V.
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:16th Feb '95
Should be back in stock very soon
The first novel by the incomparable Thomas Pynchon.
The quest for V. sweeps us through sixty years and a panorama of Alexandria, Paris, Malta, Florence, Africa and New York. as become a modern classic.
This is the first novel by the author of Gravity's Rainbow, and a profoundly impressive and original work in its own right.
Who, where or what is V.?
Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel follows discharged Navy sailor Benny Profane as he reconnects with an eclectic collection of artists known as the ‘Whole Sick Crew’, all while Herbert Stencil looks to find the woman described in his father’s diary: ‘V.’
Sweeping through sixty years, meandering across the globe and brimming with madcap characters, V. is the bawdy, sometimes sad and frequently hilarious modern classic that introduced the world to the one-of-a-kind brilliance of Thomas Pynchon.
'The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation' Ian Rankin, Guardian
'To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew' New Yorker
A remarkable book * Sunday Telegraph *
To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew. Blast through the multilayered densities of Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, and you have a young Cornell graduate, an engineer from Long Island, writing with an earnestness you might not have expected, about a world he could never recover * New Yorker *
[Pynchon's] ambitions in V. are prodigious, enough to demand comparison less with Perelman than with the Joyce of the Circe episode of Ulysses * New York Review of Books 1963 *
The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation -- Ian Rankin * Guardian *
[Pynchon] writes richer comedy than most card-carrying comic novelists, filling his eight novels with hilarious spoofs, outlandish characters, screwball dialogue and zany scenarios * Guardian *
Screwballs chase alligators in sewers in a chaotic and worlwide chase for V., while literary styles, brilliant and bizarre, chase each other * Books and Bookmen *
The book sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. Few books haunt the waking or sleeping mind, but this is one * Time *
Mr Pynchon writes with enormous skill and virtuosity * Times Literary Supplement. *
ISBN: 9780099533313
Dimensions: 196mm x 129mm x 30mm
Weight: 347g
496 pages