HOWZAT

Who said that madness is the need to keep making the same mistake, believing that, this time, the outcome will be different? Pynchon’s wild ride of a novel grapples with this most central of mortal failings — albeit with the understanding that humanity’s crazed dance is but a tragic music hall routine — and one that, though subject to countless variations, always ends up being repeated.

THE STORIES SO FAR...

V (1963)
Vintage, £8.99

Alligators in the New York sewers are the most famous image in this extraordinary debut in which the quest for the mysterious V spans 60 years, taking in Alexandria, Paris, Florence and Malta. Dark and funny at the same time.

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Vintage, £6.99

That rare bird, a short Pynchon book, and a good beginners’ starting place. Oedipa Maas explores her dead lover’s legacy. The sale of a mysterious stamp collection plays a key role.

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Vintage, £8.99

The masterpiece. The title refers to the trajectory of the V2 rockets raining on London, but this tale of war, sex, race and scientific experiment ranges across time and continents as the vastness of Pynchon’s imagination is revealed.

VINELAND (1991)
Vintage, £8.99

The book that broke the long silence marks a change to a (slightly) more accessible style. It covers the death of the hippy dream, but does so, of course, via the map that proves that the Vikings reached America long before Columbus.

MASON & DIXON (1998)
Vintage, £9.99

More American history and more accessibility in the story of the surveyors of the Line, told with characteristic off-the-wall humour and tangents. Some think it a better book than Rainbow.

EXTRACT

Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon

Kit made what he hoped was the universal sign for short funds by pulling out an imaginary pair of trouser pockets and shrugging in apology.

“Not to worry, this week it’s all on the Trinity maths department, they’re wizards at solving biquaternion equations, but show them an expense account and lucky for us their minds go blank.” He introduced himself as Barry Nebulay, from the University of Dublin, space was made, and Kit joined the polyglot gang.

All last week and this, Quaternioneers had been converging on Ostend to hold one of their irregularly spaced World Conventions. In the wake of the transatlantic unpleasantness of the ‘90s known as the Quaternion Wars — in which Kit was aware that Yale, being the home of Gibbsian Vectors, had figured as a major belligerent — true Quaternionists, if not defeated outright then at best having come to feel irrelevant, could be found these days wandering the world, dispersed, under the yellow skies of Tasmania, out in the American desert, up in the Alpine wastes of Switzerland, gathering furtively in border-town hotels, at luncheons in rented parlors, in hotel lobbies whose surfaces, varying in splendor from French velvet to aboriginal masonry, raised ensembles of echoes — they were eyed suspicously by waiters who brought in and ladled from oversize alloyed-steel kettles vegetables grown locally whose names did not readily come to mind, or animal parts concealed by opaque sauces — particularly, here in Belgium, forms of mayonnaise — whose colour schemes ran to indigoes and aquas, often quite vividly actually . . . yes but what choices, if any, remained? Having been inseparable from the rise of the electromagnetic in human affairs, the Hamiltonian devotees had now, fallen from grace, come to embody, for the established scientific religion, a subversive, indeed heretical, faith for whom proscription and exile were too good.

© Thomas Pynchon 2006

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