The Axe and The Frozen Sea: Thomas Pynchon - Shadow Ticket (Jonathan Cape, 2025) **

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Thomas Pynchon - Shadow Ticket (Jonathan Cape, 2025) **

I am a big fan of Thomas Pynchon. "Gravity's Rainbow" will remain on my list of best novels ever, a book I've read five times. I loved "V", "Vineland" and "The Crying of Lot 49". He should have stopped writing a while ago. And just like Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this may be the one book too many in his list.

"Shadow Ticket" is a caricature of Pynchon, with all the stylistic skill and well-known motifs, but with none of the real 'angst' or dread or paranoia or even sociopolitical significance of his earlier novels. Good artists should re-invent themselves all the time. In this book Pynchon uses his usual recipe to present us with some warmed-up meal that nobody is hungry for.

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Das gefrorene Meer in uns

“Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich”.

(Franz Kafka, brief aan Oskar Pollak, 27 januari 1904)

THE AXE FOR THE FROZEN SEA IN US “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” ― Franz Kafka