Comments What about the first British softcover edition? Hope this helps! I have a 1st edition in mint condition with original sales receipt.? I have a hardback that states printed in by Colonial inc April 4th printing Is this a first edition? As this article states quite clearly, yes. Trackbacks […] hands on a second print paperback from the UK dating from the first edition was published in and has very peculiar characteristics.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. About ThomasPynchon. With the publication of Against the Day in , the alphabetical guides to Pynchon's novels were migrated to the Pynchon Wikis.
About the Webmaster ThomasPynchon. You can reach him via the contact form on this website. Credits Many have contributed to the content of ThomasPynchon. These two sections are so far almost entirely different, but we're working on integrating them. An alternate form of commentary on the text. The guiding principle of these annotations is to remain spoiler-free, so that readers can follow along without the fear that later parts of the book will be revealed.
Alworth, published in Post A must-read for fans of V. The article Read the New York Times article WikiAdmin , 14 April 55 KB. It is the idea of the body, The abstraction behind The reality, the perfect Esther Behind the imperfect one Here in bone and tissue.
Just an hour of time In my plastic surgery. I could bring your soul Outside, to the surface. I could make you Perfect, radiant, Unutterably Beautiful and Platonically ideal.
Then I could love you Unconditionally, Truly, madly, deeply, dearly. View all 57 comments. So I opted to tango once more with Thomas. After odd pages of this novel, the niggles new and old returned—the introduction of innumerable madcap characters and their endless zing-flinging dialogue in the same voice; the overa So I opted to tango once more with Thomas. View all 26 comments. Everyone pretends omniscience in the classroom, but god forbid you spout off like an intellectual outside of it. And then you have the subculture of people making an effort to read Pynchon in public, and the other subcultures that amuse themselves at their expense.
The verdict seems to be know it all, but please, spare us from your efforts to prove it. I'd sell my soul to write like this at the age of six and twenty. There, I admitted to lack of know-how when i 4. There, I admitted to lack of know-how when it comes to the realm of Pynchon. Of course, the reference to souls might not be worth much coming from someone with no memory of being religious in any sense, but I'd like to think the Catholic upbringing accredits the statement somewhat.
My horse may be hitched to atheism, but I can still appreciate good theological diatribes with healthy roots in philosophy and literature. Which is what I'm getting at here. Easily graspable statements with esoteric legs to stand on. A sense of context that spans the contemporary as easily as the ancient, and ties the two together in the delightfully tangible sense. Ivory computers, porcelain circuitry, old materials caking the eternal Street from 's Norfolk to 's Malta and beyond.
To say the word 'automaton' and have the images of golems and cyborgs seamlessly interweave on the succeeding pages. This isn't your banal tactic of cultural references and knowledge dropping at every turn. I suppose I should give credit to Neal Stephenson for setting up an apparatus of tin foil and pipe cleaner, to better display Pynchon's idol of ebony and titanium.
The desire to imitate that deceptive depth of story is understandable. Not everyone can write in the style of the yo-yo, apex to apex, apocheir to apocheir, without the bottom ponderously dropping out or the string severing at the zenith or the snagging speed making the ride sickening to the stomach.
And again, six and twenty! In the US! Did you know that this book passes the Bechdel Test? I wouldn't have believed it either, least not without reading it for myself. Or believed without experiencing for myself how conscious the story is of life and its seeming coincidences, long lines of 'plot' drifting back and forth from immediate relevance to useless trivia. It never forsakes the surface details for the underlying meaning, and vice versa, and there's even spots of real humor and true beauty to be found.
It's a rare talent that belies Pynchon's youth, to describe the passions that drive the intricate clockwork of the small days, and contextualize them in the themes that have, do, and will span for millenia. And to switch from one to the other without any noticeable jerks or shuddering! It makes one question the validity of the categories of knowledge that we function in, conventional discourse that so many gain use of by sacrificing the essence of their critical thinking.
Puzzle pieces guaranteeing a pretty picture, inherently forsaking its right to a blank canvas. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. So, knowledge? Pynchon has it, and shows it in endless waves of connective tissues.
I don't claim to understand all of it. But I have to thank him for my new-found way of thinking about this reading business of mine, my yo-yoing along the V shaped tracks of books like his, picking up bits and pieces with every passing over the same old stomping grounds. There's a surface of tin cans and plastic rubbish in those lands, and a wind whistling of ages past that sounds all the clearer the longer you walk.
You can walk forward, and you can walk back, but to tread the same way twice is an impossibility, for better or for worse. View all 67 comments. Who or what is V? Would love to sit here and say that I even cared. It's certainly advisable to read this novel with a clear head. Not the sort of book you want to sit up in bed with late at night with one eye open whilst the other one sleeps.
No, this requires complete and utter attention. Alternatively, you could forget what I just said, let one's hair down, grab a drink, forget the plot, and just be dazzled by some preposterously madcap and rollickingly eccentric passages of writing.
If someo Who or what is V? If someone passed me this book and I didn't know who had written it, I would assume it was some wacko whos marble bag is a few balls sort.
Just because it's highly original, and it truly is, that doesn't mean it just gets to automatically qualify for masterpiece status. Although for the hardcore Pynchon fans shouting at the screen I can fully understand if you view it that way. If he really is the Godfather of postmodern hip lit then good for him. I remember reading Vineland back in , and it still remains the most fun I have had with a book, ever!.
This simply couldn't match it. No way. I even prefered Inherent Vice, which oddly made much more sense to me. Normally I would have quit this, but abnormally something keep me going, but I don't quite know what is was. Probably just wanting to know what lunacy was awaiting in the coming pages. One thing I would love to give Pynchon a pat on the back for is his characters names. They have to be some of the most brilliant out of the ordinary in all of literature.
So then, what does V. It certainly emphasizes the creation of a sort of modern mythology which becomes apparent the further in you go. Digressions of both idea and narrative here prove hard to crack most of the time, it was like playing around with a device that had a ten-digit code. The mode of storytelling stretches far back from the postmodern era though. Of course most will think Of Joyce. He did it for the moderns with Ulysses, writing a Homeric odyssey for a generation in which heroism lay flat on its face.
Benny Profane, one of the central characters walks the streets of New York City alternating between spells of Erotic and Bacchic revelry. As wanderer back from the war, an archetype as old as written words, Profane lacks a homeland where he might end his voyage.
Whilst the obsessive Herbert Stencil, searching for V. He isn't the only one. Profane and the whole sick crew blunder along, tormented by drunkenness and misunderstanding, and I only found a remote likability to the whole cast of players. Pynchon creates characters, so many of them in fact, it's difficult to truly make heads or tails of any of them. If only I could have found this more fun.
But another F word comes to mind. Ultimately V. She may be this person or that, that country or this, this down here, or that over there. Their crackpot epic journey always seemed to have the feel of one running blindfolded down an alley before nutting a brick wall. That leaves me now to ponder over Mason and Dixon and Against the Day, which some say is his best book.
I will likely read Vineland again though before considering one of those two. View all 14 comments. I propose that the titular "V.
What, really, is more personal than a first novel? It's that all-or-nothing, balls-to-the-wall debut effort that can either send a fledgling writer plummeting to dream-shattering depths with an effort that falls flat for any number of reasons or it can be the inaugural celebration all starry-eyed young scribes dare to hope for, that which heralds a staggering new talent to a canon populated by the many great wordsl I propose that the titular "V.
It's that all-or-nothing, balls-to-the-wall debut effort that can either send a fledgling writer plummeting to dream-shattering depths with an effort that falls flat for any number of reasons or it can be the inaugural celebration all starry-eyed young scribes dare to hope for, that which heralds a staggering new talent to a canon populated by the many great wordslingers who've scribbled their way to well-deserved immortality.
For argument's sake, we'll work under the assumption that those flimsy flavor-of-the-month bestsellers that are so in vogue for their seemingly eternal 15 minutes will, in time, be forgotten and written off as yet another regrettable mistake born of groupthink's lapse in judgment while these truly remarkable feats of literature persist through the ages. If one is to write what one knows, how daunting must it be to know so much about such a wide range of complicated topics -- minute historical details of a time one either never experienced or was simply too young to fully digest, regardless of youthful precociousness; engineering equations requiring mathematical acrobatics and a more than adequate grasp on physics; an insider's take on the naval experience; an innate understanding of how to perfectly mix high-minded concepts and lowbrow humor with a dash of poetic lyric -- and attempt to whittle it all down into a tome that won't crush potential readers under the weight of both the volume itself and the awe-inspiring ideas roiling within?
The little we do know about literature's most elusive enigma points to pieces of Pynchon being flung along the narrative's parade route like confetti, adding flashes of biographical color to his intricately structured and beautifully written first novel that pits the animate against the inanimate and the internal self against the external veneer and has the best-ever bonus of an Ayn Rand stand-in reduced to baby-talk in the presence of a pwecious widdle kittums-cat?
Because Pynchon has be one conflicted dude. To be a notoriously private man juggling such derision for the spotlight with the compulsion to write for unseen but rabid fans, to churn out maddeningly, densely obscure works that are nevertheless guaranteed to meet both critical and commercial success and increase sales of Excedrin in the following months , to posses such finely tuned right and left brains that he can be considered nothing less than an engineer-poet in his own right, to walk such a fine line between historical fictions and fictional histories -- is it any wonder that a man so in touch with dueling perspectives would build his first novel on the foundation of This v.
View all 24 comments. Events seem to ordered in "A phrase it often happened when he was exhausted kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. Events seem to ordered into an ominous logic. He found paper and pencil and began to write the sentence in varying hands and type faces. Because his novels cover such a broad realm of subjects, while proposing a very unique, and humorous philosophy of history, the connections and transitions of V.
Overall, this passage seems to function as an accurate metaphor for what it feels like to read V.. With his eagerly anticipated seventh novel coming out in August of this year, V. Benny Profane is the archetypal Pynchonian schlemihl; an endearing protagonist, merely trying to get by as the rest of the world struggles obsessively with finding existential meaning in a universe full of closed systems. Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity's Rainbow would later act as a more carefully constructed version of this character.
While it's true that not all of Pynchon's protagonists are slackers simply looking for a good time, they still function as tour guides who offer a more or less objective view of the events taking place.
Even Herbert Stencil who exists as sort of an opposite of Profane, still shares a set of common characteristics, namely, humility or humanity. Call it what you will. We follow Profane after just getting out of the navy, living in New York.
He falls in with a crowd of bohemians and drifters referred to as the Whole Sick Crew. This group resembles the social crowd in the Recognitions as well as characters belonging to any standard party scene in a beat novel albeit far more tolerable, and acting as intentional parodies.
Profane loafs around, finds a job hunting alligators in the sewers of New York. After shooting Stencil in the ass on one of his jobs more characters enter the picture, and we are introduced to Stencil's obsessive quest to find the elusive V. From there the narrative drifts back and forth between historical episodes set during the tail end of the 19th century, and the first half of the 20th. Pynchon's sympathies have always been directed at the marginalized, poor, oppressed, idealistic, liberal, etc.
Even when he sketches portraits of his capitalist, fascist, hateful villains, he still manages to show their early development from wide-eyed, idealistic dreamer to avaricious monster, while avoiding a sort of idealistic bias because he presents the reader with the inherent weakness and hypocrisy of his liberal heroes just as well. Gaddis did the same thing with Wyatt Gwyon and Edward Bast, albeit both met more morbid, Faustian ends.
Several episodes in the book, as ambiguous as they are, sort of portray "her" as an unattainable object of desire. Naturally, Shoenmaker the man who performs this operation, later to become her insensitive lover is the first sort of villain to appear. Robots modeled after humans appear later on. Profane has a particularly profound and hilarious conversation with one of them.
Pynchon utilizes this theme as a way of revealing how human beings desire this sort of mechanical, empty ontology, as a way of escaping their own horrific human condition. Once again, this is why Profane's character is so very important.
He exemplifies the human spirit. In his lackadaisical approach to life, he achieves what is of the utmost importance to Pynchon. The ability to merely exist, and deal, regardless of whatever sort of astronomical terror will abound. Another reason why his own unique brand of historical fiction functions so well.
What's more horrifying than the first half of the twentieth century? View all 10 comments. Thomas Pynchon Reads like The Adventures of Tintin on hallucinogens. Full of great comic scenes mixed with political espionage and paranoia amidst philosophical comments on the nature of politics, religion, death, time, sexuality and war. It's a haunting a Thomas Pynchon It's a haunting and frequently hilarious postmodern satire. The quest itself is a long journey, hence the time and globe spanning nature of the story.
The book itself is like a series of interconnecting short stories that sweeps through the majestic settings of New York, Paris, Malta, Egypt, Africa and Alexandria. The nature of V seems nurturing, motherly and caring in times of stress and suffering. V is eventually seen, felt and experienced for those who are willing to take the necessary steps.
Too many times are we fed little slices of fear from the characters who contemplate the nature of dying, growing old, separation from mans ignorance. These men in search of V are, in some way, in search of an ego death, to cure their fears in the face of God, a maternal presence of spirit, a being of upmost enlightenment.
Obviously, there is so much more packed into this near page novel, but that's what I got out of it first time around. Political theory is examined extensively through different countries and characters. Sexuality and youth seems prevalent within The Whole Sick Crew. There are some comments on the Christian Church and Christianity in general. Freudian psychology, science and mathematics pop up and colonialism is touched on as well.
Or you could be a schlemihl and take Benny Profane's approach: "I haven't learned a godammn thing. View all 4 comments. Although not nearly as perfect as some of his later works, there are many traces of Pynchon's genius in this novel. Pynchon's writing in this early novel, though showing early incarnations of his later works, seems unrefined and confused.
There are so called "Pynchon sentences" Although not nearly as perfect as some of his later works, there are many traces of Pynchon's genius in this novel. There are so called "Pynchon sentences" here, but none as decisive or as wonderful as in his later writings, in which almost every page is stacked full of incredibly sharp, yet long and haunting passages. Most significant in Pynchon's later writing is his incredible writing on the movement of social and political structures and mechanisms.
Quantity: 1. Condition: Used: Good. Rizzoli prima edizione novembre Cartonato rigido con sovraccoperta ill. Collana "La Scala". Cm 22,5 x 13,5. Pagine con bordi leggermente bruniti. In buone condizioni. Ryan, William H. Connell, Jr. Contact seller. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good.
Within U. Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. A densely packed magazine-format issue of this high-quality cultural review. Includes a full-page ad for Thomas Pynchon's V. Unmarked copy, light cover wear. Not Signed. Used - Hardcover. From Germany to U. From United Kingdom to U.
Octavo, pp. Publishers' jade green cloth with gilt titles to spine in unclipped printed dust-jacket. Cover cloth a little rubbed at spine tips.
Ex-library copy with stamps to each edge of text-block and to title page, and partially removed label to ffep. Endpapers marked and jacket flaps glued to paste-down endpapers; jacket spine sunned and lightly creased, with 5cm closed tear to rear top edge repaired to reverse. A Good copy in like jacket. Debut novel by the award-winning American writer, set in bohemian New York. Published by Rowohlt, Reinbek,, Walter Hellmann Dt. FAZ 7. Er mag die Gegenwart nicht; sie ist ihm zu dumm und zu grausam.
Published by Tusquets Editores. Used - Softcover Condition: Buen estado. From Spain to U. Condition: Buen estado. Published by Paris, Plon, 15 dec From France to U. Hardcover in-8, pp. Published by Reinbek, Rowohlt Used - Softcover. Einbandkanten stellenweise gering berieben. Gut erhaltenes, sauberes Exemplar. Erste deutsche Ausgabe.
Nachwort von Elfriede Jelinek. Published by Lippincott, Philadelphia, From Canada to U. Quantity: 2. No Binding. Condition: Not A Book.
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