Product Description

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #180464 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1085 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Knotty, paunchy, nutty, raunchy, Pynchon's first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader's, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again. Yet just when his recurring themes threaten to become tics, this perennial Nobel bridesmaid engineers another never-before-seen phrase, or effect, and all but the most churlish resistance collapses. It all begins in 1893, with an intrepid crew of young balloonists whose storybook adventures will bookend, interrupt and sometimes even be read by, scores of at least somewhat more realistic characters over the next 30 years. Chief among these figures are Colorado anarchist Webb Traverse and his children: Kit, a Yale- and Göttingen-educated mathematician; Frank, an engineer who joins the Mexican revolution; Reef, a cardsharp turned outlaw bomber who lands in a perversely tender ménage à trois; and daughter Lake, another Pynchon heroine with a weakness for the absolute wrong man. Psychological truth keeps pace with phantasmagorical invention throughout. In a Belgian interlude recalling Pynchon's incomparable Gravity's Rainbow, a refugee from the future conjures a horrific vision of the trench warfare to come: "League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands." This, scant pages after Kit nearly drowns in mayonnaise at the Regional Mayonnaise Works in West Flanders. Behind it all, linking these tonally divergent subplots and the book's cavalcade of characters, is a shared premonition of the blood-drenched doomsday just about to break above their heads. Ever sympathetic to the weak over the strong, the comradely over the combine (and ever wary of false dichotomies), Pynchon's own aesthetic sometimes works against him. Despite himself, he'll reach for the portentous dream sequence, the exquisitely stage-managed weather, some perhaps not entirely digested historical research, the "invisible," the "unmappable"—when just as often it's the overlooked detail, the "scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall," a bed partner's "full rangy nakedness and glow" that leaves a reader gutshot with wonder. Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book's jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding. (Nov.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
The Seattle Times sums up critical reaction to Against the Day best: "Like Bruegel's painting 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,' this is a portrait of mankind's attempt to transcend our mortality—or at least push up against its very edge." Thomas Pynchon's previous novels, including V., The Crying of Lot 49,and Gravity's Rainbow, tested boundaries as well—not only of our own human understanding but of the fiction craft itself. This newest offering contains familiar elements—a whimsical humor, an erudite intellect, leftist ideals, and a sense of historical logic. Despite its magnificence, however, Against the Day tested most reviewers' patience (especially Michiko Kakutani's). The novel's length, digressions, and intellectual complexity will not please everyone, but those who stick with it are, well, probably smarter than the rest of us.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
Listeners navigating Pynchon's latest magnum opus could easily be thrown off by the multitude of characters, themes, and events in this novel that spans several decades around the cusp of the twentieth century. From bomb-throwing anarchists to greedy capitalists, from miners to "pavement nymphs," from adventurers to mystics, reader Dick Hill works wonders as he portrays this cast of hundreds who wend their way through a dense yet always intriguing story. With a palette of voices that not only capture the unique traits of each character but make them all stand out, and with narration that keeps the story flowing, listeners who persevere through this long novel will find both the story and the performance immensely rewarding. K.M. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

"Call 'Em Communications From Far, Far Away..."
If both The Bible and The Koran are suggesting of apocalypse with reference to that loaded phrase, 'against the day' - and great title, Mr Pynchon - then for me the novel itself certainly lives up to the promise.

I believe Thomas Pynchon is The Greatest Living Novelist. Fine. But I can't think of any other writer that stays with me in the way Pynchon does. Whenever I read a novel by Thomas Pynchon I become obsessed with it. If I'm not reading it, I'm thinking about it and when I finish the thing it still stays with me. And 'Against The Day' has absolutely haunted me.

The time span of the novel begins in the late ninetenth century as Europe appears to be hurtling towards an unavoidable destiny. "You have no idea what you're heading into. The world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell" where "Flanders will be the mass grave of History".

This is serious stuff but The Great War is both the background idea of the novel and yet not quite of it. It's the daily lives of the characters which are the thing with 'history' felt but maybe not necessarily seen in the background. History waiting to happen. Is the Tunguska Event "the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the threshold of, collapsed into a single event?"

The plot itself is almost ludicrously simple for such a long novel - anarchist father is murdered at the whim of a magnate of big business and we'll see what happens to the children - but as you might expect there are a multitude of sub-plots including the adventures of The Chums Of Chance, a gang of adolescent boys who fly aboard their airship 'The Inconvenience' righting wrongs.

Or do they?

Most of the 9/11 suggestions in the book centre on The Chums and the ending left me with a feeling of general disquiet. This is obviously a good thing.

As I said the novel takes in the amount of sub-plots you would expect from a Thomas Pynchon novel and yes, there are the songs and yes, the puns continue apace and yes, it is long and no, you can't skim read it...

But why would you want to? When we talk about the pleasures of serious literature what we are talking about beyond the import and the cumulative effect are the incidental pleasures of reading. I can think of no other living writer who provides more of those moments than Pynchon.

Thomas Pynchon takes history and turns it into questions. The Campanile in Venice did mysteriously collapse in 1902; there is still a million dollar reward outstanding for anyone that solves the Reimann Principle; the air-burst of a comet in 1908 was the probable cause of the Tunguska Event...

As I said this is a novel that I couldn't shake off while I was reading it and even now it still continues to work its magic on me. I can't say for certain what it all adds up to but this is a good thing, surely? What I do know is the cliche that Pynchon's characters are mere cyphers for his bigger picture has once again, as in 'Mason & Dixon', been exploded; that the novel is simultaneously a summation of the past and a warning for now ("It's a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn't make much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting."); and that really no one else has ever written like this but the man himself.

Yeah, I thought this was a sublime read. And like I said, a warning for now...

"Illusion. When peace and plenty are once again taken for granted, at your most languorous moment of maximum surrender, the true state of affairs will be borne in upon you. Swiftly and without mercy".

A sublime read. A masterpiece.

a year of reading
a year of reading "against the day" and i'm still flabbergasted. never having read pynchon before, i am beside myself with awe...with happiness.

no, it is not easy. yes, it is long...but so what?

covering the years of tesla, edison, north and south pole adventures, the great war, anarchy and the early 20's, "against the day" teems with made up names (the humor behind which i mostly did not understand...but comprehended) known and mysterious cities and places and incidents that may or may not have occured.
i loved the feel of the book..in my hands i mean. i loved the heft of the book, on an intectual meaning, i mean. i got it..........i think.

Well Worth the Time
I dedicated three hours a night to Against the Day, and it took weeks to finish, but it was a journey well spent. Although the math/science subplots can be somewhat tedious, the overall effect is dazzling. Mr. Pynchon pulls tricks out of his magician's hat that left me laughing at what he can get away with. This is a tremendous novel!