Your rating:
Spanning the era between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, and constantly moving between locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all), Against the Day unfolds with a phantasmagoria of characters that includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, drug enthusiasts, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, spies, and hired guns. As an era of uncertainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.
Publication Year: 2007
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
I'm not a Pynchon guy. I disliked 'The Crying of Lot 49' in college, but it's been 32 years and 'Against the Day' was recommended by a trusted friend. I figured it was time to give the author another go.
I should have passed. Pynchon is a literary onanist, devoted more to pleasuring himself than entertaining and enlightening his reader. As such, he abdicates the first responsibility of the storyteller: to enrapture his audience.
'Against the Day' features a tangled narrative, a panoply of characters, and lazily academic Marxism. The first makes the novel hard to follow. The second makes it hard to keep track of who's doing what to whom. The third is childish and irresponsible. I couldn't finish this novel quickly enough - not because I couldn't put it down, but because I wanted to get it over with.
I listened to this book on Audible. I found narrator Dick Hill's diction to be imprecise, and the recording failed to flatten the volume. The former forced me to listen to the book at a much slower speed than usual, and the latter startled me whenever Hill raised his voice to convey that a character was shouting.
In short, I disliked the novel. I disliked the audiobook production. I disliked the whole package. I may revisit Pynchon in another 32 years, but I doubt it.
0
© 2024 Pagebound