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Recently finished this and... I guess /lit/ never talks about it because it's too long?
Ultimately I was disappointed by it. A lot of great ideas are set up early on - the Chums, anarchism, mechanization, WW1, etc - but the threads just keep on building and spewing outwards without ever really reaching some kind of satisfying conclusion.
Did Pynchon just need someone brave enough to tell him to reign it all in? Is that why Inherent Vice ended up so concise?
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To be fair, Pynchon isn't necessarily known for his adherence to traditional storytelling methods.
Also, apparently the plot spans a period of 30 years and takes place all around the world, so you could have easily missed some important information.
>PLOT GRID OF PYNCHON'S AGAINST THE DAY
https://ic.ucsc.edu/~ksgruesz/ltel190f/PynchonGrid.htm
The book has been out for over 10 years now, though, so I would assume someone has made a helpful guide for it.
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>>9390551
hm, when looked at from the perspective of not being a conventional story, was it at least entertaining?
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>>9390790
Of course it was entertaining.
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>>9390551
It might be my favorite of his. It's just so fucking fun and badass, and it seemed to be paced very well despite the length. Some of his best passages are in the novel. Why is /lit/ afraid of long books?
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>>9390790
It's his most entertaining but it's also his most demanding. Beautiful passages and good scenes but fuck me if I can grasp half of the book, there's stuff he drops for 300 pages and when he goes back 20 years have passed and the Chums are with Kit Traverse in the Shambala tunnels they learned about from Groucho Marx or whatever the fuck is happening.
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I'd agree there are beautiful passages and entire sections but it all feels disparate in a way that something like the disintegration of GR didn't.
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Can I get a quick rundown of Against the Day?
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>>9391562
>can I get a quick run down of 600,000 words
No
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>>9391562
Some of the themes would be industrialisation, new imperialism, anarchism, bimetallism, bilocation, Iceland spar, invisibility, World War I, miners, dynamite, energy revolution, the Wild West, robber barons, Shambhala, industrial strife, quanternions, vectors, the Great Game and great power rivalries, Tesla, the Mexican Revolution, Venice, Tunguska Event, nationalism, the Balklans. All in all a stylistic approximation of entropy?
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Would be a good idea to read this right after finishing Gravity's Rainbow?
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>>9392027
Yeah I'll probably wait to read it.
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>>9390922
>Why is /lit/ afraid of long books?
/lit/ can't even be arsed to read short books, let alone long ones.
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