Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon - along with Salinger, "the great American recluse", one of the greatest writers of world literature of the 20th, and now the 21st century, was unanimously recognized as a classic of the level of Nabokov, Joyce, and Borges... after his first publications. Pynchon's heroes are traditionally obsessed with themes of universal conspiracy and social paranoia, searching for the hidden springs of history. And who would have thought that the author of such cornerstones of postmodernism as "V." and "Gravity's Rainbow" would undertake a detective story. Well, Pynchon wouldn't be Pynchon if he didn't invent his own genre here as well - psychedelic noir. His hero, private detective Doc Sportello, at times emerging from a hazy fog, observes the sunset of the era of universal love and the onset of the age of paranoia. And when his ex-girlfriend named Shasta suddenly returns to his life with a story about an impending kidnapping of the developer magnate Mickey Wolfmann, Doc involuntarily becomes entangled in a cunning web of intersecting interests, subtle clues, and false leads. And what is the ubiquitous Golden Fang - a tax evasion scheme devised by dentists, an Asian drug cartel, or something far more sinister?..
In 2014, Paul Thomas Anderson - one of the main visionaries of contemporary cinema, director of such films as "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia", "There Will Be Blood" and "The Master", "Phantom Thread" and "Licorice Pizza" - carefully brought "Inherent Vice" to the big screen; for the first time in history, Pynchon's work succumbed to film adaptation. The film, nominated for two "Oscars", starred Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, Joanna Newsom, and others.
The translation is published in a new edition.