Against the Day

A Novel

By: Thomas Pynchon

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 53 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

"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

©2006 Thomas Pynchon (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.

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)

mind-boggling

Quite an investment in time, but worth the effort in my judgement. I downloaded this book Jan 30th and didn't finish until June 8th! 53 hours and 38 mins later, I'm still a little confused on some of the plotlines. Nevertheless, the concepts I did understand are brilliant and the character names are like Dickens on steroids. Pynchon has a knack for presenting ideas or observations in a couple of pages that other authors would use to fill an entire book. The wit is very smart, all sorts of sly allusions to history and pop culture abound. Worth the effort for me but, as the WSJ and NYT said in their reviews, this book isn't for everyone. There were times when I thought it might not be for me either, but I persevered and am glad I did. The narrator was excellent, it's got to be quite a challenge to deal with this many characters, the sheer size and all of the mathematical terms, scientific jargon and strange locales.

Pynchon’s best yet!

The broadest and most joyous of this remarkable author's unique, sprawling, epic, poetic sagas. An absorbing, sometimes surreal and almost overwhelming miasma of fact, fiction and fantasy, set during the period of tumultuous advancement in thought and discovery between the 1890’s and 1920’s, and peripheral to the dark and foreboding “war to end all wars”. But even more so than his other masterful works – Gravity’s Rainbow, V, The Crying of Lot 49 – this is a positively decadent and ultimately joyous celebration of history, scientific delusion and fact, mysticism, social turmoil and evolution, love real and imagined, flight, time travel, light, energy and ultimately redemption and hope. Pitting industrial and political czars and goons, unionists, mathematicians, inventors, spiritualists, explorers, anarchists, visionaries, charlatans, airship travelers, transcendentalists - all of them basically regular folks like you and me - against and with each other. Dick Hill's narration, voicing, inflection and pace, at first seemingly quirky, are quickly found to be perfect for the material. Though some 52 hours long, it was increasingly absorbing, and ended most graciously, though I'm sorry it had to end at all. This is one for you, whoever you are.

Best Pynchon Novel

Would you consider the audio edition of Against the Day to be better than the print version?

I have read several Pynchon novels before starting this audiobook, so I understood the scope of characters and grand, sweeping events I was in store for. What I *wasn't* ready for was Dick Hill's narration. I have been impressed with audiobook readers before--George Guidall on American Gods, Simon Vance on Wolf Hall, and Roy Dotrice on the Fire and Ice series, each outstanding in his own way handling a multitude of voices and complexity of langauge--but Dick Hill in Against the Day set a new standard which few others will ever reach. His handling of song lyrics, foreign languages, tricksy Pynchon prose mixing both high and low brow culture, and a cast of characters far too long to list here made a very difficult novel come to life and entertain in ways people can't imagine a Pynchon novel can even do. Dick Hill was essential to my enjoyment of this read/listen.

What other book might you compare Against the Day to and why?

Obviously it compares to Pynchon's other classics such as Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. From the point of view of how it synthesizes so many different ideas from so many different cultural and scientific fields, it reminds me of Joyce's most challenging works: Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. It also covered much of the same ground as Umberto Eco's recent Prague Cemetery, although it does so in a much more fulfilling and far reaching manner.

Which scene was your favorite?

Too many to count. It could be the many discussions of the cultural and political implications of fin de siecle science and math--aether and Riemann Functions for example. It could be the Chums of Chance, the perfect parody of pulp fiction of the early part of the 20th century (think Doc Savage for example). It could be the exploration of the political changes from the 1890's that lead up to the First World War. It might well be the masterful ways in which Pynchon mixes high brow and low brow culture. He'll move from discussing the Michaelson-Morley experiments in the speed of light moving through aether that helped set the groundwork for Einstein's Theory of Relativity to having a Arabic character named Al Mar-Faud who wears a hunting cap, carries a shot gun and loves to go hunting for "wabbits."

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The Traverse boys, all with different points of view spend most of the novel hunting for the man who was responsible for ordering their father's death. They are as a whole perhaps the most human and fleshed out characters in all of Pynchon's work. Their whole story arc is very moving.

Any additional comments?

It's not an easy read/listen, but it's well worth the time. Enjoy the laughter even as you puzzle through the implications of some of the weightier issues and themes. Pynchon is a master at that blend in a way no one else is.

great narrator, okay book

Unlike other reviewers, I think plot is indispensable for good storytelling. Thus, I found this book frustrating. I listened, following along with the text, and consulting the websites where passionate fans chew on the intriguing set pieces that Pynchon offers. The many settings, characters, networks, and theories never cohere, and most of them never connect into any overall thematic or allegorical meaning. But there's lot of richly ambiguous symbolism, a sort of alchemical semiotic miasma using light, day, gold, silver, abstract math (fourth dimension, quaternions), and doublings (paired characters, worlds, realities). This book seems to be an attempt to tell a story set in the past that is emphatically non-historical insofar as history is defined as a grand narrative. There's no God-like narrator, no attempt to frame the individual stories within a larger sense of the historical moment. Instead, there's an unmasterable heap of details and small plots, similar to the way that life is really experienced. There's a lot of wacky humor, such as an opera entitled The Burgher King, a Middle Eastern assassin named Al Mar-Faud, dressed in English hunting tweeds and a shotgun, ("Gweetings, gentlemen, on this Glowious Twelfth!), and very little of the urgency and tragedy that I need in a novel of this length to keep me interested. I forced myself through this book because I'm interested in the ideas and in the potential of experimental postmodern narrative.
The narrator is stupendous, bringing this very difficult book to life with an astounding array of accents deployed consistently. He also pronounces the dozens of obscure and foreign phrases accurately, a remarkable feat. Most importantly, he achieves an understated tone of muted irony that perfectly matches that of Pynchon.

Rare

Like everything Pynchon, this is a rare gem of a book. The Dick Hill's narration is amazingly true to the Pynchon characters and spirit of the story.

Not to be missed.

Good But Dense

This book is well written (incredibly written really) but is equally hard to follow if you're not giving it your full attention. I get audio books to listen to as I'm walking or doing chores, so there are occasions were I'm not focused entirely on the book I'm listening too. Unfortunately with this book if you lose track of the story for even a moment it is incredibly hard to figure what you missed. This means a lot of going back which can be frustrating.

That being said I did love the parts that I knew what was going on. Characters are well written, colorful and varied. On that note, there are A LOT of characters. The book spans generations, and Pynchon jumps back and forth between different character arcs without warning, another reason it's hard to keep track of. huge variety of local all well described.

The narration was good, never really wow'd me but never detracted from the story either. He also kinda sounds like Stan Lee, which works better for some parts than others.

Obviously take my review with a grain of salt, I only made it through the first part and a half before I began to completely lose track of what was going on. May come back to it again when I've got the time to devote to it.

Very Dense

It was too soon for me to read "Against the Day" by Thomas Pynchon. I should had waited and read some of his other books from his back catalog first before I listened to this epic novel. This is only my second book from this author and I have nothing bad to say because I really like his style of writing.

Against the Day takes part after the first World War and expands through the globe and the story is all over the map. It's historical fiction with romance and a slight glimmer of tech which makes it good.

Like most epic novelist, Pynchon writes each of his characters to be the main character in each sub story to the main plot. The book tends to grow on you overtime and wear you out because of its great length. There were times where I couldn't wait to start where I left off and there were times where I needed to take a break to regroup my thoughts and listen again.

This is no fault to Thomas Pynchon because it's just the attention span to the reader when they are reading over a thousand pages or listening to 53 hours on a book. It is how most readers are. We just need to take a break.

My take of "Against the Day" is positive. I really liked how the story flows. I would had enjoyed the book more if I was more familiar of Pynchon's work, but from the two books that I've read so far, I really liked his style. I like his uneven storytelling the most. It's like having a floor puzzle with pieces all over and at the last spoken word, you hope to see the whole picture.

Even after spending quite some time with this audiobook, I have still yet to see the overall picture. I'm sure that the image will come to me after I read more of his classics. Against the Day is not my favorite title in my library and I can see why most listeners takes months to finish the book, but it is not my worst either.

Pynchon at his best hystorographic metafiction

this is a true epoch only Thomas Pynchon could create. Starting in the 1893 Worlds Fair and ending in the first world war this panorama of characters weaves an intricate tapestry, A challenge of a book but well worth the effort

Worst performance I've ever tried to listen to..

What would have made Against the Day better?

A voice that could be listened to.

What was most disappointing about Thomas Pynchon’s story?

Trying to get into the story line and being unable to concentrate on it. How can all the characters have voices changing in adolescence? Dick Hill's voice is one thing but all his attempts to change that voice is unbearable.

Would you be willing to try another one of Dick Hill’s performances?

No.

What character would you cut from Against the Day?

I have no idea what the book is even about.

Any additional comments?

I love long books but this was too poor to even get a feeling for the story.

Ridiculous Book

Dick Hill is a gifted narrator, but the sound engineering for this book is deplorable. His voice goes from stentorian to inaudible in the same sentence too many times. I might have stuck with this very odd story if the listening had been more agreeable, As it is, I couldn't get through the first hour.