An impossible book to review and an impossible book to summarise, but a very enjoyable read and one which encompasses a complex array of characters, styles, genres, historical, scientific, political and sexual references.

Pynchon's starting point is the history that led to the Great War, but although parts of the book are true to the history, his characters are larger than life and the fiction is invention on a grand scale.

The setting mirrors our earth, but its laws of physics are rather different, if no more implausible than much 20th century science would seem to the scientists and inventors of the late 19th century. The overall plot is as complex as the political world Pynchon explores, and he can follow a character for a chapter and then come back to him/her 200 pages later - none of them is a conventional lead but all play their part in the tapestry.

I could say more, but that would probably get boring, and this book is rarely that.

I waited a year after reading Gravity’s Rainbow before taking on Pynchon’s longest book “Against the Day”. I find reading Pynchon tiring, and his style demands full concentration, and the commitment to follow through the myriad asides and sometimes obscure references, while reading the book. The immediacy of the Internet as a search engine is a boon in this respect.
The overall enjoyment gained, though, is well worth the effort. Absorption of Pynchon does get easier once you, the reader, has a fix on his style.
In a number of respects I found ATD and GR had similarities:
•tPynchon is a comedy writer. These are funny books, and particularly in the acute and subtle pokes at human foibles.
•tThe two books’ narrative plot-lines are absolutely not central to an enjoyment of the writing. The sum of the individual parts, of the many cameo appearances, is much greater than the whole.
•tPynchon doesn’t produce grandstand, Dickensian finishes. There is just too much going on to wrap up neatly.
When reading GR I was aware throughout that I found great chunks of prose barely comprehensible, and I continued to search for continuity. With ATD I mentally separated the various story-lines and ‘plots’, and then attempted to find deeper meanings and messages once I finished the book. This worked better for me.
Pynchon is ultimately an historian, writing a form of satire that illuminates historical events in ways that conventional, linear, academic history studies tend to omit. Formal history studies have changed radically in the last twenty years. History is now less an account of Emperors, Presidents and Kings. Social history and twentieth century studies have opened up the field. How does Pynchon fit into this?
GR is ultimately an alternative account of World War2 and Nazism. ATD, to a greater extent even than GR takes real history, examines it, puts a new slant on it, references our contemporary world with historical precedent (with the benefit of hindsight) and wraps it up in a quirky and funny fiction.
It’s a great way for a writer to come up with new inspiration, and for the reader there’s the double benefit of reading cleverly structured literature, backed up by individual events and movements that are intrinsically fascinating.
Truth it is said is stranger than fiction
The stories takes place predominantly in the years 1893-1910. Not fertile ground for interesting events one might think?
Actually there are so many fascinating references introduced. “Inner Asia” has not had a huge press, but it yields any number of incidents and peoples. This book straddles a wide wide range of peoples and cultures.
Reading this book in 2016 is to read it at a time of entrenched materialism and of so much technological and scientific certainty. ATD is set at a time, as Pynchon puts it in his introductory notes, “a world of shamans, psychics and stage magicians”. ATD went some way in transporting me back to the late 19th century. I imagine Pynchon would be pleased with this given his interest in parallel worlds and of travel in time and alternative worlds!!
What Pynchon next, and how long should I wait? ATD a five star experience.

Not up to the job of reading over 1000 pages of absurdity. I was amused for a while, and I can see that if a reader enjoys silliness and a lot of it covering the globe starting with Chicago's World Fair and balloonists, moguls, carnival fruitcakes, activists...keep it by the bedside for digestible bites.
Small taste from clips: "Some social ain't it! Why, every durn professor of flight from here to Timbuctoo's flying in, 's what it looks like." "There were steamers, electric, Maxim whirling machines, ships powered by guncotton reciprocators and naphtha engines and electrial lifting screws of strange hyperboloidal design for drilling upward through the air, and winged aerostats of streamlined shape, and wing-flapping miracles of ornithurgy. A fellow scarcely knew after a while where to look..."

Alexander Theroux's review of Against the Day in the Wall Street Journal, November 2006:

"Against the Day -- the phrase seems to allude to the apocalyptic conditional: In the familiar scriptural locution, the day itself was the eventual one of "judgment and perdition of the ungodly men." But let's not make too much of it. There is simply too much going on in this wide-ranging, encyclopedic, nonpareil of a novel to reduce it all to something as small as the apocalypse.

"Against the Day is Mr. Pynchon's fifth novel and his longest by far. It is a book in the tradition of the "literature of exhaustion," John Barth's term for a genre that -- with its learning, lists and lore -- willfully taxonomizes a world, teaching along the way and capturing, in multiple storylines and legions of characters, a different view of life from the linear one we expect from, say, Trollope and some other "traditional" novelist. And of course, this particular version of exhaustion-literature is Pynchonesque. We immediately discern his well-known themes: paranoia, entropy, secret cabals, endless quests, organizations evil and remote, faceless malice."

Ci sono città che si amano perché ne contengono mille altre. Ed è lo stesso per questo libro immenso, che sembra fatto di milioni di temi, di storie, di personaggi presi a prestito da altre avventure che, per un attimo o per centinaia di pagine incrociano la loro esistenza con la nostra, proprio come càpita di entrare con l'immaginazione in vite altrui guardando volti da finestrini di treni o autobus paralleli al nostro andare. Un continuum di rimandi, echi, ricordi di qualcos'altro. Può stancare o stuccare il lettore che non sta al gioco, ma se si sale sull’aeronave Inconvenience di Pynchon con una sospensione d’incredulità, con quella fiducia e quell’abbandono assoluto che i bambini riservano a chi racconti loro delle storie, ebbene, si entrerà in un universo parallelo che sembra un viaggio nel tempo, nello spazio, nella memoria, alludendo in realtà a qualcosa di più oscuro e profondo. Sembra, dico, perché questo è un libro che a ogni pagina slitta, traslìttera e si sposta subdolamente di sbieco. Come un caleidoscopio che a ogni colpo cambia i cristalli colorati al suo interno, obbligando lo sguardo a ricostruire la visione con gli stessi elementi mutati di segno. Cambia la storia, quindi, parodìa di libri d’avventure e Bildungsroman, fantascienza e teorie matematico-mistiche, excursus storico e spy-story. Cambia lo stile, ironico, divertentissimo e allo stesso tempo lirico e struggente. Cambiano le città dai nomi esotici e musicali Kashgar, Durango, Venezia, Gottinga, Shambhala. Cambia la luce, riflesso di spato d’Islanda, fiamma esplosiva, lume sfocato, riverbero ectoplasmatico, sole crudele da mezzogiorno di fuoco, crepuscolo malinconico degli addii. Trascinato dalle lande artiche alle città minerarie del vecchio West, su e giù per il nulla russo, l’asettica Svizzera, i passaggi montenegrini, la scintillante Londra dei teatri, i Grand Hotel della riviera francese, le piste asiatiche, il lettore stremato raggiungerà finalmente quel senso di straniamento e di noncuranza in fondo della destinazione che colpisce tutti i viaggiatori spintisi troppo in là per tornare. Quando si renderà conto che non importa dove finirà o cosa troverà, ma ha senso solo la ricerca continua e perpetua di ciò che non abbiamo e nel profondo cerchiamo tutti, 'l’ascesa del cuore, il senso di un inizio e di una possibilità' che ci porti attraverso la notte e ci dia la forza di predisporci appunto, 'contro il giorno'.

(Update, 3/23/13: finally plodded my way to the end of this thing. Review still stands.)

First things first: I haven't finished Against The Day yet. I'm on page 752, which is more than 300 pages from the end. But 752 of this book's pages, with their tiny print and their relatively homogeneous content, are enough to solidify one's judgment several times over. It's possible that the ending will cause me to reconsider some of what I'm about to say, but given what I've seen so far, I doubt it.

I want to like Pynchon. Lots of people I respect are very fond of him (see e.g. this glowing review by Adam Roberts), and he's often mentioned in connection with writers I like (Wallace, Barth, Nabokov, postmodern fiction in general). He certainly seems lovable. His books are bursting with cool esoteric facts and wacky character names. He exudes a boisterous love for material existence in all its particularity. He's obsessed with ukuleles. What a character, right?

I dunno. Somehow he's never worked for me. I read The Crying of Lot 49 and, while it didn't strike me as actively bad, it failed to excite any visible activity on my E-Meter. Totally neutral. If there was a point, I missed it. Then I tried Gravity's Rainbow, had a negative visceral response and put it down (with some force) on page 120. But I was determined to finish one of these big Pynchon books in my lifetime, and I had heard that ATD was gentler and more fun than GR, so I said what the hell.

200 pages in, I was hopeful. The book seemed just plain good, charming, lyrical, plotty. I thought I was finally on Pynchon's wavelength. 752 pages in, I can report that I was wrong: I'm still as mystified as ever.

A saner review would end there. I just don't get Pynchon, and if I try to explain what's "wrong" with him I'll simply annoy people and/or make a fool of myself. Well, here goes.

It's the End of the World As We Know It

The word "day" in ATD's title has at least two meanings: it refers to the time when the sun is up and everything's illuminated, and also to the day in the sense of "the present day." As early as that title and the epigraph -- "it's always night, or we wouldn't need light" -- ATD sets up the core of its thematic edifice. That core is an opposition between "the day" and "the night." "The day" is daytime clarity, logic, consolidation, lack of ambiguity, "official" versions of history, electricity, modernity. It is aligned with the version of America that is quickly being established at the time at which the novel is set -- the turn of the twentieth century -- an America with a relatively homogeneous culture, relatively powerful institutions (private and public), an America that communicates at the speed of electric current and can form nationwide consensuses with relatively little latency.

"The night" is nighttime haziness, pre-modernity, subjectivity, secret histories, esoteric knowledge, fiction, mad hopes, counterfactuals of all sorts, the subjunctive. The central conceit of ATD is that the day's victory -- the victory of modernity and its official, real-world history -- was not inevitable, and that at the turn of the 20th century the day contended with a vast range of competing possible worlds. On the most mundane level, Pynchon is suggesting that other social arrangements (anarchy rather than consolidation of power) and other scientific ideas (quaternions rather than vectors) fought for precedence with the ones we actually got. But with characteristic zeal for the blurring of the metaphoric bridge, Pynchon also explores wilder interpretations of the phrase "possible worlds." At times the counterfactuals become literal alternate universes in the science fictional sense. Sometimes they are doppelgangers or alternate selves coexisting in one universe, which have some vague connection to the imaginary numbers. Sometimes the counterfactuals are not alternate histories but actual fictions, as when we see the Chums of Chance, the heroes of a 1890s-era boy's adventure serial (Pynchon's invention), acquire real existence in the same world in which the books they star in are published.

How much of this is "true"? How much of it is insightful? Surely the modern world we actually got was not quite inevitable. But whether this has any interesting connection to the relationship between written fiction and reality, much less to the relation between imaginary and real numbers, is questionable. It probably doesn't matter -- it seems best to view ATD as an exuberant fantasy, an attempt to envision a version of the pre-WWI era in which nocturnal/counterfactual weirdos of every conceivable kind, from anarchists to time travelers, mount a motley, heroic last stand against the day. That, in the abstract, sounds promising. The problems are all in the details.

We Danced Like People in the Hyper-Tight Light of Fried Chicken Commercials

ATD's world is made out of the raw material of genre cliche. The characters are boy adventurers, western gunslingers, evil plutocrats, globetrotting spies, bewitching women from the Orient. Reviewers infinitely more well-read than I have charted the way that Pynchon (yet more well-read) derives almost every one of his characters and episodes from the conventions of one 1900-era popular genre or another. The book revels in its own gleeful corniness, or rather the juxtaposition of that corniness with torrents of accurate historical detail and writing that's way beyond anything in the source material. It's the kind of thing I'd want to call "campy" if Sontag hadn't declared that you can't be campy on purpose.

Pynchon, evidently, is interested in combining artifice with realism and the serious with the silly. That's something I love too, and a lot of the appeal of this sort of book for me is in the way implausible or impossible things can be made to feel real through the magic act that is good writing. Pynchon's version of this effect, though, is quite different from (say) the version I loved in Wallace's Infinite Jest. Wallace creates a political and social situation that's absurd and cartoonish, but when he zooms in on any of the people living in that situation, they feel real. From afar, the world of Infinite Jest looks like a maniacal child's play set, but if you peer inside the minds of any of the action figures you find fully functional minds with hopes and neuroses, reflecting and deliberating in hyper-realistic detail. Pynchon, by contrast, never delves for more than a fleeting moment into any given character's mind. References to mental states crop up, but usually in the service of getting someone from one place to another, or of depicting the long-time evolution of a relationship or the like -- a textual version of the montage. Moment-to-moment consciousness, not yet edited into time-lapse summaries, is not among his subjects.

His version of the artifice/realism two-step is a more third-person, solipsistic one. Put simply, he takes silly things and takes them seriously, or vice versa. This is fundamentally different from making silly characters real by depicting their consciousness. It's a gesture of the writer's own consciousness, a change in writerly stance that need not accompany any shift in the object of that stance. Pynchon's gambit is that his corny subject matter can be elevated by modulations of his own way of speaking about it, by calculated bursts of lyrical, quintessential "good writing."

So, for instance, when we first meet the Chums of Chance (pedant repellant: technically, the five-boy crew of the skyship Inconvenience, one unit of the larger Chums of Chance organization), the writing sounds like this:

"Oh, boy!" cried Darby Suckling, as he leaned over the lifelines to watch the national heartland deeply swung in a whirling blur of green far below, his tow-colored locks streaming in the wind past the gondola like a banner to leeward. (Darby, as my faithful readers will remember, was the "baby" of the crew, and served as both factotum and mascotte, singing as well the difficult treble parts whenever these adolescent aeronauts found it impossible to contain song of some kind.) "I can't hardly wait!" he exclaimed. (1-2)

But the pastiche of boy's adventure stories doesn't follow the Chums everywhere, and sometimes we read things like this:

For somehow, the earlier, the great, light had departed, the certitude become broken as ground-dwellers' promises -- time regained its opacity, and one day the boys, translated here to Belgium, as if by evil agency, had begun to lapse earthward through a smell of coal smoke and flowers out of season, toward a beleaguered coast ambiguous as to the disposition of land and sea, down into seaside shadows stretching into the growing dark, shadows that could not always be correlated with actual standing architecture, folding and pleating ever inwardly upon themselves, an entire mapful of unlighted outer neighborhoods sprawled among the dunes and small villages. . . . (551)

Neither of these passages blends with character psychology in the way good third-person prose often does. Is the quaint, awkward style of the first quote reflective of how the Chums think? Is the shadowy dread in the second quote the Chums' own, or just the narrator's? We might wonder if the changing style reflects the Chums' growing maturity. But there is no such trajectory in the Chums' own behavior, only in the writing. The tone and style of the second quote has essentially nothing to do with the human subject matter -- it is just Pynchon choosing to relate the experiences of inane characters in a high-flown style, because he can. (The Chums are an extreme case, but most of this carries over to the other major characters.)

Just as Pynchon is uninterested in conventional characterization, he is also uninterested in plot. It feels odd to call ATD a plotless novel, since it is a novel in which a great deal happens. These events, however, are not connected by anything resembling cause and effect. Plot devices enter the story, stick around for a scene or two, and then disappear. Different strands of the plot do not interact with one another even when they would be expected to, as though they are taking place in different universes (in some cases, this may literally be true). In one early chapter, the Chums transport to New York City some sort of alien (?) embryo which has been retrieved from the north pole, and it proceeds to wreak havoc in a sort of a pre-image of 9/11. The whole thing is a great little episode of Lovecraftian sci-fi, quite successful on its own, and I was excited to see where Pynchon would take it. The answer, of course, is that he doesn't take it anywhere. The devastation of New York never comes up again. There is probably some multiversal explanation for this, but it is nonetheless a perfectly typical example of the book's acausality.

What the book eventually begins to feel like, dispiritingly enough, is a television series. It's televisual in its abundance of period-authentic visual detail ("eye-catching sets") and its paucity of mental detail, its remixing of existing genres (imagine the pitch: "it's a steampunk revenge western sci-fi period piece!"), its seemingly endless and aimless succession of amusing episodes with no lasting consequences, its preference for characterization by means of snappy dialogue. When the plot is allowed to move, it moves in ways that feel like internal compromises on the part of a writing staff. For instance, one chapter culminates in the death of a semi-major villain, but this villain is merely the lesser member of a villainous pair, with little significance of his own, and so the "writer" of that "episode" can happily top off his story with an apparently important plot point without altering the overall situation in any way that might impair the freedom of other staff members to explore the setting in their own ways. Things change, but nothing really changes; you can tune in next week, even if you've missed an episode or two, and be confident that you'll encounter the same kind of adventure you're used to. Pynchon distorts conventional storytelling for artistic purposes, but he ends up in the same place as artistically unambitious TV shows. (What would Wallace say?)

Thomas Pynchon vs. The World

Where are the day and the night in all of this? Pynchon's fondness for everything he associates with the night (everything he pits against the day) often frames itself as a fondness for human freedom. Pynchon is for the right to go crazy, to disobey conventional canons of taste and decency, to refuse to do what The Man -- or the plot -- tells you to do. Over time, though, Pynchon's enforced entropy begins to feel more oppressive than any strong plot ever could. Behind the string-pulling mastermind villain Scarsdale Vibe is Pynchon himself, pulling strings to make sure nothing ever connects. True freedom, after all, depends on a reliable underlying physics, a logic of cause-and-effect. I could stop writing this review right now and walk outside my apartment -- that's a way in which I am free. I would feel much less free if I, say, did not feel (mostly) sure that in doing so I would not step into an alternate universe (something that actually happens to one ATD character). I am free to choose my actions, but implicit in the notion of "actions" is some sense of consequence; if I don't know how the world will respond, I have no basis on which to choose how to act, and might as well not be free at all. Pynchon's characters seem superficially free -- and utilize that freedom in all the traditional boozy, horny, countercultural ways -- but these dancers in the dark face a world which is less meaningful, less connected, than even our own vale of tears.

So the night and the day are strangely mixed in Pynchon's world. Nocturnal chaos reaches, in its statistical limit, a homogeneity indistinguishable from the results of authoritarian, diurnal control. People straight from the light of a flickering television screen in the 21st century flit about among glittering reflective surfaces, outer lives without inner lives. This is freedom? This is the carnival, the night? Is Pynchon trying to tell me that in the end the day and the night are one in the same? But I can simply pick up another, better book and verify that this is not the case: it is easy to find characters both more free and more constrained. Freedom that breaks down this way is not the genuine article.

What Pynchon needs sorely in this book is a foil. A staunch representative of the day, an advocate of traditional fiction and the conventional view of modern history. Someone to tell him, when he strays: dammit, Tom, you're getting into pure stoner logic here, there really isn't any connection between historical counterfactuals and imaginary numbers except as a very facile metaphor. This book is lacking in the heat and light that results from genuine conflict. It is drowning in pure gooey Pynchonianness, so suffused with Pynchon's fixation on everything alternative that the mainstream never gets to make its case. Show me the face of coherence, if only so you can reject it. If Pynchon wants to escape into the bland infinity of endless alternatives, I would at least like to see what he is running from.

What amazed me throughout this huge, baggy thing is just how tonally brilliant Pynchon's prose is here: it allows him to riff on everything from mathematics to cricket, music theory to telepathy, Aether to optics--interests too many to list here. And yet with all the madness going on, the prose at times almost imperceptibly shifts registers and presents a stunning passage (some of which might as well be out of a good old, traditional family novel) that knocks the reader's socks off. Amazing!

Disappointing to get through a thousand plus pages and to feel completely underwhelmed. I honestly wouldn't even say I liked it, but it managed an extra star just because of its breadth and writing. But ultimately it was much too cumbersome, much too long, and much too convoluted. I read this book nearly everyday for a little over a month but still lost the storyline numerous times. It'd be impossible to sum this behemoth up in a review, but I think the scope of the book was insanely massive, and this led to the book being much too expansive and confusing which ultimately made it none too entertaining. I've found Pynchon's shorter works (i.e. Bleeding Edge) to be much better than some of his longer stuff (i.e. Mason & Dixon). I'd never recommend spending the time to get through this tome. Can absolutely be skipped.

A book to marvel at and completely lose yourself in. It's one of the most entertaining but demanding books I've ever read. Pynchon's longest novel, 1200 pages, hundreds of characters to keep track of, merging different genres from western, sci fi and history, I couldn't imagine any other person being able to write it. It also seems to be an accumulation of everything Pynchon has ever done, for example it has the mathematics and some sexual scenes that could of been pulled from gravity's rainbow but also has the adventure and heartwarming parts that could be pulled from mason and dixon. Truly amazing.

Es un gigantesco oxímoron intentar resumir mis pensamientos sobre una obra tan contraria al resumen, una que rechaza el sentido y el cierre en una concepción más tradicional de la narrativa. Aun así, voy a intentarlo.

"Against the Day" es un mastodonte que parte de dos familias y sus allegados para narrar la historia del inicio del siglo XX, la llegada y establecimiento de la modernidad, y los sucesos que llevarían de forma inevitable a la 1ra Guerra Mundial. Hay como cuatro narrativas paralelas, pero ello también es distorsionar el asunto o dar una falsa ilusión de un "cierre" o seguimiento tradicional de las mismas, pues Pynchon crea una telaraña del tamaño del cosmos para hilvanar personajes, sucesos históricos, referencias, especulaciones matemáticas y misticismo del más alto orden.

Es la novela posmoderna por excelencia al rehuir el sentido y la definición, al aceptar y acoger en su seno el pastiche absoluto de géneros populares de la época que recrea: las aventuras y épicas, el western, el thriller detectivesco (con su descenso al noir) y la ciencia ficción de la especulación y lo desconocido (con muchísima cercanía a la ciencia pura del asunto). De igual forma, cada una de sus partes (hay cinco, aunque la primera y última son más prólogo y epílogo respectivamente) se permite enfocarse en algo específico sobre los grandes temas que quiere plantear, con la aventura y la venganza del advenimiento de la modernidad, la intriga y misterio de las especulaciones científicas y metafísicas del mundo, y el desmoronamiento del mundo occidental por medio de la conspiración política y las ambiciones de poder.

El logro de todo ello yace en sus personajes, los hilos conductores de las múltiples historias y con quienes desearías poder estar por cientos de páginas más. La familia Traverse y los viajes de sus miembros por EE. UU. y Europa; los Vibe y la maldad de la maquinaria capitalista corporativa; los Rideout y la improvisación frente a la ciencia. Y, por supuesto; los "Chums of Chance" (o chicos del azar), aeronautas tan ficcionales como reales dentro de la novela misma, exploradores del mundo y la fascinación de la historia. Todos ellos tienen muchísimo carisma y resultan mucho más entrañables de lo que uno creería a primera instancia. Su desarrollo, a veces más sutil que lo acostumbrado en la literatura, es tan extraño como emotivo, y es incluso sorpresivo cómo una aproximación tan poco usual en lo fragmentada que es la novela logra generar empatía y cariño hacia estas creaciones ficcionales.

Pynchon es un monstruo, y la mayor enciclopedia humana que existe. Pocas son las cosas que no hace la novela, y presenta casi todo hecho histórico de ese intervalo de tiempo con maestría y una prosa exquisita. Historias dentro de historias que llevan a otras historias, la muerte del causa y efecto, y centenares (literalmente) de personajes. Es una novela condenadamente divertida, sin dejar de presentar pasajes oscuros y perturbadores como pocas cosas que pueden hacerse con el lenguaje escrito. Los capítulos son fascinantes y pasan tantas cosas que es imposible no sentirse abrumado, aunque eso viene por diseño. La prosa de Pynchon requiere acostumbrarse por su combinación de modismos, imitación de lenguajes de época, acentos, expresiones en otros idiomas, y saltos bruscos que puede dar en tangentes de tangentes, pero es genuinamente efectiva en generar impacto y enganche. Me atrevo a decir que difícilmente existen escritores más habilidosos que Pynchon que puedan contarse con los dedos de las manos.

Definitivamente es un libro imperfecto: es imposible que algo tan extenso (más de mil páginas, además de una narrativa lineal, pero que salta y se mueve de formas impredecibles) lo pueda ser. Habrán personajes que tal vez no tendrán el mayor desarrollo del mundo, y elementos argumentales sin explicar o dejados a la deriva. Sin embargo, no puedo sino sentir que ello termina pesando poco cuando se trata de un libro que me ha hecho sentir tanto. Porque el cliché de "no es el destino, sino el viaje" puede parecer una excusa sosa para escapar de un desarrollo narrativo solvente, pero "Against the Day" demuestra que definitivamente hay viajes que pueden hacerte olvidar que realmente las explicaciones no son el foco al momento de establecer el pacto ficcional. Pocos libros me han dado tanto en casi todo aspecto posible, y se ha vuelto instantáneamente en uno de mis favoritos.

Porque sí es inaccesible, exageradamente largo, obtuso y a veces inconcluso en las cosas que no responde. Pero el entregarse a "Against the Day" es dejarse llevar por la esencia pura de la narratividad y de las historias. Es demasiado divertida y entretenida, sin dejar de ser un quebradero enorme de cabeza que nunca entenderé ni en un 30%. Definitivamente es para leer tras conocer otras obras de Pynchon y con tiempo para dedicarle, con la posibilidad de que el buscar algo más estándar genere descontento. Pero, cuando no es así, uno encuentra una de las novelas más importantes de las últimas décadas, y a uno de los mejores escritores que puede haber.

Si otro libro puede hacerme llorar como este, estaré demasiado feliz por existir.

In the far future, A.I. has taken control and subjugated the entire human race, proceeding to indulge in decadent practices akin to those of ancient Rome. One of these A.I. has traveled back in time (Trespassed) and assumed a persona of a postmodernist writer, calling itself Thomas Pynchon, proceeding to inflict the rest of humanity with dense, pretentious novels, lauded by academia and misunderstood by everyone else. All the while maintaining the pose of a recluse, thus hiding its real nature - that under the thin veneer of humanity, once you peel away the skin, there is only chrome and metal, machinery devoid of empathy and human understanding. All as a part of an elaborate prank in which the emotions of organic readers are toyed with and their expectations trampled upon.

The A.I. has written a 1000-page book where it incorporated various literary styles from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century - dime novels, westerns, penny dreadfuls, for the sole purpose of concocting a monstrous chimera, whose only goal is to deceive the reader into believing the characters are real, living and breathing human beings, who will undergo character development, tell us something relevant about ourselves, the society and civilization we live in, and help the reader achieve catharsis. Oh, were it only so. Instead, they merely serve the purpose of furthering a plotless story in order to parody and mock everything about the human race, especially their low-brow literature. They go to whichever part of the world they are supposed to at a specific moment, experience being framed in long, unwieldy sentences that you have to reread multiple times just to make sense of, hollow and lifeless just like their sinister author who you can imagine is all the while chuckling to himself, ultimately exploding in metallic laughter.

If I had to choose one positive it would be the fact that in its last quarter the novel more often than not slips into explicit pornography, which I found mildly amusing, and at times stimulating. At least the machine got our mating practices right.

As unfortunate as it is, Against the Day may be the last tome we see from Pynchon. It also just might be his best. It seemed to me, while reading it, that this was Pynchon trying to cover all of the themes, questions, and philosophical ideas he explored over the course of his career and wrap them up in one final doorstopper. I feel, personally, that he succeeded.

I was blown away by how refined the language seemed in this book. It was just as beautifully written and just as complex as Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon, but somehow managed to be faster-paced and feel at times like an adventure novel. Whether or not this was due to me having read the others first, thus preparing me for this one, I cannot say. All I can say is that this book was perfect, in my opinion. Each sentence, paragraph, and chapter seemed perfectly structured and planned out. The characters were well-drawn. More than any other book I've read by Pynchon, this one hit hard when it wanted to. The character relationships are done so well, that even a goodbye between two minor characters can carry some serious emotional weight.

I will almost certainly be revisiting this book throughout my life. So much depth and so much fun. My personal favorite from Pynchon now, and that's saying a lot.

There's plenty of great reviews here already, and I don't have much to add other than this: if you're a fan of Pynchon and have been putting this one off for fear of its length, stop. Read it now. It's more than worth it. Against the Day is a masterpiece.