AtD blurb - "worldwide disaster looming"

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Another thought: the "worldwide disaster looming just a few years 
ahead" might be the Depression -> WWII, and not WWI (which, despite 
being called "The Great War" and the "war to end all wars", wasn't 
exactly "worldwide".)

(I suspect the dropping off of "postwar" from "postwar Paris" in the 
blurb in the Penguin catalogue was just a typo. It hasn't been altered 
on the Amazon site, though the new publ'n date has been entered there.)

"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. [...]"

best

> On 18/08/2006:
>
>> But the refraction of a fictional
>> past with the present day is a consistent element of
>> all of his novels, from V. to M&D.  Considering the
>> appearance of Nixon in GR, pretty much everything in
>> Vineland, and the various anachronisms in M&D, it
>> seems silly to dismiss this out of hand.
>
> The paragraph in the blurb doesn't seem to be referring to the jokey 
> anachronisms or the fast-forward to Pynchon's self-consciousness about 
> himself writing the novel and the Nixon era around him in the last 
> part of GR. If the second sentence is read as ironic or sardonic, then 
> he's making a broader statement about the similarity between one time 
> (the lead-up to WWI) and another time ("the present day").
>
> "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."
>
> In fact, it's either a pretty dire prediction of a "worldwide disaster 
> looming just a few years ahead" of us, or an analogy between the 
> current world Situation and WWI.
>
> I agree with you that his works aren't meant (thankfully) as political 
> polemics.
>
> best
>
>> Which is
>> exactly why the statement in the blurb dismissing any
>> relation to the present day comes across as ironic.
>> That said, I'm sure that AtD is not going to be some
>> 1000-page anti-Bush (or, for that matter,
>> pro-Bush)polemic.  Thank goodness.
>>
>> -Chris
>