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swordofmorality's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
2.0
bonnieg's review against another edition
4.0
Okay, first things first, DO NOT get the audiobook. You cannot begin to imagine how bad a reader can be. I regret every negative thing I have ever said about a reader because all up to now have been geniuses compared to Jeanne Berlin. I took the audio back to the library after 4 of 17 disks and got the book. Turns out, once I was out of Jeanne Berlin induced hell, the book was pretty delightful.
No mistake about it, this is Pynchon-lite, as so many have mentioned. I loved V and Gravity's Rainbow as much as the next girl, but I don't always look for that level of challenge from my reading choices. This book requires much less, though still a fair bit, from the reader. Written in Pynchon-speak with sub-references and digressions aplenty the book takes a smart and broadly well-informed reader. I enjoyed the silly dig at 9-11 conspiracy theorists. I was delighted by the nod to our need for villains, the central casting part moving from Boris & Natasha type Russians, to Muslims, to tech billionaires. I laughed at the pretty dead-on portrayal of the modern Upper West Side Jewish mother, and her Workman's Circle era parents. I take off a star for a few lengthy digressions that messed with the pace of the book (and with noir, pacing really matters) and which a judicious editor would have done away with, and for some repetitive "jokes" that show that sometimes even Thomas Pynchon, whose mind and writing skill surpass most all other comers, is not as clever as he thinks. Highly recommend this one.
No mistake about it, this is Pynchon-lite, as so many have mentioned. I loved V and Gravity's Rainbow as much as the next girl, but I don't always look for that level of challenge from my reading choices. This book requires much less, though still a fair bit, from the reader. Written in Pynchon-speak with sub-references and digressions aplenty the book takes a smart and broadly well-informed reader. I enjoyed the silly dig at 9-11 conspiracy theorists. I was delighted by the nod to our need for villains, the central casting part moving from Boris & Natasha type Russians, to Muslims, to tech billionaires. I laughed at the pretty dead-on portrayal of the modern Upper West Side Jewish mother, and her Workman's Circle era parents. I take off a star for a few lengthy digressions that messed with the pace of the book (and with noir, pacing really matters) and which a judicious editor would have done away with, and for some repetitive "jokes" that show that sometimes even Thomas Pynchon, whose mind and writing skill surpass most all other comers, is not as clever as he thinks. Highly recommend this one.
jonfaith's review against another edition
4.0
My friends and I created our online reading group samizdat in the summer of 1999. Our first selection was Gravity's Rainbow and we've made a number of efforts since then to recreate that cherry high. Those distant days of yahoo and dial up are recreated in Bleeding Edge, though most of its characters play with a heavier set of clubs. The Kabbalic notion of a deep web where the eschatological becomes, well, virtual is hardly a new idea. Pynchon drapes it all in a noir apparatus with a crime scene at Ground Zero.
Pynchon goes with a female protagonist, Maxine - mother of two and fraud investigator - Frau investigator. It has been a long time since Oedipa Mass and I think Maxine finds her form with verve. It is rife with all the standard Pynchonian parodies. There is a biopic channel where all notable personalities receive 100 minute, big screen treatment. there are song lyrics at every turn and an entire football roster of blurry men on the grassy knoll. There are fingers pointed to Wahabi networks funded from dot.com dividends, a scratchy DVD showing a fail-safe with Stinger missles being used if the planes didn't complete their mission. There is also a host of Mossad and Russians running around, not to mention an entire room of Jihadis with an ElectroMagnetic Pulse. Oh well, one shouldn't expect subtlety.
There is a scene towards the end where Maxine is discussing the internet with her father. He rebukes here deterritorialized utopian view and tells her point blank that it was designed by cold warriors, that intent has to linger.
Pynchon goes with a female protagonist, Maxine - mother of two and fraud investigator - Frau investigator. It has been a long time since Oedipa Mass and I think Maxine finds her form with verve. It is rife with all the standard Pynchonian parodies. There is a biopic channel where all notable personalities receive 100 minute, big screen treatment. there are song lyrics at every turn and an entire football roster of blurry men on the grassy knoll. There are fingers pointed to Wahabi networks funded from dot.com dividends, a scratchy DVD showing a fail-safe with Stinger missles being used if the planes didn't complete their mission. There is also a host of Mossad and Russians running around, not to mention an entire room of Jihadis with an ElectroMagnetic Pulse. Oh well, one shouldn't expect subtlety.
There is a scene towards the end where Maxine is discussing the internet with her father. He rebukes here deterritorialized utopian view and tells her point blank that it was designed by cold warriors, that intent has to linger.
tyler_h3490's review against another edition
Not sure what it is about Pynchon…more of the same from Vineland I.e long boring parts with his wackiness leading to nothing with great great writing at certain parts
laurencenz's review against another edition
5.0
Slightly less random than some of the magnum opi, but still a great read. Excellent review at http://theamericanreader.com/review-thomas-pynchons-bleeding-edge/#identifier_3_10277 that puts all his books within a unifying context of chaos.
Great realistic descriptions of life in NYC.
Also the morality of the interent
on page 420 "Yep and your internet was their (cold war McCarthyites) invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smaller details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our previous time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never Was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible As it kept growing it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet and don't think anything has changed, kid."
and then 12 pages later:
Maybe what we've been living through is just a privileged little window, and now it's going back to what it always was..... Look at it every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothing but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage -
In the end I came round to it as one of his best.
Great realistic descriptions of life in NYC.
Also the morality of the interent
on page 420 "Yep and your internet was their (cold war McCarthyites) invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smaller details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our previous time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never Was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible As it kept growing it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet and don't think anything has changed, kid."
and then 12 pages later:
Maybe what we've been living through is just a privileged little window, and now it's going back to what it always was..... Look at it every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothing but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage -
In the end I came round to it as one of his best.
runkefer's review against another edition
2.0
I was disappointed in this latest tome from Pynchon. It read like a mashup of Jonathan Lethem's CHRONIC CITY and Neal Stephenson's REAMDE, and to some extent SNOW CRASH, all of which I liked much better. I'm not averse to the techno-paranoia genre at all, but BLEEDING EDGE was populated by so many characters that I began losing track almost immediately, and the through-line was, well, where was it? There were so many funny lines, clever turns of phrase, great puns, but these were the only things that kept me reading. That and my obsessiveness about finishing books. There was no real arc, no real character development. It is a vehicle for delivering wordplay. I'm sure he'll be accused of anti-Semitism, if he hasn't been already. National Book Award? are you kidding me?
veganshay's review against another edition
5.0
Not a biography of U2's guitarist by a disgruntled Dub...it's Pynchon back to his meta-paranoic best. It's amazing that he can still write blazing fiction at an age when most authors are either dead or writing elegiac works of nostalgia, although you could argue there's a nostalgia for the paranoia of books like The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, when it was possible to believe there was some order underlying all the chaos of the universe. It was inevitable he'd tackle 9/11 and the internet eventually and the nexus between 9/11 and the subsequent theories that sprung up online are perfect Pynchon fodder. As zany and erudite as anything he's written.
jonathanelias's review against another edition
S148 - muss mich jedes Mal wieder ranpeitschen. Dieser super raffinierte ironische Tonfall gepaart mit comichaften Charakteren.. Gegenentwurf zu Knausgard, wo es um die ernsthafte, echte Gefühle geht, seelisches Innenleben. Davon ist ja nix da, da geht es irgendwie um Zeitgeist, Popkultur.
Ich tue mich natürlich auch schwer mit diesem magisch verschwurbelten DeepWeb.
Thomas Pynchons Thriller "Bleeding Edge" spielt in einer düsteren, cyberpunkigen Welt, die eigentlich unsere nicht allzu ferne Vergangenheit ist, das Jahr 2001, kurz vor und kurz nach dem elften September, berichtet Ronald Düker. Die Betrugsermittlerin Maxine Tarnow stößt auf die Machenschaften einer Organisation namens hashslingrz, die offiziell in Computersicherheit macht, aber eng mit einer islamistischen Terrorgruppe und dem amerikanischen Sicherheitsapparat zusammenarbeitet und jede Menge Geld in dubiosen Start-Ups wäscht, fasst der Rezensent zusammen. Die Welt, in der Maxine sich hashslingrz-CEO Gabriel Ice stellen muss, wird dominiert von Big-Data und Algorithmen, wobei sich "das Eigenleben der Programme" längst jeder Kontrolle entzieht, erklärt Düker. Aber: "Romane sind keine Welterklärungsapparate" und Pynchon kein Freund klarer Verhältnisse, weiß der Rezensent, deshalb sollte man in diesem Buch nicht auf eine vollständige Auflösung hoffen, verrät Düker.