
Against the Day
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Dick Hill
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By:
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Thomas Pynchon
About this listen
"Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel 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, postwar 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. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. 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, the author 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-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
"Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck."
—Thomas Pynchon
Critic reviews
"[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel." (New York Times Book Review)
"Pynchon delivers a novel that matches his most influential work, Gravity's Rainbow...in complexity, humor, and insight, and surpasses it in emotional valence....A capacious, gritty, and tender epic." (Booklist)
I am full of admiration for Dick Hill as narrator/navigator through this maze. He manages to give each character their own voice which well reflects their personalities, and keeps a good pace going throughout. Even so, I have been forced to re-listen to huge chunks of the book as I suddenly came down to earth and realised that I was completely and irrevocably lost!
Yes, great value for money and great fun. I was fully immersed in this wondrous tale for several weeks, in the end, and probably listened to the book more than twice by the time I had finished.
Don’t hesitate, jump in head first and enjoy!!
An epic romp through the end of an era
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Dodgy non-American accents
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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes. It's mad, maddening and funny. Interesting things are complicated.What did you like best about this story?
The mix of history, humour and fiction.Have you listened to any of Dick Hill’s other performances? How does this one compare?
NAWas there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Yes. See the title of this review. This is a quote from the book with a dual meaning which is at once funny and tragic.Any additional comments?
If you have a spare 50 hours, listen to this 😀And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!
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I have never published reviews for books I’ve not finished, but I’m doing so now because in all honesty I think it’ll be quite a long time until I’m ready to try Pynchon’s ”Against the Day” (2006) again. If you’ll allow me, I’ll try to explain why I still want to jot some thoughts down.
I had arrived rather late (I have no idea why) to the Pynchon party that had been going on for almost half a century before me, and chose ”Mason & Dixon” (1997) as my way in (again I have no idea why) in 2014. From the very first sentence I knew my life as a book reader had changed forever. There was beauty in it, both wild and precise, funny and truly profound often at the same time. There was a treasure to be found on every page, sentences were like whirlwinds. It took me a month to read, which was quite a feat since I not only was I working full-time during the day, we also had three small children to look after, and the book, not the shortest of tomes, was just so beautifully written I often had to read it out loud.
I truly was transfixed. I still return to it, sometimes reading from the beginning, sometimes just opening it at random and I’m transported. Thinking I could read anything after that, I tackled ”Against the Day” (2006) in the hope that this sense of omnipotence would easily carry through that work as well. I had heard it was difficult, but I had heard the same thing about ”Mason & Dixon” as well, so I figured that since it came so easily to me, would there be any reason to doubt why this one wouldn’t as well?
But the well had run dry. I couldn’t get past the first hundred pages, and let it be. I let it be, read something else meanwhile and in early 2015 tried to return. I read the first forty pages and again hit the wall. I did manage to read ”Inherent Vice” rather quickly, and enjoyed it a lot, and then entered ”Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), which I slumbered through and couldn’t get a grip on, regardless of also perusing George Guidall’s audiobook, at this writing not available here. Last autumn I tried again. I bought the Kindle version to go along the audiobook, the Whispersync for Voice a rather wonderful technology, and bought the first edition hardback for about US$1, a beautiful book in its own right.
And here I am now, some six months later, stuck somewhere around page 350. (”But how many times did it take to stop being a coincidence and start being a pattern?”) And while I know I won’t be able to finish it in who knows how many years (I don’t even really want to return to it in the foreseeable future), I can still attest to its remarkable beauty. Regardless of my inability to tackle the book, Pynchon remains a master of language, narrative and ideas. I mean who is able to conjure something like this: ”As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here”, or ”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, smoldering as if always just about to explored into open flames”?There are heartbreaking moments, many laugh-out-loud funny bits (”Men in this era are not being known to sigh, he exhaled expressively”). There’s a ball lightning that makes a great reading companion in otherwise lowlight conditions, there’s even a Finn there, who’s just as unpredictably insane as one could wish; a smart dog quickly presents itself, and there’s even a mysterious object that arrives from our deep mythological past, absolutely thrilling stuff.
I like the episodic structure of the thing, and it makes for enjoyable reading and listening for the most part, but it’s also what made it impenetrable for me. If not impenetrable, since that’s perhaps too hyperbolic a word, then at least consuming. As enjoyable as the book was, it was also moving a bit too quickly for me to keep up. I ended up lost, my knees and wrists bruised. ”I almost got it!” I might have exclaimed like a mad scientist, eyes bulging. It’s just too much for the time being, and I’ll happily admit the fact. And it’s not the length in itself, it’s the complexity and relentlessness Pynchon moves through time and space, as well as the details he’s able to put on the page that while completely immersive, they also make for a rather daunting experience.
As for Dick Hill, he does an admirable job. I’m not completely won over, though, as most people seem to be. His is a lively reading, and tremendously funny, too, but he also sometimes reads it a bit too over the top, which at times feels like it’s gone a tad too bonkers for my taste, by which I mean that he goes from straight out shouting to lullaby-style whispering in a split second. And while this is my problem and not yours, I find the dynamics of the recording a bit too all over the place to be enjoyable in any other circumstance than complete silence, regardless of how well my earphones block outside noise.
In short, a wild masterwork of imaginative writing (”And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!”), a remarkably ambitious audio recording and, for the time being, I feel too much like a Sisyphus to be able to say I’ve read it. But I like it, regardless.
"And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!"
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Work of genius well told
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Mixed feelings
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The Meta textual elements (playing with references to it all being fiction or one big illusion etc) doesn't help to build more involvement.
Perhaps it's the prose and parody style that limits empathy with any of the characters, and it's a shame, because there are some very good moody bits in it, so with some more editing could've been great.
Interesting, but ponderous overwrought novel
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Too much
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