
Bleeding Edge
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Narrated by:
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Jeannie Berlin
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By:
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Thomas Pynchon
About this listen
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?
©2013 Thomas Pynchon (P)2013 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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-
-
Narrator's Monotonous Tone Ruined Book
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
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Against the Day
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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-
-
brilliant!
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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..everybody's a hero at least once...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Notable Book of 2013
"Brilliantly written...a joy to read.... Full of verbal sass and pizzazz, as well as conspiracies within conspiracies, Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best." (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)
"A precious freak of a novel, glinting rich and strange, like a black pearl from an oyster unfathomable by any other diver into our eternal souls. If not here at the end of history, when? If not Pynchon, who? Reading Bleeding Edge, tearing up at the beauty of its sadness or the punches of its hilarity, you may realize it as the 9/11 novel you never knew you needed...a necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting for, ever since it went to bed early on innocent Sept. 10 with a copy of The Corrections and stayed up well past midnight reading Franzen into the wee hours of his novel’s publication day." (Slate.com)
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
Re-record with a new narrator and I think the book would be great.Would you be willing to try another one of Jeannie Berlin’s performances?
Never, no way!!!!Any additional comments?
I am astonished that this made it out of production, this is akin to an April fools joke. I cannot believe this narrator was hired, the most awful I have heard in well over 300 books.Worst Narrator Ever
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Shalom.
Plotz! plotz! Kvetsh! Try giving it a chance, nu?
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This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
It's not the book, it's the horrid narration. It took me several attempts just to get past the first chapter.What other book might you compare Bleeding Edge to and why?
The metal-on-metal screeching of a train derailing.Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Jeannie Berlin?
Jar Jar Binks would have been an improvement.Any additional comments?
Pynchon is a fine author. His prose is special. This narrator manages to hold a pillow over the face of Pynchon's humor and smother it to death.The Bleeding Ear
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Is there anything you would change about this book?
Ever since V in 1963 Thomas Pynchon has written superb novels and Bleeding Edge does not disappoint in anyway. He spins a dazzling web of a plot populated with engaging characters and conveying a powerful message for our times. An excellent readHow could the performance have been better?
Its hard to imagine a worse selection of narrator than this. She was presented with excellent material to perform but delivers it in a croaking monotone with no discernible sensitivity for timing or inflection rendering a fine novel almost unbearable. Its hard to understand how this performance escaped the studio. This narration made me buy my first hard copy novel for years.A fine wine in a dirty and cracked glass
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It's about the Internet. It's about 9/11. It's about what it means to be real and alive. It's full of conspiracy and obscure hacker (Yes, Thomas, I remember anon.penet.fi and own an earlier edition of ORA's Perl 5) and pop culture references from the noughties. However, I didn't find the references stifling and forced (unlike the 80's references in Ready Player One. Then again, I did admit I'm a bit biased).
Like any good fanboy, I picked up the audiobook and printed book on the publication date. I love the book but just can't get into the audiobook. Granted, reading Pynchon is a daunting task. Any reader would have trouble really nailing puns in Russian or hitting every German joke, but Jeannie really made it sound -exceptionally- difficult.
I really wouldn't bother with the audiobook, but the book's so good I encourage curious shoppers to check out the sample. Maybe it's just me!
If you've never read Pynchon before, I emphatically suggest skipping this audiobook as an introduction. There's too much in the writing to love to be turned off by the reader!
Listen to the sample before buying!
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Read this book, don't even attempt to listen to it
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What would have made Bleeding Edge better?
Shoot the narratorWho would you have cast as narrator instead of Jeannie Berlin?
Anybody. Her nasal monotone ruins the book. A listener cannot tell whether the main character is speaking, whether the narrator is speaking, whether someone is musing aloud.What character would you cut from Bleeding Edge?
The narratorAny additional comments?
I want my money back. This is a good book that becomes incomprehensible because the narrator has no inflection, no emotion, no passion and only one voice. A listener cannot know who is speaking.This narrator has destroyed a good book.
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Nostalgia for the Guliani days
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Would you try another book from Thomas Pynchon and/or Jeannie Berlin?
This narrator ruins the great new book by Thomas Pynchon. She sounds like a cross between the late talk-radio voice Lynn Samuels and Laugh-In's Ruth Buzzi. It doesn't sound like she's even read the material beforehand. It sounds like a grating, horrible COLD READING!!! Ugh!What didn’t you like about Jeannie Berlin’s performance?
It was HORRIBLE.If this book were a movie would you go see it?
Yes.Any additional comments?
Thomas Pynchon is America's great writer. Give him some voice talent. The guy who read INHERENT VICE isn't much better. Who is in charge of voice talent around here???horrible vocal performance
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The narrator is awful!
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