Difference between revisions of "ATD Reviews"

Revision as of 08:26, 1 December 2006

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Please add any relevant reviews as they come in. Blog reviews are acceptable as long as they're substantial and more than just a few paragraphs.

12/2007 - Bookforum: "I hope some future scholar will read the novel twenty times and either illustrate how it recapitulates the whole history of narrative or demonstrate how every piece fits together into a fourfold design that will replace four-base genetics as a model of all life."

11/29/06 - The Times Online (UK) "This is not to say Pynchon suggests any solution. What he does is highlight how invisible our claims for salvation are, thus disturbing all the familiar comforts they might offer, including the comforts of the novel’s structure. This gets its clearest exposition in his handling of the relentlessly optimistic airborne crew at the novel’s end."

11/27/06 - Sci Fi Weekly "The hundreds of figures who jam into Against the Day are not in fact characters at all, because Pynchon has evacuated his book of that degree of hope. They are utterands: people-shaped utterances who illuminate the stories of the old world that their Author has placed before us in funeral array; they are codes to spell his book with."

11/26/06 - New York Times (Sunday book review): "In “Against the Day,” Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print"

11/25-06 - The Scotsman: "a gaze that holds you in its grip for a thousand pages. Quite a feat."

11/22/06 - The Nation

11/21/06 - Salon: "it's obvious [Pynchon's] disciples now write better Big Idea novels than he does."

11/20/06 - USA Today: "Falling into a novel can be like enjoying a weekend trip to a place you've never been. Against the Day is more like going away for a month, getting lost on your way there and back, returning exhausted, but with bags full of stories."

11/20/06 - The Modern Word: "for those willing to suspend disbelief and leave the ground behind, Pynchon’s great Inconvenience proves to be one hell of a ride."

11/20/06 - New Yorker: "with this one there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel."

11/20/06 - New York Times: "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." (Written by Michiko Kakutani, so let the reader definitely beware!)

11/19/06 - Washington Post: “Pynchon fans will accept this gift from the author with gratitude, but I’m not so sure about mainstream readers.”

11/19/06 - Los Angeles Times: “A book this long that amazes even 50% of the time is amazing.”

11/19/06 - Austin American-Statesman: "Forget it, fellow Pynchonians. [Against the Day] isn’t “Gravity’s Rainbow II.” That time, that place and that writer won’t ever come together again.”

11/19/06 - Newsday: "a novel as exhilarating, tiresome, unnerving and exhausting as all the others put together.”

11/19/06 - Boston Globe

11/15/06 - New York Sun: "The silliness of "Against the Day" about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need."

11/14/06 - The Complete Review: "impressive in its parts, but near confounding as a whole."

11/14/06 - The Phoenix: “Undaunted in the past by the big questions that bug a guy, he here takes on, in addition to the elusive quality of light... time travel, multiple universes, the death struggle between anarchism and capitalism, the dance of order and chaos.”

11/13/06 - Time: “More than in any of Pynchon’s previous books, just what it all means is a problem in Against the Day, where plots and ideas and fantastic developments pile up in exhausting profusion.”

11/3/06 - The Modern Word (first impressions): "It seems like the logical evolution/conclusion to Pynchon’s career as a prose experimentalist."

10/24/06 - Publisher's Weekly: "reads like half a dozen books duking it out for his, and the reader’s, attention. Most of them shine with a surreal incandescence, but even Pynchon fans may find their fealty tested now and again."