Monday, August 14, 2006

How Much Does Scanner Cost?

new book and good luck.


Exact date, November 21. That day goes on sale Against the Day, the new novel of Thomas Pynchon. Yes, it seems that is not the book on mathematics princess, and that Godzilla will not appear on their 992 pages, but you never know. But we can not resolve that question for another two months, when the new Pynchon fill the shelves of American bookstores.

the moment we only know the short review that Amazon released and was forced to withdraw under pressure from Penguin. This incredible story of the ghost review. Today reappears in the pages of the powerful online bookstore:

"Spanning the Period Between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the work 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.

(As a curiosity: there another book with the title chosen by Pynchon. Did legal battle?)

0 comments:

Post a Comment