Against the Day - Hardcover

Pynchon, Thomas

4.03

9,541 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224080954 ISBN 13: 9780224080958

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2006

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Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, Against the Day 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, Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. As an era of certainty 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. Meanwhile, Thomas Pynchon is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-fact occurrences occur. Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it's what the world might be.

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Review:

"Unmistakably a masterpiece" -- Robert Murphy, Metro

"Heart-stopping felicities of description lurk around every
corner" -- Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday

This amazing writer continues to be amazing
-- London Review of Books

`Clever and inventive in a mad professor kind of
way...Intermittently warmed by paragraph-long sunbeams of iridescent
prose-poetry' -- Economist

`Funny, thought-provoking and exquisitely written, this is well worth the hours one must devote to it.'
-- Times

`Pynchon's enthralling ambitiousness and phenomenal imaginative
power remain undimished' -- The Sunday Times rev John Dugdale

`Pynchon's enthralling ambitiousness and phenomenal imaginative
power remain undimished' -- The Sunday Times rev John Dugdale

`door-stopping, continent-spanning, carnivalesque romp'
-- FT Fiction choice, Angel Gurria-Quintana

`review of reviews'
-- Sunday Telegraph

review. -- Private Eye

From the Publisher:

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, a vast epic spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, will be hailed as one of the great American novels of the twenty-first century.

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