Against the Day - Pynchon

[1001shelf]

Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon. Post reviews here.

[Amanda]

I listened to the big ol' audiobook for this, and it was a lot to keep up with. There's not one continued plot: there is a vague interchange of different kind of stories with different motifs or writing themes: one has a Jules Verne boys adventure quality (it's about a crew on a airship), one a country-Western revenge theme, one a mid-20th century spy story theme, and one called the "The Geek Eccentric Scientist cluster" which is written rather obnoxiously to be honest. And these are not each a story, these are 'clusters' containing a bunch of disjointed stories.

It covers the 1893 Chicago World Fair, Nicola Tesla, the film noir era, German philosophers philosophers, spy rings, mining drama... I usually love a medley, but I'm not sure this one always worked. I read that part of Pynchon's intent was to replicate the overwhelming too-much-info feeling of modern life. Which I thought was an interesting thing to do with decidedly non-modern stories (hell, some of them feature the Tsar of Russia and Franz Ferdinand).

However, because there is so much business going on so quickly, I felt it sometimes had the opposite intended effect. Many things were not established deeply enough before switching to the next thing for me to get immersed in that story, and thereby I wasn't overwhelmed by anything because it just felt like I was skimming the top of everything.

I gave it 3 stars.