Thomas Pynchon

UNDER GATSTENARNA - STRANDEN! - Inherent vice, jur. ung. medfödd last, dold skada, dold last, inneboende brist, arvsynd, är Thomas Pynchons högst personliga variation på noir-deckaren. Den utspelar sig som sig bör i Los Angeles, fast inte inte så mycket i asfaltsdjungeln, utan mer på 70-talets surfstränder, och inordnar sig i en informell romantrilogi i övrigt bestående av Buden på nummer 49 och Vineland. Därmed också sagt att det är en Pynchon av fin årgång, VP, vintage Pynchon: 350 sidor fulla av popmusik, påtända hippies, paranoida snutar, post-Manson-syndrom och en riktigt ful fisk till president.

Inherent Vice er kort fortalt en noir detektivroman men ikke en helt normal af slagsen. Hovedpersonen Doc Sportello er ikke en hårdkogt privatdetektiv a la Chandlers Philip Marlowe men en mere blødkogt version - en evigt potrygende hippie der dårligt kan få sig til at kræve betaling for sine tjenester og for hvem lsd-hallucinationer er lige så værdifulde spor som fingeraftryk og vidneforklaringer. Vi er i det sydlige Los Angeles i begyndelsen af 1970 i og omkring den fiktive bydel Gordita Beach: en lille lomme af modkultur som primært er befolket af surfere på jagt efter den perfekte bølge og hippier på jagt efter den perfekte joint. I overensstemmelse med krimigenrens konventioner skydes begivenhederne i gang af en smuk kvinde. Doc opsøges af sin ekskæreste Shasta der beder om hans hjælp til at forhindre et komplot mod sin nuværende elsker Mickey Wolfmann en stenrig ejendomsspekulant der pludselig har set lyset og vil forære hele formuen væk og hvis hustru derfor pønser på at få ham indlagt på et psykiatrisk hospital. Det bliver starten på et vildt og rasende plot der involverer et korrupt LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) lånehajer nazibikere pornografiske slips Californiens daværende guvernør Ronald Reagan og ikke mindst den sære størrelse Golden Fang der måske er et smuglerskib måske et asiatisk heroinkonsortium eller måske bare en skattefidus for en gruppe tandlæger. Doc kaster sig ufortrødent ud i den indviklede affære hvor nye spor konstant leder til nye spor og hvor man efter endt læsning ikke er helt sikker på hvem der egentlig har gjort hvad mod hvem. Men i modsætning til Pynchons tidligere romaner får plottet her en traditionel forløsning komplet med en dramatisk skudduel (tag ikke fejl af Doc: Under det langhårede sandalklædte ydre gemmer sig en stålsat mesterskytte og under trompetbuksernes svaj en revolver). Krimigåden løses selv om det måske ikke står helt klart hvad gåden egentlig er.

The legendary author of V and Gravity's Rainbow is back with a taut, psychedelic yarn, about the sixties, featuring private eye Doc Sportello... Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon – private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L. A. fog. It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L. A., and Doc knows that 'love' is another of those words going around at the moment, like 'trip' or 'groovy', except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there...or...if you were there, then you...or, wait, is it...

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon--Private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there. It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L. A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Undeniably one of the most influential writers at work today, Pynchon has penned another unforgettable book.

" Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel." --The New York Times Book Review "Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant." --USA Today "Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling." --The Boston Globe The inimitable Thomas Pynchon has done it again. Hailed as "a major work of art" by The Wall Street Journal, his first novel in almost ten years spans the era between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I and moves among locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all). With a phantasmagoria of characters and a kaleidoscopic plot, Against the Day confronts a world of impending disaster, unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places and still manages to be hilarious, moving, profound, and so much more.

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, Against the Day moves from the labour troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York; Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it's what the world might be.

Novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 1973. The sprawling narrative comprises numerous threads having to do either directly or tangentially with the secret development and deployment of a rocket by the Nazis near the end of World War II. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is an American working for Allied Intelligence in London. Agents of the Firm, a clandestine military organization, are investigating an apparent connection between Slothrop's erections and the targeting of incoming V-2 rockets. As a child, Slothrop was the subject of experiments conducted by a Harvard professor who is now a Nazi rocket scientist. Slothrop's quest for the truth behind these implications leads him on a nightmarish journey of either historic discovery or profound paranoia, depending on his own and the reader's interpretation. The novel won the National Book Award for fiction in 1974

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels"A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force." -- San Francisco ExaminerThe Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's highly original classic satire of modern America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in what would appear to be an international conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

I juni 1761 kunde man om vädret tillät det iaktta Venus passera framför solen, som en svart plump mot den ljusa skivan, vilket sker två gånger med några års mellanrum vart hundrade år. De dåtida astronomernas observationer av det sällsynta fenomenet bidrog till att utveckla bl a lantmäterikonsten. Venuspassagen bildar utgångspunkten för Thomas Pynchons nya roman i 1700-talsdräkt, Mason & Dixon (1997), som berättar den vidlyftiga men sanna historien om hur två britter, astronomen Charles Mason och lantmätaren Jeremiah Dixon, med stjärnornas hjälp drog den spikraka gränsen mellan de amerikanska staterna Pennsylvania och Maryland. Genom skogar,över vatten och berg får vi följa denna expedition med svenska skogshuggare i spetsen som banade väg för vetenskapssamhället, vars framfart gick ut över den indianska ursprungsbefolkningen och förutsatte importerade svarta slavar. Den sköna nya värld som Mason och Dixon mäter upp tar vid där den gamla europeiska slutade, just vid den förutvarande svenska kolonin vid Delawareflodens fjordlika mynning, vecklar sedan ut sig över en kontinent, varifrån den så småningom, som en kolonialistisk trestegsraket, kommer att lyfta mot rymden. Denna parabel om upplysningens mörka sidor flödar över som en Pandoras ask: med en hamparökande blivande president, konspirerande jesuiter, geniala kockar, mekaniska ankor och allsköns gengångare; dessutom bjuder Mason & Dixon på några ännu oprövade platser, som de försvunna 11 dagarna från kalenderskiftet 1562, eller den ouppmätta och okarterade Delaware-triangeln, som i stil med bokomslagets ö-liknande &-tecken påminner om att det alltid finns något att tillägga - som ett extra tecken i alfabetet, bonustecknet, tegelstensromanens kännemärke, läsandets paradisö. Thomas Pynchon framstår idag som en av efterkrigstidens viktigaste amerikanske författare, lika hemlighetsfull som inflytelserik.

Die Briten Charles Mason und Jeremiah Dixon, ein Astronom und ein Landvermesser, nehmen uns mit auf eine Grand Tour durch die dunklen Gefilde der Aufklärung im 18. Jahrhundert, von ihrer ersten gemeinsamen Expedition ans Kap der Guten Hoffnung ins vorrevolutionäre Amerika und wieder zurück nach England. Wir begegnen Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, einem chinesischen Feng-shui-Meister, einem sprechenden Hund und einem Enten-Automaten.

Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line.

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she haas been made executrix of a former lover's estate.

Gravity's Rainbow is never a single story, but a proliferation of characters - Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more - and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension.

"? Vineland? ist vermutlich das zugänglichste Buch, das der große Unbekannte je geschrieben hat. Der Roman beginnt mit dem Sprung durch eine Fensterscheibe und zerbirst danach wie sie in Myriaden glitzernder Scherben. Aber am Ende, wie in einem Film, der rückwärts läuft, springen die Splitter vom Boden hoch und fügen sich auf wunderbare Weise zu einem Ganzen." (Salman Rushdie)

A compilation of five short stories which include: "The Small Rain", "Lowlands", "Entropy", "Under the Rose", and "The Secret Integration".

Das Leben als Parabel. Parabelförmig ist die Flugbahn zwischen zwei Punkten, ist die Flugbahn der deutschen V-Waffen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, deren Entwicklung und Einsatz nur einen der zahllosen Handlungsstränge dieses Pandämoniums darstellen. Die Rakete als Sinnbild besiegter Schwerkraft, aber auch hybrider Männlichkeit mit ihren katastrophalen Auswirkungen, lenkt den Blick des Lesers durch eine unabsehbare Fülle von Ereignissen. Thomas Pynchons großer Roman ist bereits zu einem Mythos der modernen Literatur geworden.

Thomas Pynchon, seit "Die Enden der Parabel" einer der meistdiskutierten Autoren der literarischen Moderne, ergänzte seine Werke um fünf bisher nur schwer zugängliche Kurzgeschichten: von einer Weltflucht in militärischen Schlendrian, der mit der Realität einer Naturkatastrophe konfrontiert wird ("Der kleine Regen"); vom Überwintern des Lebendigen im Abfall ("Tiefland"); vom Todestrieb in physikalischer Verbrämung ("Entropie"); von der Ratlosigkeit des Geheimagenten in Karl Baedekers Ägypten anno 1898 ("Unter dem Siegel") und vom Kampf kindlicher Phantasie gegen den alltäglichen Rassismus im Amerika der frühen sechziger Jahre ("Die heimliche Integration").

Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).