.” “As anyone not insulated by wealth from the cares of the day is obliged to be. Sir.”
He dies by his own right hand after having himself given personal and impersonal pain to a family, to his workers, to the millions of people in need.

Pynchon appears to approve violence of the oppressed towards the oppressive. So, Pynchon approves terrorism? Not a light decision for him to make, but I think he does. Or at least he understands why it happens. At points I think he understands it's the only weapon.
‘Dynamite Them All, and Let Jesus Sort Them Out.
“Explosion without an objective', declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form'.”

So folks, what is this book about? It's about light, it's always night or we wouldn't need it.

Fun facts: If I've read Against The Day before reading Vineland then my alias would not be karmologyclinic but probably “deathbymayonnaise” or maybe ”DiscomcobulatedDynamos”


-----****-----
Story of reading this book

(Story so far...
I started reading this mid-summer 2008. Read half of it mostly during vacations when I had nothing else to do but read. Then I returned from vacations, shit happened, I stopped reading altogether and book was on pause. Time passes by, I am able to concentrate on reading again but every time I try to continue, the book is just too cumbersome to read on bed before I sleep (I own the hardcover version) plus I need the dictionary with me (my english is not that good yet) and it makes it two times harder. Some months ago, I got an ereader and just a few weeks back I felt brave enough to restart the book from the beginning, because after 3 years it wouldn't make sense to just continue from where I left. So, I get the bright idea to buy a digital version of the book and read it on my ereader. Bonus: my ereader comes with embedded dictionary so the only thing I have to do is double click a word and it pops up its meaning!!!!
But there is no official ebook of Against The Day. Gah! anyway I found a non-official version, loaded it in my ereader and started reading again from the start. This time I am enjoying it more, because of the portability and my easy-to-use-dictionary. UPDATE- Problem solved when I was three quarters into the book, Mr. Pynchon allowed us to have ebooks of his work. Is it so bad to be a luddite?)

It took me a month to finish this book, and when I was done with all 1,085 pages I had expected to feel relieved, even ebullient. Instead, I was kind of sad it was over.
This is a beautiful, moving book, very sad but also very silly.

It's one of the easiest Pynchon books to understand, along with Mason and Dixon, and one of the easiest to get through, in part because it doesn't have large sections that are really really sad and twisted, as is the case with Gravity's Rainbow and V (one of my all-time favorites). I disagree with the critics who say Pynchon doesn't create characters you can sink your teeth into; I felt that his characters (and there are a LOT of them) are so poignant and sad I don't think I could have made it through this book if I'd they'd been any more fully developed.

Having said all that, it's not exactly like reading Janet Evanovitch. Pynchon is a literary treasure but he doesn't really "write books" like other professional authors. He doesn't really create a plot, which is maybe why his books are so long. He just keeps going until, I guess, either he gets exhausted or his publisher makes him turn it in or, I dunno, his printer breaks down.

It helps to know a few things going into this book. It helps, actually, if you can keep a laptop with WiFi next to you while you read so you look stuff up as you go along. But, some tips that might help (and I"m sure I"ll forget or miss a bunch, so anyone who reads this should feel free to add more in 'comments')

First, Pynchon is easiest to read if you don't come to it with an expectation of a normal story arc and normal plot development. There isn't a beginning middle and end, really, and only one character (Cyprian) has a classic epiphany.
Don't try to find one, or you'll be disappointed. Just read and enjoy every page as it comes to you. Trust me, you'll find yourself getting totally involved in what's happening.

There are so many many characters and they all speak in a kind of distinctive voice, I found it helpful to assign a well-known actor to many of the recurring characters. The Chums of Chance, for example, seem like utter twits until you try reading Darby in a Denis Leary voice and Chick Counterfly in an Owen Wilson voice. For the evil Scarsdale Vibe I used Christopher Walken and for his sidekick Foley Walker I found John Heard (remember him from Big and the Milagro Beanfield Wars?).

Curiously, I could never find actors to fit the supposed three main characters of the book, the three Traverse boys. Somehow they seemed the least coherent of all the characters in this book.

Everyone will tell you this is a wacky travel tale about anarchists and corporate greed. I didn't think so. I think it was basically kind of an existential book; there are all these characters searching desperately for redemption in a world that's completely chaotic and out of control and heartless. In the end the ones who find it, find it in love (yes, can you believe it? In Thomas Pynchon?) and in the trivial details of everyday life. Over and over the most insightful characters repeat that it's love and trivia that are the only refuge from life.

But that doesn't stop all these characters from trying to find redemption in insane areas. Math and science, for example. You always feel like you need a pHd in physics when you read pynchon. But in a way, he makes all the math and science nerds the bad guys; they've gotten too involved in things that are too refined.

There are SOME science things you need to know, though. But before I get into them, i have to go feed my family dinner, an act that is trivial and loving.

During those simpler, happy times (the Democrats assumed control of the House and matters appeared to be changing)I pre-ordered the novel with my happy local bookseller. It arrived really early, well before its publication date and I was four thousand miles away from home.

The bulky block of lore was scooped upon return. My friends had selected Against The Day for our winter read and I read the novel in two lengthy slogs, finding it necessary to reread several sections. Some of my friends weren't as ecstatic. I still found the Chums of Chance an ace device for observing a world spinning out of control: for the first decade of the 21st Century as well as their own. Our expectations will always be thwarted. The system will encircle our most valued motives and commodify such. This will continue until heat death snuffs out the flame. Entropy and Ossification remains Pynchonian archtypes and much of this is explored here through scattered paternity and the menace of mechanization. I bought a copy a few years ago for my wife's sister during a most happy christmas and I have pondered since that the novel certainly DEMANDS a second reading. We shall see.

Postoje oni specifični razgovori sa još specifičnijim ljudima gde jedno obično ‘kako bilo sinoć’ proizvede sto pesetšes malih digresija i skretnica i gde se na kraju uopšte i ne dodje do odgovora. Ti razgovori su mi često neki od omiljenih, ali neretko me i u toj meri iscrpe da mi dodje da se protegnem i kažem kako sutra ustajem baaaaš rano i da uteknem sa mesta pre nego što do zločina (od moje ruke) uopšte dodje. Čitati Pinčona je obično kao takav neki razgovor - ovaj puta rastegnut na hiljadu i dvesta dvadeset stranica neurotičnog teksta prepunog zabavom i značenjem i, da, ponekad dosadom.

Posebno kada je koncentracija u perpetualnom potoku. Posebno kada je taj potok suv da suvlji ne može da bude, toliko suv da se možda i ne nazire.

I Pinčon nije kriv za to. Nije kriv što ja ovo čitam devet meseci (da nije tužno bilo bi poetično) i što je moje razumevanje teksta takvo da ponekad moram da pročitam sinopsis na vikipediji o tome šta se tačno u tom nekom poglavlju desilo. Nije kriv, ali i kriv je. Jer njegov mozak je kao ta konverzacija sa sto krakova, slepih ulica: struktura ovog romana je usko povezana sa matematikom i fizikom koja je i jedna od glavnih tema i efekat je utoliko više nalik na traku bez početka i kraja. Stil varira od avanturističkog do detektivskog do apsolutno nenormalnog. Konture likova se neretko (namenski) preklapaju; konstante su sklonosti ka seksualnom fetišizmu, ka banalnim odlukama i visokim idealima. Ukratko, maksimalistički roman kojeg nije stid te titule. I, kao što je uostalom i slučaj sa većinom stvari čija je konzumacija namenjena sa zvukom na maksimumu, sa gasom do daske, ovaj roman umori i iscrpi i mnogo toga da, ali mnogo toga traži – a ako nemaš šta da mu daš, onda ostane jedino žrtvovati zadovoljstvo.

4

Contro il giorno è un eccesso: di dimensioni, di intrecci, di personaggi, di storie, di Storia, di sapienza, di stile… è gargantuesco, perché smisurato e insaziabile.
Il romanzo è un labirinto temporale e spaziale, che parte dal 1893 fino ad arrivare agli anni successivi la prima guerra mondiale; fa un po’ da prequel, insomma, all’Arcobaleno della gravità (tanto che incipit di quest’ultimo e frase di chiusura di Contro il giorno hanno dei richiami palesi…).

Cercando di tracciare delle linee guida per districarsi tra trame e sottotrame presenti nel romanzo, si potrebbe dire che Conto il giorno è un libro che parla di vendetta. Vendetta che i 4 figli di Webb Traverse, minatore per copertura e dinamitardo sindacalista di professione, cercano nei confronti di Scarsdale Vibe, magnate dell’industria che ha fatto uccidere Webb. Le storie dei figli sparsi per il mondo e la ricerca della loro vendetta diventano il pretesto che Pynchon utilizza per portarci a spasso per il mondo nel corso degli anni a cavallo della prima guerra mondiale. Luoghi reali ed immaginari si susseguono tra le pagine: si attraversa il Messico rivoluzionario che combatte il presidente-generale Porfirio Díaz, la Londra Vittoriana di Jack lo Squartatore, la Gottinga della celebre facoltà di matematica, la Venezia dei primi anni del ‘900 (quando è crollato il campanile di San Marco), le foreste siberiane di Tunguska (dove si narra sia caduto un meteorite), l’utopistica città perduta di Shambhala, la Hollywood del cinema muto, i Balcani attraversati dalle trame dei servizi di intelligence…
Qui, oltre ai destini di Frank, Lake, Reef e Kit, si sovrappongono le storie di centinaia di altri personaggi bizzari: minatori, anarchici, spie, agenti dei servizi segreti, avventurieri, viaggiatori, chiaroveggenti, maghi, matematici, una cane di nome Pugnax che legge Henry James, un fulmine globulare di nome Skip, un tornado ciclico di nome Thorvald, fantasmi di persone in fuga da un futuro poco ospitale (i trespassers), Nikola Tesla, l’equipaggio di un’aeronave (i Compari del Caso)…
Tutto questo per dire che il romanzo è funambolico e vi si parla davvero di un mucchio di cose, ma che, personalmente, ho trovato un paio di chiavi di lettura interessanti (delle mille esistenti, probabilmente): prima, mi sono soffermata molto sui Trespassers, che, probabilmente, sono il modo che Pynchon utilizza per scagliarsi contro la società capitalista, perché Pynchon ama «fantasticare di quando la terra era libera, prima che i capitalisti repubblicani ultracristiani la rapissero per i loro scopi malvagi a lunga scadenza». I Trespassers arrivano in fuga dal futuro, cercando un luogo o, per meglio dire, un tempo, lontano dai tratti inumani che ha assunto il loro di mondo. Sono un avvertimento, l’escamotage narrativo che Pynchon utilizza per metterci in guardia dalla deriva capitalista che ha intrapreso la società.
Contro il giorno sottolinea i chiaroscuri della Storia e della vita dei singoli personaggi: non c’è nulla di univoco, nulla che possa essere interpretato in un modo solo, perché il tempo non è lineare e spesso basta una piccola differenza per dare origine a centinaia di rifrazioni difformi. Questo pensiero mi ha fornito la seconda chiave di lettura su cui mi sono soffermata: l’itinerario sfinciuno, una mappa dell’Asia centrale stilata da esuli veneziani emigrati sulle orme di Marco Polo, che dovrebbe mostrare la via per la mitica città perduta del buddismo tibetano di Shambhala e di cui molti personaggi del libro vorrebbero entrare in possesso. Le indicazioni per la città di Shambhala, però, diventano leggibili solamente se osservate tramite una lente particolare, prodotta sempre da veneziani sull’Isola degli Specchi (la stessa lente, usata dal mago Luca Zombini in un esperimento di prestidigitazione, causa la duplicazione di esseri umani, così per dire…). Bisogna, quindi, deviare la luce meccanicamente per arrivarci, rifrangerla in maniera diversa: è necessario deviare dalla realtà, scostarsi un po’ più in là per riuscire a leggerla e approdare in questo paradiso mistico. Insomma, nulla è solo logico e razionale, tutto si plasma e modella attraverso mille differenti prospettive.
Scrivendo queste poche righe mi rendo conto che qualsiasi recensione di un libro di Pynchon è assurdamente riduttiva, perché l'immaginario che è capace di creare non può essere contenuto o tantomeno ridotto. Pynchon va letto e riletto e riletto di nuovo, e sono convinta che 20 riletture non basterebbero per cogliere tutte le allusione che l'autore americano ha messo nell'opera; ma il bello e la potenza di un'opera d'arte sta proprio qui, nella sua capacità di rinnovarsi e risultare attuale ad ogni rilettura, anche a distanza di anni. In questo Pynchon è maestro.
Come sempre utilissimo il sito Pynchon Wiki per qualsiasi approccio all'autore...

I've never really felt comfortable writing a review of a Pynchon book. From the short and relatively accessible Crying of Lot 49 to the byzantine and complex Gravity's Rainbow, he's always left me standing agape, grasping for the right words to express just what it was that I had experienced, yet knowing that whatever choice I eventually make I will only be able to express the tiniest amount of what I had just been through. Because, if you're patient enough and not too thrown off by what seem like insufferably long asides with no contextual relation to anything that has come before in the book, Pynchon will take you on a journey to the farthest reaches of your imagination. From stitching together materials from a wide and eclectic group of influences, he will attempt to gain entry into the fabled halls of imagination itself, a literary paradise in which all is simultaneously effortlessly possible and maddeningly difficult. Whether he succeeds is a matter for great debate, but for me it's always the journey that makes it worthwhile.

In Against the Day, Pynchon chooses one of the most interesting eras in modern history, a time in which the old world was making way for the new in drastic violent upheavals in nearly every realm of life. Beginning with the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 and meandering along through time until just after the end of the Great War, Pynchon paints a surreal portrait of a world on the cusp of multiple revolutions. From the political struggles of the time- Colorado miners to unionize for better working conditions against the mine owners and their Pinkerton thugs, the blooming revolutions in Mexico and Russia, and the anarchists everywhere in between struggling to advance the freedom of all humanity to the scientific struggles and breakthroughs of the era- Nikola Tesla struggling to gain funding from capitalists to develop ways to transmit electricity wirelessly, the endless debates between rival scientists as to whether the gaps between the stars are filled with aether or nothingness, and all of the quaternion and vectorist mathematics that can explain it. Not to mention hydrogen-fueled airships, expeditions to the North Pole and into the center of the Earth, treatises on the unique nature of Venetian light, and enough bdsm power games to make your hedonist cousin blush, I'm not kidding when I say that this book really has it all.

Supported by a rotating cast of hundreds, the story primarily follows the fortunes and trials of the Traverse family as they attempt to get revenge for the assassination of their dynamite-chucking anarchist father. There's Frank, the staid and reliable middle son who uses his schooling at the Colorado Schools of Mines and his family's penchant for dynamite to attempt to get revenge on the two men who murdered his father, an odyssey that sees him rambling back and forth across the US-Mexico border more times than a character in a Cormac McCarthy book. There's Reef, the eldest son whose quest for revenge gets derailed along the way when he finds that it is far easier to use his skills as a cardsharp to defraud decadent aristocrats in Europe. There's Kit, plucked from his family's poverty and sent to private schools in the East by a powerful industrialist who may or may not have been the man who gave the order to have his father killed and who becomes a pawn in a massive game of intrigue between the forces of repression and freedom. Then there's their wayward sister Lake, so filled with self-loathing that she runs away with one of her father's assassins to a life of monotony and beatings.

All of these events occur within the pages of Against the Day but it doesn't really say anything with regard to what the book is actually about. Truthfully, after reading almost 1100 pages, I'm not entirely sure. It would be a bit of a cop-out to say that this book is about the search for paradise, both literal and metaphoric. Sure, there's a lot of that in here- the quest for Shambhala, the search for inner peace, the idealism of the anarchists- but what stands out more to me is Pynchon's playing with and breaking down duality. The vectorists and quaternions eternally quarreling, the breaking down of the gender binary that goes on between Yashmeen and Cyprian, the feud between the Traverses and the Vibes, the permeable boundary between the two worlds that is viewable only from within the epicenter of a large explosion or by peering through a piece of Icelandic spar. Not to mention the endless allusions to light and dark and how they're not really all that different, a listing of which would create a book nearly as large as the source material.

While the story does tend to feel a but unwieldy around page 600 and I found myself wondering on more than one occasion whether Pynchon had even the slightest clue as to where he was going with the tale, in the end I found myself just enjoying the ride. While a bit lengthier than his opus, Gravity's Rainbow, I found the writing to be vastly more accessible and didn't find myself reading and rereading a page half as often as I did with GR. I think this probably has more to do with being more familiar with Pynchon's rather unique way of spinning out a tale than with a change in his style, but it leaves me wanting to return to Gravity's Rainbow for a reread to see what new discoveries I can find within those pages. If you should find yourself stranded on a desert island, or locked away in prison for a length of time, you could do a lot worse to occupy your mind than reading Against the Day.

Πρέπει να είναι η πρώτη φορά που πελαγοδρομώ τόσο πολύ μεταξύ των 3,4 και 5 αστεριών...
Για το ύφος του Πίντσον θα έδινα σαφώς πεντάρι. Πολύ μου άρεσε κι αν κάτι με κράτησε ήταν αυτό.
Για την πλοκή θα έδινα ένα τεσσάρι, καθώς μου φάνηκε ένα τι φλύαρη.
Το τριάρι θα το κέρδιζε με το σπαθί του ο Πίντσον, μιας και ειλικρινά είναι αφόρητα κουραστικό να διαβάζεις 1234 σελίδες όπου παρελαύνουν μπορεί και χίλιοι χαρακτήρες!
Πρόκειται σίγουρα για βιβλίο one of a kind, μα δεν κατάφερε να με κερδίσει...επίσης, είναι απόλυτα σίγουρο ότι θα το ξαναδιαβάσω [είναι ενδεικτικό ότι αυτή τη στιγμή-δύο μέρες αφότου το ολοκλήρωσα-μου τριβελίζει διαρκώς το μυαλό ένα συγκεκριμένο κομμάτι του, που ίσως δεν πρόσεξα αρκετά]...απλά θα χρειαστεί να περάσουν καμιά τριανταριά χρονάκια πριν το ξαναεπιχειρήσω!

One thousand two hundred twenty (1,220) pages in fine print, a high 4.04 average rating in goodreads. Let's see first the metaphors and what-nots it provoked among the brave souls who had read and reviewed it:

1. Mikey Stewart (3 stars) - (his first sentence): "Good lord, where to start?"

2. Oriana (5 stars) - "It's like, instead of reading a book, you're like reading a chunk of a river...this one is like a million rivulets, each slipping overunderthrough one another, that you follow for a second, or a couple (of) pages, until they go back under and get lost in the general cacophony..."

3. Jim Ruland (5 stars) - "...like long shots of ants scurrying about in an ant farm..."

4. Marcus Mennes (5 stars) - An "onslaught."

5. Guy (4 stars) - It's about LIGHT."

6. Lee Worden (5 stars) - "I don't really get what he's up to with all the different kinds of light..."

7. Daniel (5 stars) - "(Pynchon) ends up hollowing out parts of your brain and building his own theme park there..."

8. Cynthia (5 stars) - "(Pynchon) just keeps on going until, I guess, either he gets exhausted or his publisher makes him turn it in or, I dunno, his printer breaks down."

9. Steve Aydt (5 stars) -"...like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach."

10. Mark (5 stars) - "...I let the words cascade into my brain and realize that no one does it quite like Pynchon."

11. Michael (5 stars) - "Pynchon's homage to the 19th century dime novel..."

12. Eddie Watkins (5 stars) - "...it's like reading a massive young-adult novel..."

13. Nate Dorr (4 stars) - "...full of references that fly straight by me..."

14. Andy (5 stars) - "A joyful and ecstatic clusterfuck..."

15. Tony (4 stars) - (after writing his review): "This is a mess, I'll have to clean it up a bit..."

16. Darrell (5 stars) - "...enjoyable even if much of it goes over your head."

17. Phillip (5 stars) - "...in another sense--(this) book never ends..."

18. Matt (4 stars) - "This was my summer reading project, and it took most of the summer."

19. Geoff Sebesta (4 stars) - "...reading this book reminds me of wading through brains...It's designed to hurt your head..."

20. F.R. Jameson (4 stars) - "...feels like a doorway into the wild imagination of a brilliant conjurer."

21. Snotchocheez (2 stars) - "... one gigantic headache-inducing mess."

22. Will Layman (4 stars) - (after his introductory spiel): "...what follows is impossible to summarize..."

23. Cary Barney (3 stars) - "...(while reading it) there are times you wonder why you're doing this to yourself. Pynchon had material for at least four novels here and unfortunately opted to throw it all into a blender."

24. Nat (5 stars) - "I am, at heart, a reader of the slow & persistent ilk, so spending 11 months with this tome was almost like fostering a relationship with another person."

25. Joe Hunt (3 stars) - "I still haven't finished this book! But I've had for like two years. Hyrum, my brother, gave it to me. I really like it!"

If these guys and girls had been paying attention they would not have tortured themselves writing a review of this novel because Thomas Pynchon himself has a review of this, buried practically incognito on page 956 of my copy. Here Vlado gave to Yashmeen a book entitled "The Book of the Masked" and Pynchon describes it like he would have described this novel:

"(Its) pages were filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels, of what Vlado had been visited by under the assaults of his home wind, of what could not be paraphrased even into the strange holiness of Old Slavonic script, visions of the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God's unseen world."

Read it again.

For that would be the common experience you'll have in its paragraphs and passages so that with the rereading you'll be doing the novel could very well become like 2,000 pages and not just 1,220.

Now, why have I rated this 5 stars? Because of its last seven paragraphs. Seven paragraphs the meaning of which I do not know, which I can't say I understand, full of the usual impossibilities and exaggerations, the simultaneous pregnancies, of the balloon-ship which has grown as big as a city, the talking dogs, the dog who reads Henry James, the scientific mumbo-jumbo, the trips to nowhere, all these--for reasons I do not know--had left me misty-eyed:

"One day Heartsease discovers that she's expecting a baby, and then, like a canonical part-song, the other girls one by one announce that they are, too.

"And on they fly. The ship by now has grown as large as a small city. There are neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions. It is so big that when people on the ground see it in the sky, they are struck with selective hysterical blindness and end up not seeing it at all.

"Its corridors will begin to teem with children of all ages and sizes who run up and down the different decks whooping and hollering. The more serious are learning to fly the ship, others, never cut out for the Sky, are only marking time between visits to the surface, understanding that their destinies willl be down in the finite world.

"'Inconvenience' herself is constantly having her engineering updated. As a result of advances in relativity theory, light is incorporated as a source of motive power--though not exactly fuel--and as a carrying medium--though not exactly a vehicle--occupying, rather, a relation to the skyship much like that of the ocean to a surfer on a surfboard--a design principle borrowed from the AEther units that carry the girls to and fro on missions whose details they do not always share fully with 'High Command.'

"As the sails of her destiny can be reefed against too much light, so they may also be spread to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are effortless now. It is no longer a matter of gravity--it is an acceptance of sky.

"The contracts which the crew have been signing lately, under Darby's grim obsessiveness, grow longer and longer, eventually overflowing the edges of the main table in the mess decks, and occasionally they find themselves engaged to journey very far afield indeed. They return to Earth--unless it is Counter-Earth--with a form of 'mnemonic frostbite,' retaining only awed impressions of a ship exceeding the usual three dimensions, docking, each time precariously, at a series of remote stations high in unmeasured outer space, which together form a road to a destination--both ship and dockage hurtling at speeds that no one wishes to imagine, invisible sources of gravity rolling through like storms, making it possible to fall for distances only astronomers are comfortable with--yet, each time, the 'Inconvenience' is brought to safety, in the bright, flowerlike heart of a perfect hyper-hyperboloid that only Miles can see in its entirety.

"Pugnax and Ksenji's generations--at least in every litter will follow a career as a sky-dog--have been joined by those of other dogs, as well as by cats, birds, rodents, and less-terrestial forms of life. Never sleeping, clamorous as a nonstop feast day, 'Inconvenience,' 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 evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard 'Inconvenience' has yet observed any sign of this. They know--Miles is certain--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 toward grace."

I was terrifically excited some 10 years ago when Against the Day came out, as an overly literary 20-ish year old who had seen Pynchon as the apotheosis of American fiction -- hell, my iTunes sharing name on the college network was, as I recall, "Reading Gravity's Rainbow, or Gravity's Reading Rainbow?"

So I finally got around to it, Pynchon's biggest novel yet, his neo-Gravity's Rainbow to Inherent Vice's neo-Crying of Lot 49. You'll find all the usual Pynchon signifiers -- the effects of technology, crews of beautiful losers, really kinky sex, altered states, leftover '60s wackiness. Pynchon takes his characters across the globe, to Colorado, Italy, the High Alps, Central Asia, and incorporates a few historical personages... a certain pompous young archduke who's confident that everyone at the parade in Sarajevo will love him, for instance... you get the idea. It's a big-dick mid-20th Century novel, delivered some 40 years after such ideas were hip. And really, these sorts of books are overdue for a revival -- magisterial acid trips.

Cowboys & Aliens is a 2011 American science fiction Western action film directed by Jon Favreau and starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Paul Dano, and Noah Ringer. The film is based on the 2006 Platinum Studios graphic novel of the same name created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. The plot revolves around an amnesiac outlaw (Craig), a wealthy cattleman (Ford), and a mysterious traveler (Wilde) who must ally to save a group of townspeople abducted by aliens.

In all sincerity Pynchon once again hones his biblical descriptive tools to paint several exquisite narratives into a thoroughly enjoyable "everything" novel. The scope of Against the Day is impressive in and of itself, from the Chicago World's Fair to shortly after WW1 Pynchon delves into the uncertain lives of Skyfarers, Miners, Mystics, Mathematicians among many, many other converging storylines. If you dig Pynchon, or historic fiction in any capacity I cannot recommend this novel enough!