sense to consider them as three installments in one major novelistic project, or perhaps as three parts of a triptych, but before I trace some of the many similarities between these three novels and elaborate on the single story they tell, I will begin with the latest chapter in what might aptly be termed Thomas Pynchon’s global trilogy.7

III The first indication of the global ambitions of Pynchon’s vast Against the Day is located on the front inner flap of the dust-jacket, in the book description written by Pynchon himself: Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, Against the Day moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-last-century New York to London and Göttingen, Venice and Vienna,strengthened when we actually open the book and begin to read the first chapter. The first fifty pages take us to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, which was held to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. The scale of the Columbian Exposition far exceeded previous world’s fairs, and with its 200 imposing pavilions, its many newly constructed canals and its reproductions of for instance a street in Cairo, a German village, a Moorish palace and a Japanese tea house, the fair was an elaborate miniature of the world and therefore a fitting setting for a novel that is in itself a condensed representation of the world. The Chicago World’s fair thus functions as a mise en abyme of Against the Day