Against the day ebook

It really ought to have been there, for Thomas Pynchon has thrown everything else at this novel. Please click button to get against the day book now. The first edition of this novel was published in November 21st , and was written by Thomas Pynchon.

Against the Day pdf — Thomas Pynchon. Source material of quaternions I just trying to put simply allow you by alex. And follow for outstanding arrest warrants looks like and scope. Pynchon, Thomas — Pynchon is an American experimental novelist and short story writer often associated with the black humorists. His labyrinthine, encyclopedic novels reflect the.

The Penguin Press, pages,. The hundreds of characters and scores of subplots in Against the Day amount to another decade at the office for the author. Thomas Pynchon. Boris has just given me a summary of his views.

He is weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be … No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

They think you are one of us. Thanks to us, you are now a nihilist outlaw. Did any of them bother you folks? Everyone waiting. He is not the Messiah.

He is not Christ or Napoleon returned. He was not General Boulanger. He is unnameable. Nevertheless one would have to be uncommonly isolated, either mentally or physically, not to feel His approach. And to know what He is bringing. A bewildering book. Reading this is like standing on a sideline watching the turn of the century. Pynchon is right there beside you and flipping through the scenes showing you how the common people in that era behaved through his eyes.

This is definitely not a history book yet there are real-life characters, e. Still, the bulk of the story is fictional and only uses history A bewildering book.

Still, the bulk of the story is fictional and only uses history as a backdrop. This book is an example of historiographic metafiction or those postmodernist works that are intensely self-reflective and yet paradoxically also claim to historical events and parsonages. Source: Wiki. Of course, I must admit that I did not understand half of what this book was saying. Yet it is enjoyable because it is different. Pynchon is a bully. He wrote this book to show his talent as a writer.

He appeared to me as a boastful yet he has the right to be novelist who enjoys writing long novels to prove that he is a cut above the rest. I am different! I am better than you! He, for me, is a modern-day James Joyce; who wrote another book that I did not fully understand and yet I found beautiful: Ulysses.

Although this book is more ambitious than that: it's scope is wider for to the early 's compared to just a day on Dublin streets. Against the Day also uses contemporary English and yet Pynchon, like Joyce, uses textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization that are shapeless and almost bereft of emotional impact. Like I said, reading this book is like standing on a side street watching the parade of images passing you by. The images can be blurry because I am not familiar with those that Pynchon was trying to make fun about or as sharp as a megapixel photo because of the way he described them.

However, at the end of my reading, they all seem to mix with one another and if I think through the possible theme - that main thin thread that passes through or binds the 1, pages - it is nothing but a show. However, what made this unforgettable is the mere fact of reading it. It gave me headache and backache no book has made my mind swirled as crazy as this and yet you know that this is brilliancy at its finest. Mediocre novelists definitely don't compare.

I mean who among the living writers can compose a beautiful novel with 1, pages and small dense prints? Publishers will be wary about the cost of publishing it if there is no guarantee that the book has captured readers. Pynchon has them. This being my 2nd book by him my first was his thinner book, The Crying of Lot 49 I am happy to say that I will not think twice to someday read his other works like Gravity's Rainbow , V , Vineland and Mason and Dixon. All of them are door-stoppers but sure to be beautiful, well-crafted, first-class door-stoppers.

View all 32 comments. May 16, Jonathan rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , big-books-to-live-in. So when, for example, we discover that all of his novels contain a reference to "singling up all lines" a nautical term indicating the moment before departure one would be wise to note that this tells us something important about what his novels are doing a nod here to Geoff and others who, in comments during his reading of V, made this clear.

The quote above, from page of AtD is a pretty obvious metaphor for his work. The use of the word "uncreated" is not accidental, nor is the suggestion that we as readers may have made this journey many times before. But, for Pynchon, and for those of us lucky enough to read him, possibility is always expanding, is illimitable and, as such, story and hi-story can take us anywhere it damn well chooses.

And so, though this is a novel about love and about family a journey we have traveled a hundred times before it is also about the violent collision of both with the mechanised horrors of the 20th century. It is about the Dream of Rationalism, about illimitable hope for progress and the advancement of our species. And about dirty, puerile, disappointing Life. Their friends, enemies and lovers. It is about these parents and their children, about loyalty, failure, betrayal and memory.

How anyone can possibly find these characters "flat" or "flimsy constructions" is entirely beyond me. Every event, every person, in this novel orbits around this family.

They are the novel's core and its lightening rod. To see, for example, the science sections as somehow unconnected to, or not relevant to, this family is to entirely miss the point. A crystal of Iceland spar has a fascinating property. Because of its natural polarization it is birefringent, meaning light rays entering the crystal become polarized, split, and take two paths to exit the crystal - creating a double image of an object seen through the crystal.

This property had a huge impact on the scientific developments of the late 19th and early 20thc. Its shortage in the late 19th century was considered an emergency of international import.

The design of the ATD book cover has the text doubled as though we are reading it through a piece of Iceland Spar. The crystal is mentioned and riffed upon repeatedly in the text, and we even have one of the sections of the novel named after it.

This crystal and its properties are obviously something TP means us to notice. We have many mirrors reflecting the world, characters are bilocated, Tesla is contrasted with Edison If multiple dimensions, multiple possible worlds exist beside one another, with only tissue-thin walls between them, what happens to the factual and the counter-factual? What happens to the True? It was certainly interesting to come across issues of doubling again so soon after finishing Miss MacIntosh My Darling The difference between TP and MY is that TP is an engineer, a scientist, a lover of gears and cogs and equations and electrons and oil-stained fingers.

MY, on the other hand, writes from some cloud-cluttered height, a place of light and dreaming and utopias in the sky. TP's Anarchists are farcical, or at least the world around them is, MY's have a nobility and a loftiness of purpose. TP also loves the low-brow: smut; puns; and sexcapades of countless types. I am fond of a good dick joke or two, so love that about him. MY can be witty, but I would be suprised to find a dirty joke in her work The temporal location of ATD is also key, of course, when technical progress and unfettered imagination seemed to promise other worlds, radical changes to human nature and society.

Until, sadly, , when humanity woke up, face down in the mud. The hangover would continue to worsen right up to the present day. It certainly fractured History. It certainly fractured Art. There were moments in this book, and most acutely during a scene late in the story involving statues of the Angel of Death, that I felt genuine fear for these people and their world because of what was coming and, of course, the fear was really for the "real"world and all those millions of "real" people - I have never had that sensation while reading before.

It has lingered with me all day. It is certainly a powerful work which can re-create, can summon up, that kind of dread, that kind of acknowledgment of all the blood and suffering which began precisely years ago. The high-country darkness, with little to break it but starlight off the flow of some creek or a fugitive lamp or hearth up in a miner's cabin, soon gave way to an unholy radiance ahead, in the east. It was the wrong color for fire, and daybreak was out of the questions, though the end of the world remained a possibility.

It was in fact the famous electric street-lighting of Telluride, first city in the U. The great peaks first sighted yesterday across the Uncompahgre Plateau, snaggletoothing in a long line up over the southern horizon, now announced themselves at every hand, fearsomely backlit, rearing before the gazes of the passengers, who had begun to rubberneck out at the spreading radiance, chattering like a carful of tourists from back east.

He dances between the lyrical, the satirical, the geographical and the historical with breath-taking ease. He knows landscape, he knows people and he knows the history of both. He moves effortlessly between the language of the elite and the language of the street, often within the bounds of a single sentence. Personally I would be happy to simply sit at his feet and listen to him give birth to Story for the rest of my life. Here's hoping he has at least another big, masterful book in him.

Against the Day is about a feeling. Feeling as if one is not in control of one's actions, as if one's life is constantly impaired by externalities.

I think anyone who is even mildly paranoid will sometimes be under the impression that they are not truly in control of their actions. That "something" might be the nation, The War, capitalism, or even human nature itself.

Pynchon's views on corruption and domination are informed by his views on history. He doesn't view history, like most historians, as institutional, as a war between nations for resources, with human lives as currency. Instead, his history is one of "lives as they are lived, deaths as they are died, all that is made of flesh, blood, semen, bone, fire, pain, shit, madness ,intoxication, visions"--that is real history, says Pynchon.

As much as it is about corruption and evil perpetrated on the powerless individual, it is also about potential; The potential of the human spirit, in the face of suffering and malevolence.

The potential of science, as a force of good. The potential of love and friendship, in the creation of paradise, absent from time and space entirely. Against the day is a beautiful and heartbreaking rendition of individuals trapped by historical systems of labor, capital and warfare. Pynchon is a master of pastiche, of prose and ideas, weaving concepts together and breaking them apart like a magician.

Pynchon might be intimidating and harsh at times, but fundamentally, his message is one of love, compassion and potential. Apr 17, tim rated it it was amazing. Against the Day , for me, is pure reading bliss. Pynchon effortlessly conjures up magic and grace, stretching them through a full spectrum of absurdly strange situations. His characters often lack depth, but he more than makes up for that in many other ways, not least of all with the shear beauty of his prose.

Of the thousand-and-one topics within this book, my favorite themes dwell on light, time, parallel universes, and dimensional transcendence. Anarchy may be the most prevalent thread found th Against the Day , for me, is pure reading bliss. Anarchy may be the most prevalent thread found throughout, but an equally prominent theme, if only slightly less obvious, is the search for Shambhala—both the mythological kingdom said to be hidden somewhere in Inner Asia, as well as the invisible spiritual equivalent located within the Self.

There are stories, like maps that agree It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything. One distinctly memorable scene involves an encounter with a tree in Mexico full of giant luminous beetles all flashing on and off together in unison.

All together these synchronized strobing souls make up one complete radiant soul in the same way that light is indivisible. Light is living tissue. As the brain is the outward and visible expression of the Mind. Pynchon has even more fun exploring the nature of time. For what mission have I here, in this perilous segment of space-time, if not somehow to transcend it? Most of the book takes place in the years leading up to WWI. Using the knowledge of the day, Pynchon bombards the reader in mathematical theories on vectors and quaternions in an attempt to push the boundaries of three-dimensional space.

Pynchon is something of a mystic and trickster. Pynchon must somehow reside in, or frequently visit an extra dimension from the norm. How else is he able to bring back to consensus reality seemingly endless accounts from other realms, parallel universes, and multiple dimensions, all while transporting the reader along with him into those very same worlds?

View all 24 comments. Dec 15, Michael rated it it was amazing Shelves: postmodern , fantasy , germany , new-york , world-war-1 , bulgaria , mexico , russia , fiction , satire. This is a very difficult book to assail and digest but worth it for me to see how the pomo master keeps up with the scene of post-postmodern he has spawned. I bring these others up to convey that if you like them, this may be worth the ascent..

There is something in it for most readers mystery, espionage, fantasy, historical fiction, family s This is a very difficult book to assail and digest but worth it for me to see how the pomo master keeps up with the scene of post-postmodern he has spawned. There is something in it for most readers mystery, espionage, fantasy, historical fiction, family saga, campy humor, philosophy, mathematics , and in that sense there is too much in it for most readers.

Too rich. Like reading of those other authors in a row. Jeeze, can it be back some 40 years ago? Here we get the same MO of personifying entropy and forces of physics into history.

And plenty of mind-bending forays and obsessive quests by a troupe of comic and tragic characters performing the kaleidoscopic dance for our delight and wonder. What is he doing here to mess with our minds? This time he more after the relations of reality to math than to physics per se, and instead of World War 2 as the mental crucible, he is concerned with the fateful collision of burgeoning modernity at the end of the 19th century with the vortex of forces at play after the turn of the 20th century that leads to World War 1.

Others in my reading group should take heart that long pauses can make for a feasible strategy. Jules Verne gave us 80 days to travel around the world, but with this book as a travel itinerary Pynchon does it in 25 plus years span and 10 years to write. From the book jacket: Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 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.

I love it how Pynchon kicks off the book by bringing a lot of his key characters together in Chicago at the beginning and then disperses them about the globe. At the World Exposition in , all the great wonders of modern science and industry are on display. They are the epitome of youthful and plucky gung-ho for technology in the service of progress and adventure. Their assignment has something to do with Tesla, who is working on wireless communication and hopes to create a source of free electricity for the world.

We meet a key enemy of the story, the slimy magnate Scarsdale Vibe, who desires only economic exploitation of such wonders. He funds a Professor Vanderjuice to beat Tesla at the game and a young Tesla assistant, Kit Traverse, to study at Yale the type of math most relevant to his lucrative schemes.

There you have the historical thrust of the innocent and the corrupt of this tale in a nutshell. Aside from Kit, other loveable characters we meet on scene in Chicago are a traveling photographer and electrical appliance handyman, Merle Rideout, and his brilliant adventuresome daughter Dahlia Dally.

Then there is the righteous detective Lewis Basnight, working to outsmart possible anarchist bombers. Finally, we run across some important minor characters, a pair of Austrian government agents who are guarding and keeping out of trouble the young Archduke. Yes, the very one whose assassination by a Serbian agent triggered the Austrian response and cascade of treaty obligations as the onset of World War 1.

Much of the book is a form of foreshadowing of this coming conflagration. Soon the Chums of Chance fly away to tune into an Arctic exploratory mission that has a lot to do with finding a form of calcite known as Iceland Spar.

It has the property of double refraction that holds out the prospect of a window into an alternate reality. Before we get to the house of cards in Europe, we take a diversion to Colorado, where Merle and Dally soon end up and Lew somewhat later.

Lew comes to town on the trail of anarchist threats to the railroads owned by his corporate masters and makes a modest transition to countering the subversive forces aligned with the mining unions. From the conditions of the workers, the dirty tricks and violent tactics of thugs enforcing the greedy corporations, and his growing friendship with pro-union Merle, Lew begins to question whether he is on the right side.

Colorado makes a great stage to wind-up and solidify the characters and to display a nexus of historical forces. Manifest Destiny has closed the wilderness, the Indians are all out of the way on reservations, and capitalism has a free hand to apply new technologies to exploit the environment big time and the muscle of legal and extra-legal means to ride herd over the workers, which includes a lot of foreign immigrants with socialist fervor.

The balance is upset by the entropic monkey wrench of the anarchists, who get pretty bold with their dynamite craze. Soon a lot of folks take up dynamite as a personal means of self expression and empowerment. Without saying who or why, I share the modest spoiler that Webb gets murdered. All of the brothers are forever after motivated toward avenging his death while at times actively dodging this duty.

Lake runs off with a flashy scumbag, unaware of his connections with the corporate bad guys. Lew gets on the dangerous bad side of the dark forces and takes the opportunity of a quick escape to London. The Traverse family saga is loads of fun, full of naughty bits, and replete with feats of derring-do that knits their fate with that of the world.

Frank and Reef wander around the west looking for a target for their revenge, and in the long course of events Frank ends up in Mexico in the middle of their revolution while Reef gets in the middle of the Balkan conflicts that preceded World War 1.

Meanwhile, Kit pursues math studies in Gottingen, where he bonds with fellow math whiz, Yashneen, the daughter of an important English spy and Russian mother. They soon are led into significant forays in Austria and Belgium, and then he assumes a quest that takes him through Central Asia to Siberia as she joins Reef on the Balkan escapades. As for Dahlia, she converges with Lew in London, where he is adapting his detective skills to espionage, and then she ends up in Venice, where she gets involved with the ferment of the arts and part of the draw that makes this city a home base of sorts for Kitt.

Yes, this is all quite dizzying, but Pynchon weaves a very satisfying web, and it becomes clear why places like Bosnia, Venice, and Belgium are favored sites to portray the fateful transformations between the 19th and 20th centuries. Venice is an ancient link between Europe and Asia, home of Marco Polo, the capital of one of the first nation states, a leading center of the Renaissance, and for long periods in history a part of the Austrian Empire. With its traditions of carnival and masked balls and ancient tradition of mapping and mirror making, it makes a great site for romance and intrigue for Pynchon.

It is foreshadowed as the future pathway for German invasion of France and site of the long slaughter at Yypres. The average reader can be sorely mystified and perplexed as to how much of this is a parody of academics and how much a real contributor to the forces of history. The progress of math to make use of dimensions beyond the three of conventional reality and of imaginary numbers whose terms incorporate the square root of -1 did pave the way for use as tools for progress of physics in Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

For example, the treatment of time as the fourth dimension in a geometry known as Minkowski Space was an ideal way for Einstein to portray the effects of gravity on space.

However, in most ways mathematical innovations are just a useful tool for description of reality and not translatable into altered perspectives on fundamental aspects of reality. In this sense, the search for invisible realities, sources of energy, doorways through time in the extra dimensions and imaginary numbers of mathematical systems is just an endearing lunacy.

Even so, the prospect of new weapons coming out of these academic fields presages the obvious fulfillment later in the century on their predictions of the powerful energies that might be released from splitting the atom. In retrospect, the allure is plausible: It is said that the inventor of this weapon has found a way to get inside the scalar part of a Quaternion, where invisible powers may be had for the taking.

And in this age of bizarre spiritualism at the end of the Romanticism based on a recent historical reading of Chaos Imagined , there would likely thoughtful folks who would align the science with the mysticism of Tarot and the Hindu Atman and Shiva and come up with the potential for bifurcated lifelines, for co-consciousness, and for parallel universes, such as in this projection: Deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space.

Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety.

The Chums of Chance flying above all the madness below somehow maintain their innocence despite contracting with various governmental powers. Their adventures extend to a search for the invisible or underground Asian city of Shambhala and efforts to counter interventions of time travelers from the future, wavering between the flavors of Lovecraft and Steampunk e. I was uplifted how, when World War 1 finally came to pass, they largely flew above the fray, so to speak, and punched out to the other side with even more optimism and ambition than they started with.

The same is true for many of the Traverse and Rideout clans, as we bid a fine farewell to them in sunny California. View all 13 comments. Nov 01, Cody rated it it was amazing Shelves: pynchon , immortal. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way.

Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin, blunt-fingered, downy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over, a busy development of small trailside shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged precision, herbs the wildcrafters knew the names and market prices of and which the silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet, knew the magic uses for.

I can add nothing to the conversation beyond this: As an old hand at Pynchon, this is the work that gains the greatest relevance with age. Just as it should be. View all 6 comments. Aug 07, Bradley rated it really liked it Shelves: shelf , mindfuq , history , sci-fi , humor , metaphysics , traditional-fiction. I'm not sure that I can review this. I'm overwhelmed with the sheer sprawling immensity and lack of cohesion except for just a few special points That's kinda my view, too.

It's set up with seemingly hundreds of little scenes and build-ups starting all the way back to Chicago's World's Fair and ending after WWI and never staying in any place for very long. Want to globe-trot around the world? Hop I'm not sure that I can review this. Hop from character to character in admittedly brilliant and detailed and deep world-building sampling whole realities of the past?

Stick around. We've got anarchism and dynamite-wielding revolutionaries, Archduke Ferdinand, Nicola Tesla, druggies, time-traveling hucksters turning harmonicists into a paranoid commune, we've got the ultimate steampunk, we've got sexual escapades from all sorts and means and ends, we've got a cumulative history of detectives starting from mining towns and ending in LA pre-noir, we've got cowboys, the Mexican Revolution, and best of all, tons and tons of science AND science fiction.

But above all, we've got light. Lots and lots of light. Double refractions cause both hallucinations and mirrored universes and where are you, Alice? The rabbit just disappeared.

So did the plot. This novel has no plot even when it has lots and lots of scenes that appear to have plot and cohesion Who knows?

Maybe I'm alone in this feeling. Indeed, I'm caught on the fence between wanting to throw my hands up and go, WHY? It was entertaining in all its myriad pieces, to be sure.

I cannot say the same about trying to tie it all together in order to make sense of it all afterward. Or during, for that matter. It's random and anarchistic AS a novel.

Not just with the characters and the constant re-referencing to anarchism. I feel like I just read a DFW novel that was wider rather than deeper than his normal fare.

View all 3 comments. Some works are so densely, elaborately planned and plotted that any map to their intricacies would necessarily be longer than the work itself. This, I think, is the justification and promise of post-modern literature, with works reaching further in all directions and via as many tools as possible.

Against the Day is one such work: almost any given line or action may upon study be split, like light through a prism, into a full spectrum of significant motifs. And so Against the Day serves as a refr Some works are so densely, elaborately planned and plotted that any map to their intricacies would necessarily be longer than the work itself.

And so Against the Day serves as a refracted history beginning in history's common beam, yet bent slightly away of how the bright promise and "unshaped freedom" of the turn of the century was "rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor" of the 20th century's Great Wars.

The quoted lines refer to the stockyards of the novel's opening setting and microcosm: Chicago, , with the "White City" of the World's Columbian Exposition running into the stockyards where cattle that once roamed the western plains unfettered were brought to slaughter. This history is told mainly through the broad social forces of labor, capitalism, and anarchy all bumping against one another, violently or not, across thirty years and hundreds of significant characters.

But these motifs blend and overlap with the concurrent history of math and physics, so it is also a book about electricity, about bilocations, about vectors and quaternions and graspings at academic fourth dimensions and so, briefly, time travel , and, pervasively about light, which so suffuses every corner of the work that I could resist picking its up its language here.

But fortunately, despite the complex conceptual wash, and as with V , Pynchon is fairly clear in laying out his palette -- fortunately since this nearly page supernova is rather more densely interconnected than the thematic dichotomies of V , even as it spews seemingly? Against the Day is certainly among Pynchon's best in fact, it would be a reasonable starting point for new readers, if not for sheer length , but it's also Pynchon: digressive, intermittently plotted, and full of references that fly straight by me or will require considerable additional consideration to fit into a relevant spot in the workings.

But what makes this novel burn so brightly is that even with this cast of hundreds, the book is largely carried out by believable, memorable characters capable of leading the reader through even the most absurd or divergent mirrored funhouse halls. View all 5 comments. 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 differe 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.

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.

I could say more, but that would probably get boring, and this book is rarely that. View all 7 comments. 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 R As unfortunate as it is, Against the Day may be the last tome we see from Pynchon. 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. View 2 comments. I feel like a MLB pitcher that won Game Seven of the World Series, he knows that no other game he plays from now on will feel as good as pitching in that game, reading that book… 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 s This might very well end up being my favorite Pynchon novel.

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.

Reef took up his book and looked a Reef took up his book and looked at it. Big-ass motherfucker. And now that his nightly reading functioned more as a sort of gloomy serenade to his dead father than anything else it seemed reading material was inconsequential. Upon finally finishing the book, Reef, with some struggle, took a deep breath, halfway into which he began coughing violently, as if a mosquito had flown straight down his throat hell, maybe one did.

I just want to know what the ha-yull this book's trying to say. You read me them Chums books and they were entertaining, sure, but what in the actual ha-yull this book is about?

In fact, it seemed damn-near impossible. Well, shit. I hardly know where to begin. Or Thorvald, the sentient tornado? And do you remember that fella who thought he was an actual Berliner, living in an actual konditorei as a Berliner? Order and chaos