pynchon's new novel

[pynchonoid]

November 21

Book Description
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.

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.

--Thomas Pynchon 


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