Against the Day

Blurb: 'Against the Day'

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after the First World War, Against the Day moves from the labour troubles in Colorado, to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, to Venice and Vienna, to the Balkans and Central Asia, to Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tungska event, to Mexico during the revolution, 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 sizeable 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 is 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's 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.

What I love about this self penned blurb is the imaginative irreverence of the whole thing; it literally bursts off of the page. In my mind I am already making connections, searching for correspondences, making paranoid narratives... Which is precisely what you do when you read a novel by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. I love the fact that this aging hipsters still has the capacity to explode the landscape of the imagination in an effort to mine the subconscious memory of the twentieth century. We need authors like Pynchon, now, more than ever.

Like many others out there, I can't wait until this book is published.

If you don't have the fainted idea who I am blathering on about you could do worse than reading the Independent's take on the life and times of Mr. Pynchon.