Pynchon Audiobooks

Life as a parabola. The trajectory between two points is parabolic, as is the trajectory of the German V-weapons in World War II, the development and use of which are just one of the countless storylines in this literary pandemonium. Among the main characters is the American GI Tyrone Slothorp, who gets an erection before a V2 rocket hits. As a living early warning system, he’s not only of interest to the Allies. British officer Pirate Prentice and Dutch double-agent Katje embark on a wild goose chase with Slothorp to find the secret of his conditioning. They travel through a war-torn Germany in which anarchy and paranoia reign.Thomas Pynchon’s great novel has already become a legend in modern literature. Edited and staged by the award-winning radio play director Klaus Buhlert, a true work of acoustic art was created. Nearing forty people, the ensemble cast features prominent narrators such as Bibiana Beglau, Felix Goeser, Franz Pätzold, Corinna Harfouch, Wolfram Koch, Jens Harzer and Manfred Zapatka.

I originally rented the unabridged audio book to see if I have the patience for Pynchon’s latest work, knowing my threshold for the Hamster varied upon which work I was currently confronting at the time. I anticipated problems with the work due to the style and narrative voice in which it was composed, so I cut to the chase and decided to dip my toe in the water of M&D before jumping in headfirst. I opened the tome to page one as I hit play.

As much as the audio reading helps the reader to avoid getting tangled up in the archaic diction of the 18th century narration, Jonathan Reese does justice to the work insofar as he maintains a consistent pace throughout the reading (though this shouldn’t be posed as a possible area of contention when listening to an audio book, one must keep in mind just who Reese is having to represent). The downfall of the reading lies in that Reese, though understandably, narrates the tale in a persistent melancholic tone, which leaves the listener contemplating dinner possibilities instead of getting caught up in the world of Mason and Dixon. The intonations between characters can only be heard at inspired moments in the reading, and even then the differences are minute.

Yet perhaps this can be seen a safeguard on Reese’s behalf. In a tale which begins with a first-person narrator, and later dives into a third-person telling of events at which the original narrator could not have been present, Reese leaves the interpretation of who is saying and doing what, when, and where solely to the listener. As anyone familiar with Pynchon knows, even though his work is presented in a somewhat linear narrative format, several ambiguities generally arise during the course of any of his long tales. For anyone to assume the task of dictating precisely what is going on at any particular time in a Pynchon text is a gargantuan feat that would not be overindulged by being listed as a Herculean labor.

Aside from the drudgery of the narration, the listener does get to meet a French mechanical duck without a mate, a glowing Indian, a huge ball of cheese, a floating ear, and a talking dog along with such personages as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Samuel Johnson, and James Boswell.

The great fault of the audio rendition of the work lies at the conclusion of the reading. A Pynchon first is seen at the close of this text, a cathartic sentimental tirade upon the death of Dixon and Mason’s recollection of his late friend. I have read several accounts of how the death of Dixon lead many a reader to tears. I was interested as to how Pynchon, usually a tongue-in-cheek satirist who keeps himself (and the reader) at a distance from the pestilence of his insane worlds, would pull in his audience and achieve such a Pynchonian precedent. But Reese’s reading leaves one feeling as if nothing of any more significance occurred than when the pair crossed the Atlantic hundreds of pages back.

As much as the audio book may save one over 700 pages of reading time, it deprives one of the experience of reading Pynchon. Pynchon, to really feel and live the Hamster, must be read, not heard. For all those who do not have the time to read this last great masterpiece of Pynchon, we readers will sympathize for you and can only hope that the master will produce a radio play for you unfortunate folk sometime in the near future.

Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar 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 sizable 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’s 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 is 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.

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the Internet. It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the Internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?