Some adjectives to describe ‘Against the Day’: Historical; futuristic; fantastical; gritty; witty; epic; adventurous; philosophical; lusty, scientific; learned; surreal; dense; playful; sociological; hallucinogenic; relentless; ambitious; funny, theological and licentious.

Some areas touched upon by ‘Against the Day’: Quantum mathematics; European anarchy; American anarchy in the old west; English anarchy of a sort Conrad wouldn’t quite recognise; Boy’s Own Stories; the union movement; families; betrayal; cartography; geology; bilocation; World War I; mayonnaise; time travel; crystals; explosives; art; show business; applied mechanics; The Fourth Dimension; the afterlife; telepathy; The Russian Revolution; The Mexican Revolution; private detectives; the behaviour of Franz Ferdinand; revenge, cricket; Jack the Ripper; Tunguska 1908; secret cities; the Trans-Siberian Express; sex and desire; secret government organisations; talking plants; and the origins of West Ham United.

This is an extraordinary book which really does deserve the title ‘Epic’. Sprawling across many years and with a wide range of characters, ‘Against the Day’ feels like a doorway into the wild imagination of a brilliant conjurer. It starts with the heroic crew of the airship Inconvenience, known as ‘The Chums of Chance’, they fly across the world – and sometimes through it and even onto a Counter Earth – performing great deeds of daring-do. (One of the conceits I particularly liked is that their adventures are collected together elsewhere in a different set of books hugely popular in a parallel universe.) In the first hundred pages or so they meet a group of characters whose lives we then follow, as well as some other characters they themselves come in contact with.

If I had a criticism it’s that I’m not sure it all pulls together as a whole at the end, but the ride to get there is extremely satisfying. This is a very long book and clearly won’t be to everyone’s tastes. But I never thought that any of the chapters, or characters, or the strange little vignettes spun out with intelligent whimsy, were in anyway dull or tedious or somehow pointless.

For all its length and big ideas, this is a genuinely entertaining – if demanding – read.

This might very well end up being my favorite Pynchon novel. But I don't know, since if I were to become a one-author-reading hermit all of Pynchon's novels would be there with me, as they are the hands-down most rereadable novels I've ever read (with Nabokov a close second).

I would place this next to Gravity's Rainbow as his two most ambitious novels, but there's something about Against the Day that I like better. In many ways it's like reading a massive young-adult novel, there's just such a sense of outright fun and adventure about it (I read many parts of it with a big world atlas open on my lap, following the characters journeys).

In Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon is always striving to express things beyond the confines of the book, which gives it a tremendous sense of urgency, like he had direct experience of a reality that just couldn't be put into words. Against the Day lacks this urgency, though there's still the keen interest in a reality beyond the normal everyday, but there's also more of a detachment on Pynchon's part, which makes reading it less stressful (Gravity's Rainbow has a tendency to make me paranoid while reading it) and simply enjoyable, while still satisfying the desire for alternative realities.

I'm finally finished with this beast! This probably deserves to be a 5 star book, but I'm docking a star just because, unfortunately, I did find my attention wandering and then finding myself lost more than a handful of times. This probably had to do with a combination of not only the complexity of the plot and the number of characters to keep track of, but also because I listened to the audio book. The first ~170 pages and the characters who were introduced there are stuck much more clearly in my mind, only because I actually went back and reread the print pages after having already listened to the audio. In retrospect, I should have just stuck with the print book, but the audio narration was really well done by Dick Hill.

What was the book about? I'm still kind of at a loss after having just finished the book as before I started it. Lots and lots of characters with lives intersecting at various points in both time and space, light, living silver, photography, anarchy, bombs, underground gnomes, aliens (I think?), spies, and much more fill these 1000+ pages.

I enjoyed this journey as much as I was able. One gripe that sticks in my mind, maybe, was I wish that Pugnax the dog had made more appearances.

I could never do this book justice so I'll just say it's brilliant!

Is it ok if I get a lil’ pretentious on your asses?

(What am I talking about, this is a Pynchon review, it’s almost compulsory! In fact, the above could be P’s tagline- I’ll call his agent and set up an… oh yeah, I forgot.)



Reading this book is a lot like travelling along the Riemann zeta function that Pynchon seems so fond of. Locally, we travel small coherent distances, moving round a logical path, but when we zoom out and observe the story globally, we see how convoluted and complex it really is. Cutting a vertical cross-section through the function, we'll see the same sets of characters and storylines sometimes, but a lot of empty space where we're on our own. You can read tens, twenties of pages of this book that are like small packets of story that make sense, but go any further and you’ll get completely lost.

Here we see Pynchon older (I didn’t say mature), more relaxed, and off drugs, and so are his characters for the most part. Also they’ve stopped multiplying, in more than one way: there’s only 100+ of them instead of the 400+ of Gravity's Rainbow for eg., and they have significantly less sex (thankfully- TP’s ‘lovemaking’ scenes make Fifty Shades look like marital missionary!) Sometimes, when they make a second, third? What? Fourth appearance? You even remember their names! Great! Those were exactly the changes I wanted from GR, and yet I still like GR more, only because of its more enjoyable settings as well as my own stubbornness and first Pynchon nostalgia (oh, last year! How long ‘twas ago lawl)

Still we see his traditional format of writing from a talent tower above all other novelists, but with his mind in the gutter. Also you’ll read familiar themes of predestination, the futility of war, unconventional love, yadda yadda and plenty of silly songs too. Spoiler alert: not a single kazoo this time!

Although I did find the ijk, vector, quaternion chat (and Tesla cameo was stoopid) a bit aimless and reminded me of my least favourite Pynchon trait, the interjection of showy-off academic chat that almost deliberately excludes you from having fun with him. Yeah, Joyce’s ideal reader was himself, but that wasn’t a good thing, dude (or wazzit or wizzit I gettit). Nonetheless, it’s hard not to be charmed by big P’s playful genre-hopping neither- boy’s adventure novel runs into hardboiled crime begets… is that supposed to be Henry James? At least this time you can celebrate your own cleverness as well as his. And some sections could even be described as… sweet.

Good on you mate. I’ll read the rest, too :D

Update the second, March 08
Well, well, well [she says, much subdued, pensive; not at all her normal, boistrous, effusive self].

Here we are, March 1, 2008, and I have just closed the cover of Against the Day.

I suppose it's hard to even talk about a tome like this, a thing of this range and scope and breadth. I'd really like to use all the superlatives I can, and then invent new words to describe Pynchon and what he does, because he really is like nothing else ever. In fact, I've been saying that to all my friends over the months I've been ensconsed in this book, that what Pynchon writes are not novels, in any traditional sense, I think. They just flagrantly ignore the rules of structure, and sense, and momentum.

If you'll indulge me, I've come up with a sort-of analogy for this. It's like, instead of reading a book, you're like reading a chunk of a river. (Bear with me here.) Whereas normally a book will progress, go beginning-middle-end, this one is like a million rivulets, each slipping overunderthrough one another, that you follow for a second, or a couple pages, until they go back under and get lost in the general cacophony. Lots of the characters even have names like that -- Stray, Reef, Lake, Heartsease, Ljubica (which means 'love'), Ryder -- that just slip through your fingers as you say them, as the characters go somewhere else and you lose track. There are no beginnings or ends to a river (see? I'm bringing it back), you just watch as different bits of it flit by.

I mean, how can I read something else now? This book kind of disassembles your concept of reading, of how to read, of how to go through a book. In a way I feel like I should just keep reading this, over and over, for the rest of my reading life.

Also, because of all this, 1,085 pages is really nowhere near enough. There is so much more to the lives of these characters! I mean because the book really encompases the whole world, right? So everyone is still living somewhere, in the world between the pages (because, oddly, I don't know that anyone of note actually dies in this book), and I want to know what they do with the rest of their lives, who they go on to love, how they fight, what cities they stumble through, how they find their circuitous destinies. (This is insanely presumptuous, but I think Pynchon might be fond of that thought, since so much is made in this book of people doubling, and living many lives, in and out of the world, or the 'Counter-Earth', or within photographs, or after having Zombini do some kind of spell, or that thing with the Iceland spar, which I don't know if I really get.)

I guess I'm babbling. But I think that's fitting too, for this book. I've gotten a lot of different kinds of shit from different friends for my rapturous devotion to Mr. Pynchon. I don't care. I also don't care that this is probably a sort of frustrating review, which doesn't say much at all about the book. I also don't care that there is obvs so much in this book that I didn't get, and would never get, even if I did spend the rest of my reading life on it. I don't care. I am fiercely in love with Against the Day. I am fanatically devoted to Thomas Pynchon. I am so, so thrilled that I read this book.



Update, Jan 08
In case anyone's keeping track, I am just a smidge over halfway through this fucker. And as a diversion, I present you with a few random samples of Pynchonery:

"Abruptly, sweeping into the scene like an opera singer with an aria to unload, here came 'Mr. Ace,' as he called himself. Glossy black eyes, presented like weapons in a duel. When he smiled, or attempted to, it was not reassuring."

"It was all he could do not to reach for her, gather her into some kind of perimiter. But the moisture in her eyes was shining like steel, not dew, and nothing about her trembled."

"You could hear faint strands of music, crazy stuff, banjos and bugling, trombone glissandi, pianos under the hands of whorehouse professors sounding like they came with keys between the keys."

"Dally's voice was hard to pin down to any one American place, more of a trail voice with turns and drops to it, reminders of towns you thought you'd forgotten or should never've rode into, or even promises of ones you might've heard about and were fixing to get to someday."

See? See??

First entry, Nov 07
wooooo hoooooooooo!!!!!

(that's me going down the rabbit hole, as it were, into the depths of Pynchonalia)

Also, it's so convenient that the folios of this book are such that there are five blank pages at the back. Now I can (with no shame whatsoever) keep a list of all the characters! How the hell else am I going to make it through a 1,085-page monstrosity?

Ho faticato un poco ad entrate dentro questo libro, il mio primo Pynchon, non riuscivo a capire dove volesse condurmi questo aerovolante dal nome sibillino, Inconvenience. Sono salita, mi sono fatta trasportare e man mano ho capito che contava il viaggio in sé, farsi condurre in questo giro verso varie latitudini, varie pieghe del tempo oltre che dello spazio, dal Far West alla Manciuria, Venezia o Londra o Yale. 

Attraverso i molti luoghi, i moltissimi personaggi, si delinea poco a poco l'idea portante attorno a cui tutto ruota, personaggi luoghi ed epoche: il mondo come lo conosciamo sta correndo verso l'apocalisse, sia essa nucleare o sociale o ecologica o un'apocalisse immaginaria venuta da un'immaginata arma quaternionica proveniente dal futuro, l'umanità sta correndo verso il baratro.

Pynchon ci dice questo senso di fine mondo – che è collettivo e individuale, i suoi personaggi sono tutti in fuga da qualcuno o da qualcosa, fosse anche soltanto nel tentativo di domare l'irrequietezza ansiosa altresì chiamata vita – con fare scherzoso da film Western o da fumetto, o con tono intenso da Pulp Fiction, ma lo ripete senza sosta. In quest'apocalisse annunciata, a cui nessuno può sfuggire, non c'è tuttavia disperazione né sterile annichilimento, ma direi piuttosto la volontà di viverle contro, magari opponendole l'utopia di un'ideale anarchico, romantico, come un piccolo Davide che abbatta a suon di bombe il mostro inenarrabile che è l'idea stessa del Capitalismo già al suo sorgere.(cfr discorso del Capitalista malvagio per eccellenza Scardsale Vibe, pag. 1040-41).
Ed è contro il capitalismo disumano e ingiusto che i protagonisti principali – i bombaroli anarchici che compongono la famiglia Traverse - contro le ingiustizie e le gabbie del giorno che tutti i personaggi lottano.

Un libro utopico nella sua speranza di una possibile forma di umana giustizia, scanzonato, romantico a suo modo, anarchico e anticapitalistico, divertentissimo e istrionico a un tempo, un libro che contiene molti libri (spy story, racconto di viaggio, di fantascienza e molto altro). Parlando di quaternioni e matematici pazzi, di sciamani ute e otzovisti, della teoria spettrale di Hilbert o di come si salva una maionese impazzita, Pynchon ci parla del nostro presente e futuro, assurdo, ingiusto, irredimibile. Senza salvezza dunque? Può darsi sì, ma non per questo da non percorrere in allegria, consapevolezza e in balìa di una vitalissima, rigenerante utopia, che regali almeno l'illusione di perseguire un poco di umana giustizia.

E, lettore, non ti dirò che in queste 1127 pagine non ce ne sia nessuna che non mi abbia un filo annoiata o annichilita o..., ma subito dopo il picco si innalzava come un grafico di Piazza Affari dalla sera alla mattina, e quindi per media e per istinto non posso non insignirlo di cinque stelle sfolgoranti. Enjoy!

This was a very difficult book for me. I had wanted to like it, and it sat looking at me for years waiting for the perfect time to read it. Finally I started and was confused by much of this book, and after around the first 100 pages it dawned upon me that I was reading an updated version of Jules Verne novels. There is no doubt that there are some fun episodes and escapades that are recounted in this book, but on the whole the book is a ponderous read for someone who is not into steampunk and science fiction writing. At over 1100 pages it is definitely too long and my copy of the book was in a tiny font size which made it very difficult to read.

This is a book about the adventures of a group of hot air balloonists that takes place over the course of many years and takes them to many different locations, some of my favorite being Chicago and Iceland. The tales are fanciful and imaginative but it's too much. As I said this reminds me so much of Jules Verne’s works, specifically his first book “Five Weeks in a Balloon”, as well as his other novels. The beauty about Verne is he rarely left his home in France and all these travels were in his imagination. This is exactly what we have with this book. I know there are some who believe this is a wonderful book, I'm glad that I took the time to read it, but I think that I will prefer some of Pynchon’s other books, specifically Mason and Dixon which has a more historical fiction feel to it.

I give this a low rating because I just did not click with this book, and if you don't have that feeling about a book it's hard to give it a good rating. Again, I found the book of challenge and will think many people will find this book a challenge. But during the winter, when you have long nights and you want to go on some incredible journeys you could either take this book, or maybe go back to those books written by Jules Verne and have wonderful flights of fancy.

Having now read five Pynchon novels in rapid succession, I've concluded that later Pynchon is superior to early Pynchon. In my college days, I read The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow and loved them. But now, having re-read the latter and then Mason & Dixon and Against the Day back-to-back, Gravity's Rainbow almost seems like an early stab at the themes and techniques Pynchon really nails in the later novels.

In Against the Day, we find all of the hallmarks of Pynchon that variably delight and infuriate readers in Gravity's Rainbow. For example, there's the same relentless plot overload: so many characters and interweaving story threads that within a couple hundred pages it becomes hard to keep up. There's the intense fabulism, sometimes sublime, often zany. (Pynchon has definitely mastered the art of the psychedelic dad joke.) There's the obsession with America: its beauty and its ugliness, its ideals and its incessant betrayal of them. There's the dizzying intermixing of many genres, with a focus in Against the Day on those that emerged in late 19th and early 20th century American pop culture: for example, boys' adventure tales, scientific romance (a.k.a. proto-scifi), westerns, detective fiction, socialist dystopias and utopias, and tales of proletarian uprising a la John Dos Passos. And, there's the literary mining of science and mathematics. (Pynchon, especially in this novel, is one of the only writers I've come across who really understands the poetry in mathematics.)

However, despite these parallels with Gravity's Rainbow, in Against the Day Pynchon is much better at crafting three-dimensional characters and compelling interpersonal relationships. The same was true in Mason & Dixon, but Against the Day is even more impressive in this regard. That is, there's definitely a kind of through line in Against the Day. Although he doesn't appear all that much, in some sense the central character is the robber baron Scarsdale Vibe, who treats capitalism as a literal religion; and the book is mainly about the impact of his machinations on the various members of the Rideout and Traverse families. However, whereas Mason & Dixon is laser focused on the relationship between the titular main characters, Against the Day sprawls like Gravity's Rainbow, constantly jumping all around the world (and sometimes within and beyond it) and tracing numerous lives as they crisscross, collide and diverge. In this sense, it combines the best qualities of Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow.

Beyond this, while the fabulism in Gravity's Rainbow often has the muddled, cluttered quality of a lot of 60s psychedelia, often leading people to wonder whether Pynchon was perma-stoned while writing it, Against the Day's fabulism is consistently precise and elegant without sacrificing any of its sublimity. In the 17 years of radio silence that followed Gravity's Rainbow's publication, it seems Pynchon really learned how to leap beyond trippiness and into genuine transcendence.

All in all, in these last few months reading his books, Pynchon has become a different writer for me. Although I adored Gravity's Rainbow as a college kid, my admiration of it is much more qualified now. But Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are stone cold masterpieces for the ages. I'll definitely be pressing forward to read the remaining Pynchon books I haven't read. First up, Bleeding Edge!

Not much to say about this one, despite its classic status and gargantuan size. It's typical Pynchon, with a little less paranoia and a little more anti-industrialism. The side effect of this is more clarity in the writing--critics apparently caught onto this and called it Pynchon's "most accessible book." I wouldn't say that, necessarily, but I would say that when you write about paranoia, your writing is automatically going to be a bit murkier than it might otherwise be, since you can never know precisely what you're talking about, which probably goes a long way toward explaining why some people find Pynchon so difficult, now that I think of it.

At any rate, here are some quotes that should explain what I mean better than I can. I've never been able to write a decent Pynchon review.

"The Professor was literally having an attack of nausea. Every time Tesla's name came up, this was the predictable outcome. Vomit. The audacity and scope of the inventor's dreams had always sent Heino Vanderjuice staggering back to his office in Sloane Lab feeling not so much a failure as someone who has taken a wrong turn in the labyrinth of Time and now cannot find his way back to the moment he made it."

"'For dynamite is both the miner's curse, the outward and audible sign of his enslavement to mineral extraction, and the American working man's equalizer, his agent of deliverance, if he would only dare to use it . . . Every time a stick goes off in the service of the owners, a blast convertible at the end of some chain of accountancy to dollar sums no miner ever saw, there will have to be a corresponding entry on the other side of God's ledger, convertible to human freedom no owner is willing to grant . . . Answering the question, how can anyone set off a bomb that will take innocent lives?'
'Long fuse,' . . .
'Think about it . . . like Original Sin, only with exceptions. Being born into this don't automatically make you innocent. But when you reach a point in your life where you understand who is fucking who--beg pardon, Lord--who's taking it and who's not, that's when you're obliged to choose how much you'll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms.'"

"'La Mayonnaise has its origins in the moral squalor of the court of Louis XV--here in Belgium the affinity should not be too surprising. The courts of Leopold and Louis are not that different except in time, and what is time? Both monumentally deluded men, maintaining their power through oppression of the innocent. One might usefully compare Cléo de Mérode and the marquise de Pompadour. Neuropathists would recognize in both kings a desire to construct a self-consistent world to live inside, which allows them to continue the great damage they are inflicting on the world the rest of us must live in.'"

(A Tatzelwurm is apparently a horrific beast that lives in mines and torments miners)
"'The really disturbing thing is when you see [a Tatzelwurm] and it looks up and sees that you are watching it. Sometimes it will run, but if it doesn't, then prepare to be attacked. It helps if you don't look at its face too long. Even in the dark, you will know where it is, because it will be screaming--a high whistling scream that like the winter cold will creep in to occupy your bones.'
'Once you have had the encounter, it is with you forever. This is why I believe they are sent to us, to some of us in particular, for a purpose.'
'What's that?'
'To tell us we shouldn't be doing this.'
'Tunneling?'
'Putting railroads.'
'But we're not,' Reef pointed out. 'The people who are paying us are. Do they ever see the Tatzelwurm?'
'It visits them in their dreams.'
'And it looks like us,' Flaco added.'"

"That evening the Strand, as if by some consensus, was exhibiting that sinister British craving for the dark and shiny so well known to experts in erotic neuropathy, not to mention students of the chimpanzee--crowds in mackintoshes, patent boots, and top hats, the soiled allure of marcasite brooches and earrings, pomaded temples struck to chill glitter in the public lighting...even the pavement, slick with rain and oily exudations, contributing its own queasy albedo. The streetlighting carried, for those, such as Neville and Nigel, who could hear it, the luminous equivalent of a steady, afflicted shriek."

"Up into the Karst, to a vineyard gate and an osmizza just inside that served meals and wine, the lights of Trieste far below, a wine ancient before Illyria, nameless, wind-finished, ethereal in its absence of color. And because here on this coast wine had never simply been wine, any more than politics was simply politics--there lay as-yet-undiscovered notes of redemption, time-reversal, unexpected agency."

"Who at some point hadn't come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love."

And bleaker yet, magnate Scarsdale Vibe's address:

"'So of course we use them. We harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. Look at them--they carry the mark of their absurd fate in plain sight. Their foolish music is about to stop, and it is they who will be caught out, awkwardly, most of them tone-deaf and never to be fully aware, few if any with the sense to leave the game early and seek refuge before it is too late. Perhaps there will not, even by then, be refuge. . . . Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun.'"

And young Jesse's essay on What It Means To Be An American:

"It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don't go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down."

This was excellent, so much so that I was tempted to add it to my ever-growing list of favorites (query: if your list of favorite books exceeds a certain number, say, 100 or so, are they still your favorites, or does it at some point just become a list of books you really like? Like have 18 best friends or something; surely "best" implies a very small number? But I digress).

In the end I didn't add it, though I think it is definitely in the running for best Pynchon novel, because it started to bag for me somewhere in the 800s. I think most of the Cyprian sections were somehow not my thing; I could simply have done without him. Your mileage, of course, may vary. Also, and perhaps I am alone in this, I was happier with a Pynchon who didn't write quite so many sex scenes.

Even the slower bits, though, were completely forgivable, because fundamentally what counts is that sentence by sentence, every page is a sheer pleasure. The joy in language, the playfulness and fun of it, is evident in every sentence, baggy or not, and for me this is the difference between an author I can admire and one I can love. The older I get, the more this playfulness matters to me, and Pynchon seems to really get that. (I envision him eavesdropping on conversations in cafes around the world, taking mental notes of the ways that people talk, gleefully amassing a vast array of strategies for later use. And hey, you'd never know if that was him at the next table, would you?) I reconfirm that for me, literature is about making art out of the medium of language. Other things may be entertainment, may be valuable and necessary, but they're not capital-L literature, and they'll never be my first and foremost.

Reading this has also made me want to go back and re-read Mason and Dixon (also in the running for best Pynchon, imho), as well as to read for the first time the two big ones I never did read at all, GR and Vineland. At the same time, it's made me want to crawl off into a hole of fast-reading genre fiction, because between this and Calvino and a better but harder job, I feel pretty tired. Even as I feel this wish, I know that Pynchon is the better writer, objectively, for all time, and that even my lower appetites are still a big book snob.

Perhaps a break, and then back to the really good books, of which this is definitely one.
_______________________________
From the WSJ review by Alexander Theroux:
"To read this book with anything like comprehension, a person has to be, like its polymath author, both intellectual and hip, a person mature and profoundly well read and yet something of a true marginal, a word-nerd with the patience of Job. In my charitable estimate that would describe about five out of 500 people that I know."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1164327...

AtD blasted me away with its scale and swath(e). The fact that he was able to keep that giant mega-ball rolling, doubling, wrapping it all up at the end still amazes me. I've said this other places, but GR is Pynchon's most important novel (to date), M&D is my favorite (oh, the ending Sir, the ending), but AtD is his BEST. Pynchon absolutely doubles down on his paranoia, his doubling, his funk and sizzle. He circumnavigates the globe detailing, explaining, entertaining, and just riffing on whatever he wants to play with.