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...
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.
“‘Only.’” Woevre was amused. “Someday you’ll explain to me how that’s possible. Seeing that, on the face of it, all mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering.” (查看原文)
-- and yet none could quite suggest detaching from these corridors commemorative of the persons they had once imagined themselves to be . . . who, each of them, had chosen to submit to the possibility of reaching that terrible ecstasy known to result from unmediated observation of the beautiful. Were their impending departures not only from programs of mathematical study but indeed from further hope of finding someday that headlong embrace? (查看原文)
For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. 一场漫长的远征，读到最后一个句子时，竟然非常地不舍。甚至萌生出...For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. 一场漫长的远征，读到最后一个句子时，竟然非常地不舍。甚至萌生出一种将它从头再读一遍的愿望。但这显然是不可实现的，不仅是因为它的长度，也因为对所有的梦境而言做梦的人都只能单向地从中间穿过一遍，将它体验一次，剩下的时间就留给苏醒后无尽的回味和惊奇(展开)
![[美] 托马斯·品钦](https://img2.doubanio.com/img/author/medium/public/1490372042.71.jpg)
托马斯·品钦 作者
10 有用 Heidegger 2017-01-24 20:47:17
如同镜子迷宫或是小径分叉的花园，人物，事件，时间和空间在不断地自我复制，分裂，循环，无数人物和情节支线密密麻麻，汇成一道河流，无数浪花，眼花缭乱，凝视之下每一朵形态相似却又独一无二，有限的篇幅加上无限的时间，品钦真是永不会腻的阅读体验
8 有用 Cosmo 2022-11-29 19:01:46 天津
For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. 一场漫长的远征，读到最后一个句子时，竟然非常地不舍。甚至萌生出... For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. 一场漫长的远征，读到最后一个句子时，竟然非常地不舍。甚至萌生出一种将它从头再读一遍的愿望。但这显然是不可实现的，不仅是因为它的长度，也因为对所有的梦境而言做梦的人都只能单向地从中间穿过一遍，将它体验一次，剩下的时间就留给苏醒后无尽的回味和惊奇 (展开)
9 有用 宋阿慕 2009-06-11 18:57:28
抵抗白昼 我极度喜欢的一本书。
6 有用 袜子同学 2014-02-24 10:14:35
终于读完了！接下来细细品味吧~
6 有用 RioLiv 2022-07-07 18:52:42
终于看完了，还是熟悉的配方，就像一本世界地图，透过方解石的奇异折射，地形线穿过没有边界的时间与空间，穿过每个人的命运，复杂的科学事实，最终揭开明亮幻觉的危险本质，黑暗里的光，所谓的安全与和平只是罪恶引擎编造的谎言。很多数学实在学不懂，看到第二部分跑到博物馆拍了整整一天方解石和冰洲石矿，Pynchon全看完了，奄奄一息了已经，歇一歇吧。