Against the Day

[Mark Kohut]

It is just as much the great overarching vision of history and that
perspective on the characters
that makes this a great novel.



On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 12:08 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> something tells me that the whole point of it all is the side-view, the
> long-ish asides and explications on quite a range of different matters and
> lightings (literally). the characters aren't important, it's the voice,
> reader.
> do we care so much for Webb? even the union doesnt show up for his funeral.
> Or Reef's sexual exploits or the wondrous fashions that Dally or Yashmeen
> inhabit? or why apparently a converted Christer Foley kills Scarsdale Vibe?
> Or the long and tortuous travels through  Mexico or the Balkans or East
> Asia, filled with terrain hardships and every type of liquer known to man.
> It all becomes a blur and even in the latter parts of the Against the Day
> section, one could detect a weariness even from the author, filled with
> earnest hombres and spunky cowgirls and showtunes. So, let's make things
> easier and tie things up--the Chums meet their girl Chums and Deuce Kindred
> and Lake Traverse remain terrible people and not very interesting even in
> post-war LA where even  the used and past-life who know who contritions of
> Lew leads to a lazy rape and a lazy section.
> I could go on. Erect penises and anarchist all around! snore
> But to reiterate, its those side jaunts where nothing happens but the
> important work is done. That, to me, is the joy of the book. I even picked
> up the Vintage UK version (200 and some odd pages more of that voice
> Pynchon from the original. ha!).
> The funny thing is I could've sworn to a number of things that happened in
> the book that I remembered, that on this re-read never happened at all. it
> was as if time was the only real measure, the other axis we know and love
> and touch were not. go figure.
> So you can count of many fingers and dimensions the many doublings,
> couplings and symmetrics as you can find and it will take many an hour to
> detect them all. I'll leave that to the critics.
> I still dont know what an eigenvalue is and I probably never will
>
> rich
> --
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>