An epic romp through the end of an era

As always, Pynchon develops a huge caste of vivid and diverse characters who navigate through various long and convoluted plots which eventually converge together. The immerging technologies of the 20th century are well used to pepper his tale with seeming phantasmagorical happenings, leaving the reader to sometimes wonder where one is being led, only to find oneself in a recognisable place or happening of the time.
I am full of admiration for Dick Hill as narrator/navigator through this maze. He manages to give each character their own voice which well reflects their personalities, and keeps a good pace going throughout. Even so, I have been forced to re-listen to huge chunks of the book as I suddenly came down to earth and realised that I was completely and irrevocably lost!
Yes, great value for money and great fun. I was fully immersed in this wondrous tale for several weeks, in the end, and probably listened to the book more than twice by the time I had finished.
Don’t hesitate, jump in head first and enjoy!!

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Dodgy non-American accents

The narrator performs American voices and accents admirably, but his attempts at non-American accents are for the most part pitiful. His British and Irish accents are particularly bad, and often unrecognisable, and his Italian and Japanese accents border on the offensive.

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And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes. It's mad, maddening and funny. Interesting things are complicated.

What did you like best about this story?

The mix of history, humour and fiction.

Have you listened to any of Dick Hill’s other performances? How does this one compare?

NA

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Yes. See the title of this review. This is a quote from the book with a dual meaning which is at once funny and tragic.

Any additional comments?

If you have a spare 50 hours, listen to this 😀

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"And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!"

"There are stories, like maps that agree . . . too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking. . . . It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.” — Thomas Pynchon, ”Against the Day” (2006)

I have never published reviews for books I’ve not finished, but I’m doing so now because in all honesty I think it’ll be quite a long time until I’m ready to try Pynchon’s ”Against the Day” (2006) again. If you’ll allow me, I’ll try to explain why I still want to jot some thoughts down.

I had arrived rather late (I have no idea why) to the Pynchon party that had been going on for almost half a century before me, and chose ”Mason & Dixon” (1997) as my way in (again I have no idea why) in 2014. From the very first sentence I knew my life as a book reader had changed forever. There was beauty in it, both wild and precise, funny and truly profound often at the same time. There was a treasure to be found on every page, sentences were like whirlwinds. It took me a month to read, which was quite a feat since I not only was I working full-time during the day, we also had three small children to look after, and the book, not the shortest of tomes, was just so beautifully written I often had to read it out loud.

I truly was transfixed. I still return to it, sometimes reading from the beginning, sometimes just opening it at random and I’m transported. Thinking I could read anything after that, I tackled ”Against the Day” (2006) in the hope that this sense of omnipotence would easily carry through that work as well. I had heard it was difficult, but I had heard the same thing about ”Mason & Dixon” as well, so I figured that since it came so easily to me, would there be any reason to doubt why this one wouldn’t as well?

But the well had run dry. I couldn’t get past the first hundred pages, and let it be. I let it be, read something else meanwhile and in early 2015 tried to return. I read the first forty pages and again hit the wall. I did manage to read ”Inherent Vice” rather quickly, and enjoyed it a lot, and then entered ”Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), which I slumbered through and couldn’t get a grip on, regardless of also perusing George Guidall’s audiobook, at this writing not available here. Last autumn I tried again. I bought the Kindle version to go along the audiobook, the Whispersync for Voice a rather wonderful technology, and bought the first edition hardback for about US$1, a beautiful book in its own right.

And here I am now, some six months later, stuck somewhere around page 350. (”But how many times did it take to stop being a coincidence and start being a pattern?”) And while I know I won’t be able to finish it in who knows how many years (I don’t even really want to return to it in the foreseeable future), I can still attest to its remarkable beauty. Regardless of my inability to tackle the book, Pynchon remains a master of language, narrative and ideas. I mean who is able to conjure something like this: ”As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here”, or ”Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explored into open flames”?There are heartbreaking moments, many laugh-out-loud funny bits (”Men in this era are not being known to sigh, he exhaled expressively”). There’s a ball lightning that makes a great reading companion in otherwise lowlight conditions, there’s even a Finn there, who’s just as unpredictably insane as one could wish; a smart dog quickly presents itself, and there’s even a mysterious object that arrives from our deep mythological past, absolutely thrilling stuff.

I like the episodic structure of the thing, and it makes for enjoyable reading and listening for the most part, but it’s also what made it impenetrable for me. If not impenetrable, since that’s perhaps too hyperbolic a word, then at least consuming. As enjoyable as the book was, it was also moving a bit too quickly for me to keep up. I ended up lost, my knees and wrists bruised. ”I almost got it!” I might have exclaimed like a mad scientist, eyes bulging. It’s just too much for the time being, and I’ll happily admit the fact. And it’s not the length in itself, it’s the complexity and relentlessness Pynchon moves through time and space, as well as the details he’s able to put on the page that while completely immersive, they also make for a rather daunting experience.

As for Dick Hill, he does an admirable job. I’m not completely won over, though, as most people seem to be. His is a lively reading, and tremendously funny, too, but he also sometimes reads it a bit too over the top, which at times feels like it’s gone a tad too bonkers for my taste, by which I mean that he goes from straight out shouting to lullaby-style whispering in a split second. And while this is my problem and not yours, I find the dynamics of the recording a bit too all over the place to be enjoyable in any other circumstance than complete silence, regardless of how well my earphones block outside noise.

In short, a wild masterwork of imaginative writing (”And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!”), a remarkably ambitious audio recording and, for the time being, I feel too much like a Sisyphus to be able to say I’ve read it. But I like it, regardless.

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5 people found this helpful

Work of genius well told

This is a towering performance of narration which perfectly compliments a fabulous work of art. It is always hard to categorise Thomas Pynchon's work but this lives up to my adoration-soaked expectations. It is joyous, darkly comic, poignant and explosive in its perceptions. It's Technicolor writing performed by a Eastman film voice. And, just to get all value-for-money on you, it's Hours of entertainment at a snip. Bold and beautiful stuff.

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Mixed feelings

I really enjoyed this for a while (in spite of the somewhat distorted and unclear audio). There are segments of unbelievably good prose, fantastically imaginative ideas, and a lot of humour. However, after a while it just began to drag: I suspect some of the maths jokes passed me by and so seemed to become unnecessarily long-winded, the sex scenes were funny at first but then, like the maths, became rather boring. I’d been hoping for a more satisfying ending—not to explain everything, but as it is the story just seems to lose steam. I was left feeling that it would have benefited from a substantial edit in length, to make the allusions and ideas more focused.

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Interesting, but ponderous overwrought novel

One of the few audiobooks I struggled to finish. Narration was OK, but too many characters, with no clear story line (there are some great ideas of how industrialisation and capitalism at the early 1900s shaped our current world and geared up to WW I) and a lack of a proper suspense arc.

The Meta textual elements (playing with references to it all being fiction or one big illusion etc) doesn't help to build more involvement.

Perhaps it's the prose and parody style that limits empathy with any of the characters, and it's a shame, because there are some very good moody bits in it, so with some more editing could've been great.

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Too much

I really struggled through this. It's very long but I didn't feel immersed in it. I didn't care for any of the characters, who were like figures in some endless, unresolved mathematical equation. The storyline plots were so unconstrained and random that I got lost and past caring. I thought his sympathy for violence in the anarchist cause was cartoonish, naive and unquestioning. I couldn't see the depth, humour or intelligence that others have seen. There is some great writing but it was swamped by too much of everything, with no sense of resolution or even of stories merging. Some people love him but I'd recommend David Foster Wallace or Jennifer Egan instead.

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8 people found this helpful