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174 reviews for:
Thomas pynchon's Against the day: A Deleuzian reading of pynchon's language.
Thomas Pynchon
4.19 AVERAGE
174 reviews for:
Thomas pynchon's Against the day: A Deleuzian reading of pynchon's language.
Thomas Pynchon
4.19 AVERAGE
Too complex/diverse/obscure/lengthy/dense to really enjoy.
adventurous
challenging
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Typically I love Pynchon, and it's probably just my fault rather than his, but for some reason the lack of protagonists, narrative structure and descriptive coherency really kept me from getting further than a few chapters on this one.
I have read longer books, but this may have taken me the longest to read.
Didn't think there would ever be a shaggy-dog tale that last roughly twice the length of Moby Dick? Pynchon has you covered!
I laughed! I was bored! I was engrossed, and disgusted and several times I had no idea what was going on.
Would recommend.
Didn't think there would ever be a shaggy-dog tale that last roughly twice the length of Moby Dick? Pynchon has you covered!
I laughed! I was bored! I was engrossed, and disgusted and several times I had no idea what was going on.
Would recommend.
Despite being in a huge reading slump with everything going on in the world, I finished this bad boy. Now that I have completed all of Pynchon's novels, it must be said that this is his greatest achievement. My ranking of his works:
1. Against the Day
2. Gravity's Rainbow
3. Mason & Dixon
4. V
5. The Crying of Lot 49
6. Inherent Vice
7. Vineland
8. Bleeding Edge
Against the Day, like said in countless reviews on this site, defies all expectations and explanations. You really just have to swan dive into this ocean of various narratives that multiply, magnify and maximize the adventures of the Chums of Chance. I really enjoyed how Pynchon delved into philosophical, scientific and historical questions about the function of Time, and the many ways in which History tends to fold on itself. While not a linguistic masterpiece such as Gravity's Rainbow, V and M&D, this novel shines in both its storytelling and its scope.
1. Against the Day
2. Gravity's Rainbow
3. Mason & Dixon
4. V
5. The Crying of Lot 49
6. Inherent Vice
7. Vineland
8. Bleeding Edge
Against the Day, like said in countless reviews on this site, defies all expectations and explanations. You really just have to swan dive into this ocean of various narratives that multiply, magnify and maximize the adventures of the Chums of Chance. I really enjoyed how Pynchon delved into philosophical, scientific and historical questions about the function of Time, and the many ways in which History tends to fold on itself. While not a linguistic masterpiece such as Gravity's Rainbow, V and M&D, this novel shines in both its storytelling and its scope.
I finished this week a few weeks ago but knew I'd have to spend awhile with the review and therefore procrastinated on it. This is a really interesting novel in a variety of ways. It's possibly a little easier to follow for those who have had difficulty with Pynchon's other work, too. That isn't to say it's not complicated. The most difficult task is keeping all of the names and details of the characters straight as there's a baffling number and Pynchon switches back and forth throughout the novel. The characters are connected to one another in complex sorts of ways having to do with The World's Fair, Tesla's electricity, Wild West sentiments, early attempts to create time machines, unions, anarchy, early photography, magic tricks, etherism, quantum mechanics, and one amazing hot air balloon. The time span is substantial and Pynchon shows quite a few different areas of the world between 1893 and the 1920s which also make it interesting. There's a perception throughout the novel that few of the characters are trustworthy but most are intelligent and some are rather ruthless which makes their personalities more engaging to explore. However, if Pynchon had limited the novel to half of these characters, he would have been able to explore their moral complexities with more depth.
***spoiler ahead***
Of course, the kicker of the novel is that you don't realize that all of the characters in the novel (except of course the historical figures referred to more off hand in discussions of electricity) are actually part of a dime novel until pg. 200 or so. When it becomes clear that the Chums of Chance are in fact just dime novel characters, it quickly spurs a sort of "guilt by association" sort of reading that occurs where all that associate with Chums of Chance directly and then all who associate with them are also dime novel characters. In the end, there's no one left who could in fact be real. This excuses some of the fantastical sequences (especially occurring with the Chums of Chance) as well as some of the really cheesy scenes of intercourse that occur towards the end of the novel. What one ends up with, of course, is an intelligently written dime novel from the perspective of a heady and worldly researcher. I'm sure there isn't another novel quite like it. Also, I'd give this a 4 1/2 if GoodReads would let me. It'd be a 5 if those scenes of intercourse weren't so embarrassingly bad.
FAVORITE QUOTES:
pg. 41 "Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, moldering as if always just about to explode into open flames."
pg. 41 "any people believe that there is a mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no connection. All the variables are independent.
pg. 57 "Not long after Erlys had gone off with Zombini the Mysterious, Merle Rideout dreamed he was in a great museum, a composite of all possible museums, among statues, pictures, crockery, folk-amulets, antiquated machinery, stuffed birds and animals, obsolete musical instruments, and whole corridors o stuff he would not get to see...The wallet (his own) was itself a sort of museum, on a smaller scale-a museum of his life, overstuffed with old ticket stubs, receipts, notes to himself, names and addresses of half or sometimes totally forgotten folks from his past. In the midst of all this biographical litter, a miniature portrait of her appeared."
pg. 59=60 "Some claimed that light had a conscious personality and could even be chatted with, often revealing its deeper secrets to those who approached it in the right way. Groups of these could be observed in Monumental Park at sunrise, sitting in the dew in uncomfortable positions, their lips moving inaudibly. There were diet faddists who styled themselves Lightarians, living on nothing but light, even serving up labs they thought of as kitchens and concocting meals from light recipes, fried light, fricaseed light, light a la mode..."
pg. 66 "'If the US was a person..and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would be instantly plunged into darkness.'"
pg.111 "'Anyone at all educated,' protested Lindsay, 'Knows that Fourth of July fireworks are the patriotic symbols of noteworthy episodes of military explosions in our nation's history, deemed necessary to maintain the integrity of the American homeland against threats presented from all sides of a benightedly hostile world.'
'Explosion without an objective,' declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form.'"
pg.153 "So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence-not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be-its inhabitants became and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator."
pg.259 "Bells are the most ancient objects. The call to us out of eternity."
pg. 285 "Anarchists ain't the only ones with ideas about the future."
pg. 354-355 "'Anybody can saw their assistant in half, he said, 'it's one of the oldest effects in the business. The problem is, she always gets reassembled, there's always a happy ending.'
'Problem? It should be an unhappy ending?" Bria puzzled. 'Like those bloody horror shows they put on over there in Paris, France?'
'Not exactly. You already know about this stuff here,' Bringing out a small, near-perfect crystal of Iceland spar. 'Doubles the image, the two overlap,with the right sort of light, the right lenses, you can separate the in stages, a little further each time, step by step till in fact it becomes possible to saw somebody in half optically, and instead of two different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking around, who are identical in every way capisci?'"
pg. 393 "The desert is something that has evolved over geographical time. Not somebody's personal punishment."
pg. 540-541 "'They could turn out to be innocent mathematicians, I suppose,' muttered Woevere's section officer, de Decker. 'Only.' Woevre was amused. 'Someday you'll explain to me how that's possible. Seeing that, on the face of it all, all mathematics leads, doesn't it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering.'"
pg. 567 "'There's a new Puccini opera,' she said. 'An American betrays a Japanese woman. Butterfly. He ought to die of shame, but does not-Butterfly does. What are we to make of this? Is it that Japanese do die of shame and dishonor but Americans don't? Maybe can't ever die of shame because they lack the cultural equipment? As if, somehow your country is just mechanically destined to move forward regardless of who is in the way or underfoot?'"
pg. 578 "'They died there? How good can the food be?'
'Oh, then call them traces of consciousness. Psychical research is beginning to open these matters up a bit. Ghosts can be...well, actually, look at them all.' He waved an arm up and down the Zattere. 'Every tourist you see here streaming by, everyone who plans to sleep tonight in a strange bed is potentially that kind of ghost. Transient beds for some reason are able to catch and hold these subtle vibrational impulses of the soul. Haven't you noticed in hotels, the way your dreams are often, alarmingly, not your own?'"
pg. 635 "'Fate does not speak. She carries a Mauser and from time to time indicates our proper path.'"
pg. 686 "...much like dreaming, in which one version of you remains behind, all but paralyzed except for basic activities like snoring and farting and rolling over, while another goes calmly off to worlds unexpected, to fulfill obligations proper to each of them, using daytime motor skills often extended into such areas as flying, passing through walls, performing athletic miracles of speed and strength...And this traveling double was no weightless spook-others could see it solid and plain enough, in fact too plain, many reporting how figure and ground were kept separate by an edge, overdefined and glimmering, between two distinct kinds of light..."
pg. 784 "For awhile after the Event, crazed Raskol'niki ran around in the woods, flagellating themselves and occasional onlookers who got too close, raving bout Tchernobyl, the destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of Revelation. Reindeer discovered again their ancient powers of flight, which has lapsed over the centuries since humans began invading the North. Some were stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area. Mosquitoes lost their taste for blood, acquiring one instead for vodka, and were observed congregating in large swarms at local taverns. Clocks and watches ran backward. Although it was summer, there were brief snowfalls in the devastated taiga, and heat in general tended to flow unpredictably for awhile. Siberian wolves walked into churches in the middle of services, quoted passages from the Scriptures in fluent Old Slavonic, and walked peaceably out again. They were reported to be especially fond of Matthew 7:15, 'Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly, they are ravening wolves..."
pg.1036, "'See, every photographic subject moves,' Roswell explained,'even if it's standing still. It breathes, light bounces off, something. Snapping a photograph is like what the math professors call 'differentiating' an equation of motion-freezing that movement into the very small piece of time it takes the shutter to open and close. So we figured-if shooting a photo is like taking a first derivative, then maybe we could find some way to do the reverse of that, start with the still photo and integrate it, recover its complete primitive and release it back into action...even back to life..."
***spoiler ahead***
Of course, the kicker of the novel is that you don't realize that all of the characters in the novel (except of course the historical figures referred to more off hand in discussions of electricity) are actually part of a dime novel until pg. 200 or so. When it becomes clear that the Chums of Chance are in fact just dime novel characters, it quickly spurs a sort of "guilt by association" sort of reading that occurs where all that associate with Chums of Chance directly and then all who associate with them are also dime novel characters. In the end, there's no one left who could in fact be real. This excuses some of the fantastical sequences (especially occurring with the Chums of Chance) as well as some of the really cheesy scenes of intercourse that occur towards the end of the novel. What one ends up with, of course, is an intelligently written dime novel from the perspective of a heady and worldly researcher. I'm sure there isn't another novel quite like it. Also, I'd give this a 4 1/2 if GoodReads would let me. It'd be a 5 if those scenes of intercourse weren't so embarrassingly bad.
FAVORITE QUOTES:
pg. 41 "Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, moldering as if always just about to explode into open flames."
pg. 41 "any people believe that there is a mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no connection. All the variables are independent.
pg. 57 "Not long after Erlys had gone off with Zombini the Mysterious, Merle Rideout dreamed he was in a great museum, a composite of all possible museums, among statues, pictures, crockery, folk-amulets, antiquated machinery, stuffed birds and animals, obsolete musical instruments, and whole corridors o stuff he would not get to see...The wallet (his own) was itself a sort of museum, on a smaller scale-a museum of his life, overstuffed with old ticket stubs, receipts, notes to himself, names and addresses of half or sometimes totally forgotten folks from his past. In the midst of all this biographical litter, a miniature portrait of her appeared."
pg. 59=60 "Some claimed that light had a conscious personality and could even be chatted with, often revealing its deeper secrets to those who approached it in the right way. Groups of these could be observed in Monumental Park at sunrise, sitting in the dew in uncomfortable positions, their lips moving inaudibly. There were diet faddists who styled themselves Lightarians, living on nothing but light, even serving up labs they thought of as kitchens and concocting meals from light recipes, fried light, fricaseed light, light a la mode..."
pg. 66 "'If the US was a person..and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would be instantly plunged into darkness.'"
pg.111 "'Anyone at all educated,' protested Lindsay, 'Knows that Fourth of July fireworks are the patriotic symbols of noteworthy episodes of military explosions in our nation's history, deemed necessary to maintain the integrity of the American homeland against threats presented from all sides of a benightedly hostile world.'
'Explosion without an objective,' declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form.'"
pg.153 "So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence-not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be-its inhabitants became and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator."
pg.259 "Bells are the most ancient objects. The call to us out of eternity."
pg. 285 "Anarchists ain't the only ones with ideas about the future."
pg. 354-355 "'Anybody can saw their assistant in half, he said, 'it's one of the oldest effects in the business. The problem is, she always gets reassembled, there's always a happy ending.'
'Problem? It should be an unhappy ending?" Bria puzzled. 'Like those bloody horror shows they put on over there in Paris, France?'
'Not exactly. You already know about this stuff here,' Bringing out a small, near-perfect crystal of Iceland spar. 'Doubles the image, the two overlap,with the right sort of light, the right lenses, you can separate the in stages, a little further each time, step by step till in fact it becomes possible to saw somebody in half optically, and instead of two different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking around, who are identical in every way capisci?'"
pg. 393 "The desert is something that has evolved over geographical time. Not somebody's personal punishment."
pg. 540-541 "'They could turn out to be innocent mathematicians, I suppose,' muttered Woevere's section officer, de Decker. 'Only.' Woevre was amused. 'Someday you'll explain to me how that's possible. Seeing that, on the face of it all, all mathematics leads, doesn't it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering.'"
pg. 567 "'There's a new Puccini opera,' she said. 'An American betrays a Japanese woman. Butterfly. He ought to die of shame, but does not-Butterfly does. What are we to make of this? Is it that Japanese do die of shame and dishonor but Americans don't? Maybe can't ever die of shame because they lack the cultural equipment? As if, somehow your country is just mechanically destined to move forward regardless of who is in the way or underfoot?'"
pg. 578 "'They died there? How good can the food be?'
'Oh, then call them traces of consciousness. Psychical research is beginning to open these matters up a bit. Ghosts can be...well, actually, look at them all.' He waved an arm up and down the Zattere. 'Every tourist you see here streaming by, everyone who plans to sleep tonight in a strange bed is potentially that kind of ghost. Transient beds for some reason are able to catch and hold these subtle vibrational impulses of the soul. Haven't you noticed in hotels, the way your dreams are often, alarmingly, not your own?'"
pg. 635 "'Fate does not speak. She carries a Mauser and from time to time indicates our proper path.'"
pg. 686 "...much like dreaming, in which one version of you remains behind, all but paralyzed except for basic activities like snoring and farting and rolling over, while another goes calmly off to worlds unexpected, to fulfill obligations proper to each of them, using daytime motor skills often extended into such areas as flying, passing through walls, performing athletic miracles of speed and strength...And this traveling double was no weightless spook-others could see it solid and plain enough, in fact too plain, many reporting how figure and ground were kept separate by an edge, overdefined and glimmering, between two distinct kinds of light..."
pg. 784 "For awhile after the Event, crazed Raskol'niki ran around in the woods, flagellating themselves and occasional onlookers who got too close, raving bout Tchernobyl, the destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of Revelation. Reindeer discovered again their ancient powers of flight, which has lapsed over the centuries since humans began invading the North. Some were stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area. Mosquitoes lost their taste for blood, acquiring one instead for vodka, and were observed congregating in large swarms at local taverns. Clocks and watches ran backward. Although it was summer, there were brief snowfalls in the devastated taiga, and heat in general tended to flow unpredictably for awhile. Siberian wolves walked into churches in the middle of services, quoted passages from the Scriptures in fluent Old Slavonic, and walked peaceably out again. They were reported to be especially fond of Matthew 7:15, 'Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly, they are ravening wolves..."
pg.1036, "'See, every photographic subject moves,' Roswell explained,'even if it's standing still. It breathes, light bounces off, something. Snapping a photograph is like what the math professors call 'differentiating' an equation of motion-freezing that movement into the very small piece of time it takes the shutter to open and close. So we figured-if shooting a photo is like taking a first derivative, then maybe we could find some way to do the reverse of that, start with the still photo and integrate it, recover its complete primitive and release it back into action...even back to life..."
It took me a year to read. I still don't know if that's because of the book itself, because of my own life getting in the way, or a combination of both. I kind of suspect the book is designed for your own life to get in the way (almost everyone I've discussed with has a similar experience...) and that's kind of what the book is about. A bunch of people with goals, some of them succeed beautifully, some succeed tepidly, some fail, some forget what their initial goals even were.
It's sort of about capitalism, anarchism and union busting. It's also sort of about life just happening and doing your best to experience what's available to you.
There's a line in the film "Hiroshima Mon Amour" when Emanuelle Riva, recalling her former lover, long since dead, shouts at the top of her lungs in the middle of a crowded restaurant "I was so YOUNG once!". This book kind of feels like a 1000 page extrapolation on that moment. It's really frustrating, and perfect, and heartbreaking all at once.
It's sort of about capitalism, anarchism and union busting. It's also sort of about life just happening and doing your best to experience what's available to you.
There's a line in the film "Hiroshima Mon Amour" when Emanuelle Riva, recalling her former lover, long since dead, shouts at the top of her lungs in the middle of a crowded restaurant "I was so YOUNG once!". This book kind of feels like a 1000 page extrapolation on that moment. It's really frustrating, and perfect, and heartbreaking all at once.
I really enjoyed this for a while. There are segments of unbelievably good prose, fantastically imaginative ideas, and a lot of humour. However, after a while it just began to drag: I suspect some of the maths jokes passed me by and so seemed to become unnecessarily long-winded, the sex scenes were funny at first but then, like the maths, became rather boring. I’d been hoping for a more satisfying ending—not to explain everything, but as it is the story just seems to lose steam. I was left feeling that it would have benefited from a substantial edit in length, to make the allusions and ideas more focused.
One of the most purely entertaining books I have ever read, and it also happens to be one of the best. An enormously brilliant novel that’s endlessly fun to read. I recommend it for anybody who enjoys adventure.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes