One thousand two hundred twenty (1,220) pages in fine print, a high 4.04 average rating in goodreads. Let's see first the metaphors and what-nots it provoked among the brave souls who had read and reviewed it:1. Mikey Stewart (3 stars) - (his first sentence): "Good lord, where to start?"2. Oriana (5 stars) - "It's like, instead of reading a book, you're like reading a chunk of a river...this one is like a million rivulets, each slipping overunderthrough one another, that you follow for a second, or a couple (of) pages, until they go back under and get lost in the general cacophony..."3. Jim Ruland (5 stars) - "...like long shots of ants scurrying about in an ant farm..."4. Marcus Mennes (5 stars) - An "onslaught."5. Guy (4 stars) - It's about LIGHT."6. Lee Worden (5 stars) - "I don't really get what he's up to with all the different kinds of light..."7. Daniel (5 stars) - "(Pynchon) ends up hollowing out parts of your brain and building his own theme park there..."8. Cynthia (5 stars) - "(Pynchon) just keeps on going until, I guess, either he gets exhausted or his publisher makes him turn it in or, I dunno, his printer breaks down."9. Steve Aydt (5 stars) -"...like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach."10. Mark (5 stars) - "...I let the words cascade into my brain and realize that no one does it quite like Pynchon."11. Michael (5 stars) - "Pynchon's homage to the 19th century dime novel..."12. Eddie Watkins (5 stars) - "...it's like reading a massive young-adult novel..."13. Nate Dorr (4 stars) - "...full of references that fly straight by me..."14. Andy (5 stars) - "A joyful and ecstatic clusterfuck..."15. Tony (4 stars) - (after writing his review): "This is a mess, I'll have to clean it up a bit..."16. Darrell (5 stars) - "...enjoyable even if much of it goes over your head."17. Phillip (5 stars) - "...in another sense--(this) book never ends..."18. Matt (4 stars) - "This was my summer reading project, and it took most of the summer."19. Geoff Sebesta (4 stars) - "...reading this book reminds me of wading through brains...It's designed to hurt your head..."20. F.R. Jameson (4 stars) - "...feels like a doorway into the wild imagination of a brilliant conjurer."21. Snotchocheez (2 stars) - "... one gigantic headache-inducing mess."22. Will Layman (4 stars) - (after his introductory spiel): "...what follows is impossible to summarize..."23. Cary Barney (3 stars) - "...(while reading it) there are times you wonder why you're doing this to yourself. Pynchon had material for at least four novels here and unfortunately opted to throw it all into a blender."24. Nat (5 stars) - "I am, at heart, a reader of the slow & persistent ilk, so spending 11 months with this tome was almost like fostering a relationship with another person."25. Joe Hunt (3 stars) - "I still haven't finished this book! But I've had for like two years. Hyrum, my brother, gave it to me. I really like it!"If these guys and girls had been paying attention they would not have tortured themselves writing a review of this novel because Thomas Pynchon himself has a review of this, buried practically incognito on page 956 of my copy. Here Vlado gave to Yashmeen a book entitled "The Book of the Masked" and Pynchon describes it like he would have described this novel:"(Its) pages were filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels, of what Vlado had been visited by under the assaults of his home wind, of what could not be paraphrased even into the strange holiness of Old Slavonic script, visions of the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God's unseen world."Read it again.For that would be the common experience you'll have in its paragraphs and passages so that with the rereading you'll be doing the novel could very well become like 2,000 pages and not just 1,220.Now, why have I rated this 5 stars? Because of its last seven paragraphs. Seven paragraphs the meaning of which I do not know, which I can't say I understand, full of the usual impossibilities and exaggerations, the simultaneous pregnancies, of the balloon-ship which has grown as big as a city, the talking dogs, the dog who reads Henry James, the scientific mumbo-jumbo, the trips to nowhere, all these--for reasons I do not know--had left me misty-eyed:"One day Heartsease discovers that she's expecting a baby, and then, like a canonical part-song, the other girls one by one announce that they are, too."And on they fly. The ship by now has grown as large as a small city. There are neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum conditions. It is so big that when people on the ground see it in the sky, they are struck with selective hysterical blindness and end up not seeing it at all."Its corridors will begin to teem with children of all ages and sizes who run up and down the different decks whooping and hollering. The more serious are learning to fly the ship, others, never cut out for the Sky, are only marking time between visits to the surface, understanding that their destinies willl be down in the finite world."'Inconvenience' herself is constantly having her engineering updated. As a result of advances in relativity theory, light is incorporated as a source of motive power--though not exactly fuel--and as a carrying medium--though not exactly a vehicle--occupying, rather, a relation to the skyship much like that of the ocean to a surfer on a surfboard--a design principle borrowed from the AEther units that carry the girls to and fro on missions whose details they do not always share fully with 'High Command.'"As the sails of her destiny can be reefed against too much light, so they may also be spread to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are effortless now. It is no longer a matter of gravity--it is an acceptance of sky."The contracts which the crew have been signing lately, under Darby's grim obsessiveness, grow longer and longer, eventually overflowing the edges of the main table in the mess decks, and occasionally they find themselves engaged to journey very far afield indeed. They return to Earth--unless it is Counter-Earth--with a form of 'mnemonic frostbite,' retaining only awed impressions of a ship exceeding the usual three dimensions, docking, each time precariously, at a series of remote stations high in unmeasured outer space, which together form a road to a destination--both ship and dockage hurtling at speeds that no one wishes to imagine, invisible sources of gravity rolling through like storms, making it possible to fall for distances only astronomers are comfortable with--yet, each time, the 'Inconvenience' is brought to safety, in the bright, flowerlike heart of a perfect hyper-hyperboloid that only Miles can see in its entirety."Pugnax and Ksenji's generations--at least in every litter will follow a career as a sky-dog--have been joined by those of other dogs, as well as by cats, birds, rodents, and less-terrestial forms of life. Never sleeping, clamorous as a nonstop feast day, 'Inconvenience,' once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination, where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard 'Inconvenience' has yet observed any sign of this. They know--Miles is certain--it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace."
[written 2008]The early reviews I read of Against the Day were all a little bewildered, and gave me the distinct impression that a lot of reviewers had tried to skim-read this huge novel so they could get their articles written in time. It's not an easy one to write up at all. It's very long, very busy, and you come to it with all kinds of preconceptions, just because it's Pynchon and although he's only written a few novels they all seem to be masterpieces.For people who have been following him over the years, it's something of a change of direction. His last two books, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, seemed to show a new concern with characters, personalities and intimacy compared to the unreconstructed craziness of his earlier work. But Against the Day has much more in common with his earlier books – it most closely resembles Gravity's Rainbow (the hipster's long novel of choice), although there is a weariness, a kind of ironic distance at work here which points to an older author.If it seems like I'm putting off the business of actually trying to explain what this novel's about, it's because I am. Ostensibly we are looking at a timeframe moving from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the years immediately after the First World War. Pynchon has always been much more interested than his compatriot writers in the world outside America, and here we get wonderful sketches of everywhere from Colorado, New York and Chicago to Siberia, London, Yugoslavia, Morocco, revolutionary Mexico, Constantinople, Venice and plenty more besides. The cast of characters is huge, though not as disorienting as some reviewers have made out. The main plot strand concerns three brothers from Colorado trying to avenge their father's murder, though there is also a boy's-own spy story involving British agents and unrest in the Balkans, not to mention a whole subplot about characters who are at least partly fictional even within the world of the novel.It's not even entirely certain whether or not these events are taking place precisely in our world. In the novel, not only do we have the new force of electricity changing the face of society, but we also have mathematicians and scientists devising machines which can make photographs move or allow for the possibility of time-travel. In many ways it's written not as a historical novel but as a sci-fi novel might have looked written by someone in the 1880s. ‘By now,’ someone remarks at one point, ‘I know that your most deranged utterances are only conventional history prematurely blurted.’At first that just seems like a cute conceit, but as the novel goes on it assumes a greater importance. There is always a suggestion that the world of possibilities shown in here somehow became our own world after some cataclysmic event, which is especially associated with the War. ‘This world you take to be “the” world will die,’ says one character, ‘and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.’The upcoming war looms over everything, just as the Second World War did over Gravity's Rainbow. It is conceived as being so awful that it has stained time itself, affecting events long before it happened with an air of sinister disaster. It is the darkness behind everyday events, which is sensed preternaturally by almost every character in the book, and which allows Pynchon to give free rein to his delight in finding mystery and paranoia in otherwise normal events. Who else would, or could, describe a sunrise like this:The sun came up a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnameable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment – its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence.Here you can see all Pynchon's trademarks – the long sentences, stacks of clauses skirting round some inexplicable sensation of mystery, a general feeling that you're never totally sure what he's going on about. It is this mood, rather than any event-based plot, which Pynchon is concerned with describing. And the writing is everything you'd hope for – I think he's the best writer of sentences since Nabokov. Some of the turns of phrase stop you dead: a view from a hotel window of ‘long, moon-stung waves’; a rough night for someone who ‘didn't so much sleep as become intermittently conscious of time’; or an emotional parting at a railway station, of which we are told: ‘though their kiss went on for what could have been hours, so little did it have to do with clock time, she was already miles away down those rails before their lips even touched.’Looking back through my copy to pick out these passages, it's telling that I can hardly remember now which characters are even being written about here. They seem less important than what he uses them to say. Some people might even call them types; you could certainly be forgiven for getting a bit suspicious about the way every single female character is a submissive nymphomaniac – though that certainly allows for a lot of fun along the way. (OK, there's one major exception, but she's a dominant nymphomaniac.) The verisimilitude is also not helped much by the outrageous names everyone seems to have, like Professor Heino Vanderjuice or a musician called Chester LeStreet (hee-hee). It's definitely a little disappointing after where he seemed to be going with the last couple of books, but still, there's no doubt that by the end there are a core group of people who you really do care about.And they can be fun too. One of the many pleasures of the book comes from the incongruence of people and places, like the grizzled American detective who finds himself working for a tarot cult among the upper classes in London. The Colorado boys in particular generate some fantastically gruff dialogue, including one of my favourite remarks: ‘Tengo que get el fuck out of aquí.’ The women are intelligent and funny and, as I mentioned, permanently horny. He does sexy rather well. ‘Just can't stay away,’ whispers one respectable girl who has ended up all corrupted in a brothel out west, ‘…you've simply ruined me for everyday bourgeois sexuality. Whatever am I to do?’The proliferation of characters is partly down to one of the book's most important themes, that of doubling. Two of the cast, Renfrew and Werfner, are mirror-images of each other in more than just name; someone else finds himself wondering if he could be his own ghost. We hear much of the shamanic practice of bilocation, by which someone can be literally in two places at once, and there is also a preoccupation with Iceland spar, a kind of crystal which creates a doubling of light – and, by implication, of the world itself. Pynchon seems to have taken the advice of one of his characters: ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’Like a lot of Pynchon's books, it starts off being a whole lot of fun with crazy jokes and weird sex and unnecessary songs, and yet again by the time you're sucked in you can't help feeling that something very important is going on. It seems to have to do with understanding what kind of person you might have been if some choices had been made differently, and what kind of world there could have been if some choices had been made differently. With some aliens, threesomes, tommyknockers, cowboys and meteorites thrown in.Have we been here before? Oh…maybe. Still, it seems a bit harsh to criticise him for producing more of the same when the same is so brilliant, so rich, and so full of complex and fascinating pleasures. Above all I was left feeling the sadness and the wonder of all the potential worlds I and everyone else could be creating, if we only had more time to stop and work out how. As one of the many walk-on reprobates points out:…isn't it the curse of the drifter, this desolation of heart we feel each evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for half a minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the likes of us, don't you see, for we're only passing through, we're already ghosts.
What do You think about Against The Day (2006)?
Bueno, me alegro de haber hecho el esfuerzo de terminar, pasada la pájara del ecuador del libro. Superé esa sensación de que la prosa crecía descontrolada como un tumor, carente de 'centros’ y conseguí encontrar algo parecido a un sentido (o varios). También he superado mi (mala) lectura de El arco iris de gravedad, de manera que me lo apunto como relectura. Pero bueno, Contraluz:A veces tenía la sensación de ir en una montaña rusa, con oasis de aburrimiento, bien por repetitivos y monótonos, bien por incomprensibles o inaprensibles (out of memory error, bip bip), pero topando también con fragmentos sencillamente perfectos e inseparables del conjunto. A veces episodios enteros, como el viaje de Kit al Asia chamánica; otras, parrafadas de orfebrería, obra de los distintos avatares literarios del narrador:"... Se marchó cabalgando por el sendero, encaminándose vagamente hacia el sur, un día de aire tan calmo que parecía antinatural, y el polvo que levantaba a su paso se negaba a asentarse y se espesaba, hasta que pareció que se había metamorfoseado en una criatura de polvo de varios kilómetros de largo, que se alejaba arrastrándose..." En fin, Pynchon complica aún más el asunto introduciendo dos niveles en la narración: la “realidad” de personajes como los anarquistas Traverse, el magnate Vibe & co., y la “ficción” de los Chicos del Azar. "Vistas desde el suelo, las aeronaves rivales eran más hipotéticas que literales: objetos de temor y profecía, [...] objetos condensados o proyectados desde los sueños, las lejanías, las soledades. [...] La doble ciudadanía de los aeronautas en los reinos de lo cotidiano y lo fantasmal..." Desde el principio deja clara la distinta naturaleza de unos y otros, pero pronto sus caminos se entrecruzan y las aventuras de unos y otros se contagian del mismo carácter fantasmal, evanescente como las historias de los Chicos: las guerras de Tesla, los episodios venecianos, las búsquedas de Shambala, los viajeros del tiempo, las querellas matemáticas… Y universos alternativos, saltos de una narración a otra que son saltos de un universo narrativo a otro. Un torrente de materiales que no se llevan hasta el final, que no se cierran, que no se explotan y no dan todo lo que pueden dar de sí. Cada tema daría para una novela, pero claro, ya no sería una de Pynchon. Este –en alguna de las mil lecturas posibles- nos sitúa en un marco histórico definido para bucear en la trastienda de la historia, en lo que pudo haber detrás sin quedar registrado. Una relectura paranoica del pasado cuajada de conspiraciones y contra-conspiraciones. No sólo tenemos los caminos ocultos de la política o del esoterismo (que también), sino que la ciencia se suma a la fiesta y encontramos sectas pitagóricas, guerras científicas, tecnologías imposibles… Vemos un esperpento, una monumental parodia total de las polémicas científicas y de las esotéricas, que da una nueva y brutal lectura del presente. El ferrocarril, los explosivos, la aeronáutica, la metalurgia, la física y las matemáticas, la industria de la muerte y, sobre todo, el dominio de la electricidad, de la luz, con todos los mundos que esta abre. Contraluz parece una relectura de la última etapa de la Segunda Revolución Industrial, del Gran Capitalismo, que desemboca en el desastre de las Guerras Mundiales, y, por extensión, del presente que surge de todo esto. Más que un viaje en el tiempo es un viaje a la raíz. Y todo en el marco de lo que es y de lo que “puede ser”, con los fantasmas de Wells, Verne, Poe, Bierce, Conrad y hasta Lovecraft (entre otros, pasando por toda la galaxia de la ‘novela popular’), pululando en el continuo de ficción, de realidad total, incluidos los universos alternativos en los que se mueven los Chicos del Azar. Semejante enredijo sólo es posible mediante una estructura narrativa que rompe todos los límites y todas las neuronas del pobre lector. Ahí tenemos a los Traverse convertidos en algo que sería lo más parecido a un hilo conductor, liados en un culebrón de culebrones en el que confluyen (casi) todas las ideas y estilos que surcan la novela. Novelas dentro de novelas de novelas, en un ir y venir de personajes a los que resulta totalmente imposible seguir la pista. Después de doscientas páginas volvemos a encontrarnos con un personaje olvidado y apenas si podemos recuperar el hilo. Y este hilo se enreda con otros veinte que también se ocultan y vuelven a surgir, con personajes que aparecen y desaparecen y se ocultan y vuelven y cambian, sobre todo cambian, con las convenientes elipsis que lo lían todo un poco más, si cabe. [Que no, que ya no cabe.] Las andanzas de Frank, Reef, Yashmeen, Cyprian y los otros se deshilachan hasta un nivel de detalle excesivo, en unos micro-hilos que además parecen repetirse y repetirse, llevando a callejones de aburrimiento –complots frustrados, pliegues de la Historia, itinerarios sin destino-, fruto en parte del esfuerzo frustrado para tratar de reconstruir unos hilos que ni pueden reconstruirse ni parecen estar pensados para hacerlo. Pero además de los fragmentos en los que la novela remonta el vuelo, que lo compensan todo, el conjunto se crece. Algo en Pynchon marca un punto de no retorno. En su aproximación a la realidad, su narrativa parece la más lúcida. El dilema es cómo serlo conservando la legibilidad. Parece que llega un punto en que hasta el más pintado se pierde, no comprende qué pasa, y creo que cuando esto ocurre quizá estamos ante un error de planteamiento, aunque sea deliberado; aunque su objetivo fuera tener al lector ocupado en buscar patrones, esquemas y modelos que se repitan o dialoguen entre los distintas partes del relato. Algo no funciona, y no siempre es el idiota del lector, digo yo… Ni siquiera aceptando que sea una novela sólo para überlectores supervitaminados e hipermineralizados. El caso es que cada vez que pienso en la novela, imagino o intuyo nuevas lecturas o interpretaciones. Es inagotable. Es durísima. Uno se imagina al autor plantando su bandera en la ladera de una montaña, marcando hasta dónde se puede llegar, de momento."Si uno no aparta la mirada del mapa mientras retrocede lentamente por la habitación, a cierta precisa distancia, el principio estructural salta de golpe a la vista: cómo se conectan las diferentes líneas, cómo no, dónde pueden querer conectarlas los diversos intereses existentes..."(Habrá que alejarse más...)
—Jose Luis
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 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, 1893, 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 1100-page supernova is rather more densely interconnected than the thematic dichotomies of V, even as it spews (seemingly?) extraneous material in all directions.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.
—Nate D
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.g., Tesla, Kovaleskaya, and even himself (Pynchon), or real world events, e.g., 1893 Chicago World's Fair, World War I, etc. 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 1893 to the early 1920'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 1,220 pages - it is nothing but a show. There are many characters with names easy to remember: Sloat (my favorite), Deuce, Yasmeen, Miles, Chick, Lindsay, Randolf, Pugnax, Luca, etc. and yet I know that not one of these will linger in my mind like how Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus made an erasable imprint in my brain as fictional characters.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 1,220 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.
—K.D. Absolutely
