Against the Day

I haven't posted anything for a long time because I was slogging through this book. Spoiler alert: it sucks. It took me forever to read it because a) it was 1085 pages long, and b) I couldn't get into the book. So many times I thought about quitting it, but I just can't stand to do that. I read this book because it was one of the 1001 books to read before you die. Trust me, you can die in peace without reading this.

One issue was the numerous extremely long sentences that are individually difficult to follow, such as the following:

"Appearing these days in the infant science of counter-terrorism as an all-purpose code name, the bloke you sent out a discreet summons for to alert your own security staff to a crisis, the real "Inspector Sands," beleaguered, ever struggling to define and maintain a level of professional behavior, unaware of his drift into legend, soon enough aged beyond his years and sweated into a moodiness at home that could not but slop over onto the wife and kids, would find by midcareer no time even to take of his hat, hurrying as ever from one emergency to the next--"Ah, Sands, there you are, and high time too."

It's also very difficult to follow because it involves 39 characters (according to Wikipedia) with really weird names, such as:

• Lew Basnight
• Chick Counterfly
• Darby Suckling
• Sloat Fresno
• Yashmeen Halfcourt
• Deuce Kindred
• Cyprian Latewood
• Lake Traverse
• Professor Heino Vanderjuice
• Scarsdale Vibe

These characters travel all over much of the world and cross paths with each other in the most unlikely of situations over the course of about 30 years.

The story involves time travel, gratuitous sex, confusing mathematical theories, and rediculous songs. I checked out some reviews, and here are some of my favorite snippets:

• "All the paranoia and silliness and vast workings out of history make it easy to overlook the sheer beauty of Pynchon's prose." - Mark Feeney, Boston Globe
• "Rambling, pompous and often completely incomprehensible" - The Economist
• "It's a world of mystery and paranoia, of inchoate longing, of disillusionment and anticlimax. Like Pynchon's characters, we wander through a swarm of hints that both promises light and darkens what little day we have." - Greg Hollingshead, The Globe & Mail
• "Against the Day is built out of vast amounts of period detail, from ladies' hats to the arcane minutiae of the mathematical squabbles of the day...(I)t's quite a challenge to hold its multitudinous threads together in your head sufficiently clearly to grasp what it is they're being woven together to form." - James Lasdun, The Guardian
• "This shambling ragbag of prose rattles with more than a hundred characters, multiple settings in this world and others and a multitude of narratives held together by gossamer skeins of plot." - David Goldblatt, The Independent
• "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
• "There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. There are also too many tonal shifts, as though Pynchon set out to mimic all the styles of popular fiction -- boys’ adventure stories, science fiction, Westerns, comic books, hardboiled crime fiction, spy novels, soft-core porn." - Louis Menand, The New Yorker
• "The text is overwhelming, unstable, encyclopaedic and extravagantly allusive." - David Gale, The Observer

And, there are many more. Don't waste your time on this huge book.