Shadow Ticket (Unabridged)
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- 18,99 €
Publisher Description
A New York Times Bestseller • A New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, Vulture, TIME, The Guardian, The New Republic, and LitHub
The new novel from Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice.
“A masterpiece.” —The Telegraph
“Bonkers and brilliant fun.” —The Washington Post
“Late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.” —The Los Angeles Times
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In 1932 Milwaukee, private detective Hicks McTaggart gets handed what should be a simple assignment: Find a local heiress who’s run off with a jazz musician. He ends up crossing paths with British spies, Hungarian wizards who can make objects appear and disappear, a fascist vampire cult, and the shadowy International Cheese Syndicate, who just might be pulling all the strings. So yeah, this is a Thomas Pynchon novel. But it’s Pynchon at his most direct, accessible, and humane. The opening chapters feel like a screwball-comedy spin on classic hardboiled detective novels, but once McTaggart lands in pre-WWII Europe and witnesses fascism’s rise, the story becomes deeper and more poignant even as his quest gets increasingly strange. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini absolutely nails that tricky tonal balance, deftly mixing the cadence of a film noir PI with both laugh-out-loud absurdist humour and heartbreaking emotion. It’s a performance that elevates an already remarkable novel. If you’ve ever been daunted by Pynchon’s reputation for “difficult,” impenetrable work, Shadow Ticket might be your way into his singular world.
