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The Crying of Lot 49

3.71 of 5 stars 3.71 · rating details · 27,032 ratings · 1,846 reviews

This is an alternate cover for ISBN 006091397X.

Oedipa Maas is made the executor of the estate of her late boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. As she diligently carriers out her duties, Oedipa is enmeshed in what would appear to be a worldwide consipracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not-inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

Paperback, Alternate Cover ISBN: 0-06-091307-X, 183 pages

Published 1990 by Harper & Row Perennial Library (first published January 1st 1965)

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Mar 21, 2007 mary rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

so imagine you're browsing through a bookstore on a lazy saturday afternoon.

you stop in the pynchon section, and there, out of the corner of your eye, you see this *guy* and he's checking you out. you think, wow! this is one for the movies! does this actually happen? (this is a sexually oriented biased review, sorry)

you proceed to chat, laughing at the length of gravity's rainbow. and you go next door with your new books to grab a cup of coffee, which turns into dinner, whuch turns in to crepes...more

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Jan 26, 2012 Stephen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, classics, 1954-1969, audiobook, humor-and-satire, x-filing-and-secret-histories

My first excursion into the Pynchonesque…and it left me disorientated, introspective and utterly confused about how exactly I feel about it. I’m taking the cowards way out and giving it three stars even though that makes me feel like I’m punting the responsibility football and doing my best imitation of an ostrich when trouble walks by.

I am going to have to re-read this. My assumption is that I began this book taking Pynchon a little too lightly. I decided to start my exploration of Pynchon he...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Ian Graye rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2012, reviews, reviews-5-stars, pynchon

Appetite for Deconstruction

Most readers approach a complex novel, like a scientist approaches the world or a detective approaches a crime - with an appetite for knowledge and understanding, and a methodology designed to satiate their appetite.

“The Crying of Lot 49” (“TCL49”) presents a challenge to this type of quest for two reasons.

One, it suggests that not everything is knowable and we should get used to it.

Second, the novel itself fictionalizes a quest which potentially fails to allow the fem...more

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Mar 28, 2013 Manny rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: blame-jordan-if-you-like, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, well-i-think-its-funny, parody-homage, story-review, pooh-dante

"So, what do you think it's about?" she asked, as she took a preliminary sip from her cocktail. "Entropy, to start with," he replied. "If only he'd known the Holographic Principle. It follows from thermodynamic calculations that the information content of a black hole is proportional to the square of its radius, not the cube, and the Universe can reasonably be thought of as a black hole. Hence all its information is really on its surface, and the interior is a low-energy illusion. Wouldn't you s...more

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Oct 15, 2012 Jenn(ifer) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: conspiracy theorists

Recommended to Jenn(ifer) by: Tristero!

Shelves: gr-group-coreads, read-in-2012, you-should-read-this, cross-continental-book-club

Once upon a time I won this book from Stephen M. Apparently, Mr. M. had purchased this book used. The previous owner being a young scholar filled the inside cover pages with erudite observations gleaned from the text. I present them for you here in their entirety (along with my parenthetical comments):

1. Immoral in beginning; mostly about how we think (deep)
2. Mucho takes drugs to escape problems (ya don't say)
3. She's searching for answers because she thinks there's a conspiracy in the male (si...more Once upon a time I won this book from Stephen M. Apparently, Mr. M. had purchased this book used. The previous owner being a young scholar filled the inside cover pages with erudite observations gleaned from the text. I present them for you here in their entirety (along with my parenthetical comments):

1. Immoral in beginning; mostly about how we think (deep)
2. Mucho takes drugs to escape problems (ya don't say)
3. She's searching for answers because she thinks there's a conspiracy in the male (sic).
4. Dr. Halarius (sic) a doctor (sic) running away from Israelites but there's no Israelites; running after him because he was a jew nazi (umm... scratches head...)
5. Looking for truth but always falls apart. All the people she knows have non-realistic things going on. (I told you this chick was deep)
6. She's searching for truth alone.
7. All characters are in there to show "loss of truth." (hmmmm)
8. She see's (sic) WASTE, loss & horny fiancé throughout the group. (what the hell?)(this is underlined btw, apparently very important)
9. People always try to silence of truth. (perhaps English is a second language?)
10. Mute horn: the muting of everything & no one is supposed to know.
11. Unlike the character Oedpa, we are pushed into quietism. (oh are we?)
12 People that complain never gets anywhere (sic). (what that has to do with this book is anyone's guess)
13. Tries to prove gov't wrong but she finds out that the gov't was right & she finds herself lonely & she doesn't know if she really knows the truth. (uh huh)
14. The band is called Paranoids because they smoke pot. (no, she really wrote that, I'm not kidding).

*****
Makes total sense, right? My goodness, I can't imagine reading whatever brainchild was spawned from this nonsense, but I'm going to bet it got a C+ at best.

So, wanna know what I think about this book? I think it could be the love child of David Lynch & Carol Burnett -- it needs a whole new genre: slapstick surrealism. I think it's Gravity's Rainbow minus the sexy time. I think it's the embodiment of what it might be like to be a mouse forever trapped in a maze. I think it's a conspiracy, man, and I think you're all in on it!

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Nov 06, 2009 Kemper rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 100, classic-lit

I really want to like Thomas Pynchon. I love the whole brilliant but reclusive author act, and all the cool kids at the library seem to think he’s the cat’s ass. But I’m starting to think that he and I are never going to be friends.

I tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow twice and wound up curled up in the fetal position , crying while sucking my thumb. Supposedly, this is his most accessible book. It was easier to read than GR, but easier to understand? Well…….

Oedipa Maas unexpectedly finds herself...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: why-stay-in-college

The casual Pynchon reader tends to approach The Crying of Lot 49 in one or more prescribed ways that have now become kind of traditional among those interested in entering the fictional labyrinths of the big Tommy P. On the one hand, they tend to give it a cursory read to see what all the fuss is about, and then either condemn it flagrantly or sing its praises on the mountain, or give it a cursory read in "preparation" for Pynchon's longer, tougher books like Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dix...more The casual Pynchon reader tends to approach The Crying of Lot 49 in one or more prescribed ways that have now become kind of traditional among those interested in entering the fictional labyrinths of the big Tommy P. On the one hand, they tend to give it a cursory read to see what all the fuss is about, and then either condemn it flagrantly or sing its praises on the mountain, or give it a cursory read in "preparation" for Pynchon's longer, tougher books like Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon and ultimately fail to "get" it in any way, shape, or form. I know I'm certainly guilty of both. Lot 49 has a reputation of being Pynchon's easiest work to comprehend, Pynchon-lite, I guess, and the general idea is that if you read it you'll immediately be granted access to his more sprawling fictional worlds and have a much better shot at understanding what's really going on.

This is only a half truth.

While Lot 49's narrative is relatively straightforward when compared to the rest of Pynchon's oeuvre, it is certainly not a straightforward book, and demands that the reader adjust their expectations of fictional conventions and ideas of how a text should be interpreted to even gather the slightest idea of what it's trying to do.

Like pretty much all of Pynchon's books, the text of Lot 49 is a big sticky hybrid of genres and literary styles: there's detective fiction, romance, musical theatre, slapstick comedy, etc. What's most significant in this melting pot, I think, is the idea of detective fiction. Unlike the traditional who-dunnit narrative, where the protagonist (and the reader) starts out with a vast (yet delimited) array of phenomena that will eventually be narrowed down to 'solve the mystery', in Lot 49, protagonist Oedipa Maas starts out with nothing but the knowledge that she must execute a former lover's will. From there on in, clues, signs and symbols begin to appear and proliferate, and not only do they fail to be ordered into any form of logical cohesion, they eventually seem to either have no connection to each other whatsoever, or a really uncanny level of too much connection. The narrative operates inversely to traditional detective fiction: at the end, not only do we not have any resolution, but we are left with an entropic system of signs and information that leave Oedipa caught between postmodern paranoia (the sense that everything is connected), and pure nihilism (the sense that nothing is connected and that nothing means anything).

This is why Lot 49 ultimately frustrates a lot of readers. It leads them into this enticing, zany Pynchonian universe, entangling them in its web, and then just cuts off with what is often read as a big "fuck you" to the reader. But here – and this is what I feel makes the book fundamentally postmodern – what Pynchon is essentially doing is putting his reader in the same position as the hapless housewife-cum-executrix Oedipa Maas. The reader, used to going through the interpretive motions to 'explain' a book, can't explain Lot 49 in any traditionally viable way because its surface is too slippery. Pynchon short circuits the reader's attempts to formulate a cohesive, all-encompassing interpretation of the book by throwing too much information at them, some of it only holding the impression of meaning, such as the bizarre character names like Oedipa and Genghis Cohen that only appear to allude to history and mythology.

But, as any reader of Pynchon knows, there is still pleasure to be found in his breathtaking prose style, humour, and strange fictional universes. Lot 49 isn't an easy book, but it's worth the effort, and still remains an effective entry point into Thomas Pynchon's overwhelming genius.(less)

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Apr 28, 2008 TeacherMrLoria rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The kind of book that makes people hate books. Literally one of, if not, the worst story I've ever read. A classic English majors only book, aka people like talking about this book and that they "get it" make you feel like their intellectual inferior. This book is the literary equivalent of some hipster noise band that everyone knows sucks but people will say they are good just to be in the "know."

I must say this before I get a bunch of messages from people looking down their nose at me. I do "...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Arthur Graham rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Quite fittingly, I'm sitting down to write this review after having just checked the mail. Nothing today but junk and bills. Save for my paltry royalty checks and the occasional bit of fan mail here and there (fans, you know who you are), that's about all I get most days, but this still doesn't stop me from checking the box two, three, or even four times until something shows up. On the odd day there's no mail before suppertime, I'm usually left somewhat disconcerted. What, no catalogs? No super...more Quite fittingly, I'm sitting down to write this review after having just checked the mail. Nothing today but junk and bills. Save for my paltry royalty checks and the occasional bit of fan mail here and there (fans, you know who you are), that's about all I get most days, but this still doesn't stop me from checking the box two, three, or even four times until something shows up. On the odd day there's no mail before suppertime, I'm usually left somewhat disconcerted. What, no catalogs? No supermarket flyers? Not even anything for that chick who lived here three tenants ago? I start to worry that the postman fell ill, or had an accident somewhere along the way.

That's how reliable the mail is.

Sure, we've all had mail arrive late, if ever at all. Things get lost from time to time, but whatever our complaints against the various couriers, what we forget in those moments of frustration is that 99.99% of the mail addressed to us in our lifetime does eventually make its way into our hands, and usually right on time!

It's simply astounding. Sometimes I wonder whether UPS, FedEx, and the United States Postal Service have all colluded to pioneer some new teleportation technology, warping pallets of packages and correspondence from coast to coast, leisurely loading their bags and trucks for their local rounds while the rest of us dupes check their phony tracking numbers.

That's probably even further fetched than the conspiracy postulated by this book, but not by much. Either way, the mail remains quite astonishing nonetheless.

Think about it. If people couldn't send things by mail, they'd have to make every delivery in person. Only the very well connected could ever succeed in harnessing a vast network of others in such a grand endeavor, and I guess that explains why our national/international delivery systems can trace their roots back to the messengers employed by empires of old. Royal European delivery services eventually came to be rivaled by private outfits, subsequently squashed by postal reform in this country, only to return sub rosa in a campaign of guerilla mailings. Here in 2013, the government service is presently taking its turn on the ropes, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms. This isn't a morality play between big business and big government couriers, people. This is the very heart and soul of communication -- ugly, futile, and absolutely necessary.
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Jan 07, 2011 Oscar rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mainstream, míos, historia-ficción, humor-comedia, postmodernos, 5-estrellas, favorites, mis-obras-maestras

¡Una locura!¡Una tomadura de pelo! Estas, y otras, son las expresiones que se te pasan por la cabeza mientras lees esta delirante novela de Pynchon. Mientras vas leyéndola, no puedes dar crédito a lo que te está contando ni a los personajes que ta va presentando. Pero, como si de un sumidero se tratase, o de un maelström, no puedes evitar quedar atrapado en su brillante e inteligente historia.

De inicio los nombres son curiosos, Edipa, su marido Wendel "Mucho" Maas, el doctor Hilarius, la empresa...more ¡Una locura!¡Una tomadura de pelo! Estas, y otras, son las expresiones que se te pasan por la cabeza mientras lees esta delirante novela de Pynchon. Mientras vas leyéndola, no puedes dar crédito a lo que te está contando ni a los personajes que ta va presentando. Pero, como si de un sumidero se tratase, o de un maelström, no puedes evitar quedar atrapado en su brillante e inteligente historia.

De inicio los nombres son curiosos, Edipa, su marido Wendel "Mucho" Maas, el doctor Hilarius, la empresa Yoyodine, Gengis Cohen, el abogado Metzger... Pero vayamos al principio de todo, cuando Edipa Maas recibe una carta en la que se le notifica su nombramiento como albacea de la herencia del difunto Pierce Inverarity, un ricachón con el que estuvo liada hace un tiempo. Ni corta ni perezosa, Edipa se irá camino de San Narciso para encontrarse con el consejero Metzger, coadjutor junto a ella del testamento de Inverarity. Tras el encuentro en un bar con un tipo llamado Mike Falopio, miembro de la Sociedad Peter el Grasiento, Edipa descubrirá en los servicios un curioso mensaje junto a un no menos curioso dibujo. Y como si de una bola de nieve que baja por la ladera de una montaña se tratase que se va haciendo más y más grande, todo se le irá complicando a la buena de Edipa, que, por cierto, está bajo un tratamiento de pastillas recomendado por su psiquiatra, el doctor Hilarius. El viaje hilarante de Edipa no ha hecho más que comenzar, y en él se encontrará con todo tipo de historias, donde la casualidad no existe, porque éstas parecen venir a su encuentro por sí solas. Por esto mismo, Edipa entrará en una suerte de estado paranoico, donde parece que todos quieren jugársela.

La inteligencia y erudición de Pynchon es obvia. Es capaz de crear una película de aventuras y submarinos, una obra de teatro jacobita, un máquina capaz de modificar la física termodinámica jugando con la entropía, una conspiración secreta contra el correo convencional, etcétera, etcétera, y todo ello en menos de doscientas páginas. Algunas escenas son un delirio absoluto, pero hay que tener en cuenta que la novela se escribió en los años 60, cuando la psicodelia estaba de moda. No quiero pensar lo que es capaz (lo que ya ha hecho) en más de mil páginas.

'La subasta del lote 49' es mi primer acercamiento al mundo de Thomas Pynchon, y he quedado fascinado.(less)

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Aug 08, 2012 Madeleine rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, peer-pressure, our-libeary, mmxii, reread-and-reread-and-reread, maybe-it-s-time-to-live, richard-python

Hubs and I have a tradition of getting inked to celebrate the major milestones of our marriage. We are tragically overdue for our done-bought-a-house tats, which have less to do with buying our first home and are, instead, tributes to our literary heroes: HST for him, a whole mess of influential wordslingers for me, including the venerable Richard Python because, in a year that has been overflowing with some really great books and has (re)introduced me to some brilliant writers, it's my ever-gro...more Hubs and I have a tradition of getting inked to celebrate the major milestones of our marriage. We are tragically overdue for our done-bought-a-house tats, which have less to do with buying our first home and are, instead, tributes to our literary heroes: HST for him, a whole mess of influential wordslingers for me, including the venerable Richard Python because, in a year that has been overflowing with some really great books and has (re)introduced me to some brilliant writers, it's my ever-growing affinity for T. Ruggs that stands out as 2012's most enjoyable development. My intended fleshy nod to Pynchon was lifted directly from this novella (I figured an otherwise unmarked book with a muted-horn bookmark would be an appropriately obscure enough tip of the hat) -- more than reason enough to revisit the book that started it all so many years ago, right?

I loved this when I first read it, though I realize that I didn't fully appreciate its myriad little treasures until now. What dazzled me on the brink of post-college life -- the word play, the deft navigation of a tricky plot, the delightfully symbolic and outright goofy names -- were just superficial (but still mighty rad) delights. Having a better understanding of the wonderful things that happen when Pynchon's at the helm made this nothing short of a densely packed little gift that just keeps on giving.

It's not a Pynchon novel without it also being an engineering lesson, a history class, a science experiment, a physics overview and a crash course in pop culture, all told in ten-dollar words. It had me researching the histories of both the U.S. postal service and philately (which I didn't even know was a word until this book forced me to look it up -- it's the study of stamp collecting), additional resources regarding Maxwell's Demon (though Pynchon laid it out pretty well), WWII tragedies masked as collateral damage, the effectiveness of LSD as therapy (thanks for laying that groundwork, Mister Huxley!) and God knows what else, which all prove my next point: It's also not a Pynchon novel without necessitating the consultation of at least three secondary sources and the whole damn internet. I learn more about a scattershot sampling of specialized subjects reading Pynchon than I do from any other life experience because the man crams three times as much story into his books than the page count suggests. I am just batshit over how even his meatiest tomes are deceptively short compared to the wealth of information they contain.

"The Courier's Tragedy" stood out so much more this time. Masterful imabic pentameter and a story-within-a-story that hasn't been this well executed since Shakespeare set the bar for such things at dizzying and humbling heights? Yeah, this book is proof that Pynchon rushes in where only The Bard dares to tread. (less)

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Mar 17, 2008 Dusty Myers rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm if anything a fussy writer. The sort of guy who prefers to come up with excuses why all the factors surrounding the writing of some story or chapter aren't quite right, rather than actually sit down and let the thing get written anyway. I like to worry sentences, and I like to worry about sentences that sound like other sentences I've read so many times before. "She got out of the car and looked searchingly up at the sky." There's some piece in me that could never be satisfied with that sitt...more I'm if anything a fussy writer. The sort of guy who prefers to come up with excuses why all the factors surrounding the writing of some story or chapter aren't quite right, rather than actually sit down and let the thing get written anyway. I like to worry sentences, and I like to worry about sentences that sound like other sentences I've read so many times before. "She got out of the car and looked searchingly up at the sky." There's some piece in me that could never be satisfied with that sitting on the page.

For a while I thought this was big of me. I thought it meant I cared foremost about language. And maybe in the tiny, fussy domain of the short story it's the sort of thing readers won't like to be given, but in a novel such concern is a little ridiculous. Thinking hard about the ways I read novels I know that if everything's chugging along smoothly and I'm at full engagement with the story when I come across such a sentence all I do is register the information it gives me. Its blandness doesn't stop me in my tracks. And so there's room in novels for these sentences. James called novels shaggy beasts; finessing every god damn line will get nobody anywhere.

Oh, I imagine Pynchon has such sentences in this novel, but what I want to talk about are the other ones, the ones that won't probably ever get written again. Lots of the best sentences in this book spill down their pages. Some of them are "attainable," so to speak, in the challenge I made with myself as I read the book to assess my own ability to craft the sentences he already did. Ones like this one, where you just accumulate well observed details, aren't really that hard to write: "She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages (149)."

Do-able, right? Well, maybe not "planking" or "swung". Those words would never occur to me in the places they fall. But then look at these, just a page later: "Perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For now it was like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would be either a transcendent meaning, or only the earth (15)."

The former bit takes merely a good eye, perhaps some experience, and a decent way with words, all of which can be picked up in a short number of years. The latter, though, takes some new kind of mind all together. A nimble, fluid mind, that can make leaps of association that all sort of swell around one another.

Another thing that makes this book so rad is its subject: postal conspiracy. So nice to read something new. It's always very en vogue to write stories about "weird" types. For lots of uninspired writers with little imagination, weird gets translated into the noble rural poor. (I read at least 15 of these stories today for the lit-mag I screen for.) For others, and often for me, it translates to people with nontraditional jobs, the sorts of careers no one goes to school for.

Here the strangeness of philatelists, underground postmasters, and Jacobean community theatre folk all seems very closely strange, somehow. Maybe this whole entry is longhand for saying I can't find a way to call this book quirky. Is this only because of its age?(less)

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Oct 02, 2009 Aerin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: litrachur, well-that-was-awesome, americana, twisty-turny

There was a point about halfway through this book where I was certain that it was by far the coolest thing I'd ever read. Protagonist Oedipa Maas, trying to untangle the many confusions of her role as executor of an old lover's will, attends a production of an old Jacobean play called The Courier's Tragedy. In it, a postal carrier for Thurn and Taxis, the official mail system, is attacked and murdered by representatives of Trystero, which seems to be a rogue underground postal system. Suddenly,...more

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Oct 20, 2011 Angus rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: all-time-100-novels, reviewed-and-blogged

Original post at Book Rhapsody.

***

Intro

I bought this book the same day that I bought my violin. January 30, 2009. My superstitious self tells me that I shouldn't have bought this book with Karl Johan, my violin; I should have seen it as a portent.

A portent of what? That I would not be able to make Karl Johan sing. That I would abandon my classical music pursuit. For the time being, at least. And why am I talking about my violin here?

It's because I don't know how to start writing about this book....more

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Mar 02, 2008 Martine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: conspiracy theorists

Shelves: postmodern, modern-fiction, north-american

I'm not sure how much I care for Thomas Pynchon's brand of postmodernism. On the one hand, The Crying of Lot 49 contains interesting ideas, culminating in a weird trip down Paranoia Lane. On the other hand, the writing is so detached and plain weird that it is hard to emotionally invest in the characters. As a novel of ideas, then, The Crying of Lot 49 has some merit; as a reading experience it's rather less rewarding. It feels like a 200-page story crammed into 127 pages, and that's not a compl...more I'm not sure how much I care for Thomas Pynchon's brand of postmodernism. On the one hand, The Crying of Lot 49 contains interesting ideas, culminating in a weird trip down Paranoia Lane. On the other hand, the writing is so detached and plain weird that it is hard to emotionally invest in the characters. As a novel of ideas, then, The Crying of Lot 49 has some merit; as a reading experience it's rather less rewarding. It feels like a 200-page story crammed into 127 pages, and that's not a compliment.

For what it's worth, the story is as follows. Oedipa Maas, a married lady living in 1960s California, is unexpectedly made executrix of her dead ex-boyfriend's estate. While carrying out her duties, she comes across strange goings-on which may or may not point to the existence of a secret postal service. The clues keep piling up. Are they mere coincidences or is there a sinister conspiracy afoot? And if even something as basic as post delivery is subject to a conspiracy, what else may be going on in society? Keen to find answers, Oedipa digs into the clues, only to get sucked into what is best described as a wild and obsessive brainstorm.

As I said, there are some interesting ideas going on here. Pynchon has a definite knack for mixing fact and fiction, to the point where you find yourself Googling things to see what is truth and what is fiction. He also quite successfully makes you buy into the conspiracy theory. Sadly, though, he's rather self-indulgent, blending good stuff with lengthy passages of dense, impenetrable prose that don't really seem to go anywhere. These passages do serve a purpose in that they make the reader as confused as Oedipa herself (a confusion further strengthened by the maddening open ending), but for all their paranoia-inducing quality, I wish Pynchon had taken more time to flesh out his story, to turn it into an actual novel with flesh-and-blood characters and emotions rather than an exercise in cleverness. In short, I wish the book had more pages. I didn't think I'd ever say that about a Pynchon novel, but here it's true: less is not always more. Alas.
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Mar 31, 2012 Josh rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2011, library, longish-reviews

My 11th grade AP English class had us make a "collage" (whoopee) for a book we read that semester. My teacher expected me to make one for Gravity's Rainbow, but I said that would be like making a collage for a dictionary, and chose Lot 49 instead. Here's the beauty:

I also glued two envelopes with "W.A.S.T.E." written on them to the lower left corner when I turned it in. It looked pretty nice on a wall filled with posters for The Hunger Games, 1984, Fahrenheit 451*, The Help, and Water For Eleph...more

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Feb 13, 2010 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Tata J

Recommended to K.D. by: 1001 Must Read Books and Time Magazine's 100 Best English Novels

Shelves: 1001-core

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is the shortest novel of Thomas Pynchon,an American novelist based in New York City and noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. You should see his more voluminous other two novels, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixson (1997) and you will have the urge to read The Crying first to test if you will be able to understand him. So, yesterday, I tried.

My main problem with some authors of satire like Salman Rushdie (at least in The Satanic Verses) is how...more The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is the shortest novel of Thomas Pynchon,an American novelist based in New York City and noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. You should see his more voluminous other two novels, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixson (1997) and you will have the urge to read The Crying first to test if you will be able to understand him. So, yesterday, I tried.

My main problem with some authors of satire like Salman Rushdie (at least in The Satanic Verses) is how they used terms and phrases that must be familiar to their intended audience. This is also true here in TCOL49. The setting is in the 60's during the Rock and Roll era. The main protagonist is a woman called Oedipa Maas and it is about her quest for the truth regarding a hidden organization whose acronym is W.A.S.T.E. This organization is the underground competitor of the actual mail distribution company, Thurn und Taxis that was the first firm to distribute postal mail in 1577. Thurn and Taxis defeated the other company, Trystero (or Tristero) in 1700 but persisted doing business underground under the acronym of W.A.S.T.E.

The story revolves around how Oedipa unearthed this organization's existence. Along the way, she alienated herself from his relatives and friends as gets entangled with many new characters, sex and drugs. There were interesting funny characters spoofing Sigmund Freud and The Beatles. Pynchon also incorporated songs during the era so the reading is enjoyable as the melody and lyrics can play in your mind while you read the adventures of Oedipa. In one of the Beatles songs, he altered some lyrics and incorporated Humbert Humbert and Lolita the nymphet and I glowed in recognition. I Googled his autobiography and found out that Pynchon actually sat in the writing classes of Nabokov and Pynchon wrote TCOL49 at the height of Lolita's fame.

Thomas Pynchon's name has always been popping up during deliberations for Nobel Prize for Literature. He already won The National Award for Gravity's Rainbow (my next book of him) in 1974. Having read TCOL49, I am sure this will come true in the next few years. (less)

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Jul 21, 2008 Jackie "the Librarian" rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: tenacious fans of absurdity

Shelves: adultfiction, humor, classics

Update: I finished re-reading this, about a week ago. I wanted to let my thoughts percolate before committing to an opinion here. My verdict: Nope, still didn't like it much, but I didn't hate it so much this time. I took it slowly, going back to re-read passages to make sure I had the characters straight. There are a LOT of characters, all with weird names that seem to have significance, but don't. Ha ha. Fun.

Okay, fine, Pynchon fans. I'll give you that it's an interesting plot - the idea of a...more Update: I finished re-reading this, about a week ago. I wanted to let my thoughts percolate before committing to an opinion here. My verdict: Nope, still didn't like it much, but I didn't hate it so much this time. I took it slowly, going back to re-read passages to make sure I had the characters straight. There are a LOT of characters, all with weird names that seem to have significance, but don't. Ha ha. Fun.

Okay, fine, Pynchon fans. I'll give you that it's an interesting plot - the idea of a secret, underground mail service, with its symbol hidden in plain sight for those in "the know". Oedipa Maas, our heroine, while executing the will of an old boyfriend, stumbles onto this underground postal service, but can't quite believe in its existence. She goes in search of the truth, and learns that nothing is for sure. She is cut loose from all her old ties, free from the mental tower of self-imprisonment and disconnect she had been in at the beginning of the book.

I liked the portrayal of southern California in the 60's, and all the little sub-cultures. I liked the creative mish-mash of history and crazy theories and wordplay, up to a point. I didn't like the oddly structured sentences and the obfuscatory word choices. See, you probably didn't like that I used the word obfuscatory. Or maybe you're contrary, and you did. If so, this is the book for you.

I can see this as being a book that grows on you with re-readings. Once you know the characters, and know where the story is going, it's possible that you can appreciate the vignettes, the wordplay, the arcane mysteries of Tristero. I'm not quite there yet.

***
Okay, everyone. Hold onto your hats! I'm voluntarily re-reading this frustrating morass of a book. I'm 38 pages in, and so far it seems more penetrable than the first time. I'm crossing my fingers...

Old review from my previous reading: I read this my senior year of college, and it was so beyond me I could not forgive it. There were so many obscure references crammed into this book, it reminded me of a fruit cake, dense and filled with unpleasant bits that you weren't sure what they were. Maybe if I'd read it for class, with an English professor helping decrypt it for me? But I just felt like an idiot, and totally lost. Weird names, murky motivations, and who the hell knows what was going on?
However, my college roommate loved it, and recommended it to me. He is my dear friend, and we are both big readers, and librarians, but oh boy, our book tastes do not overlap very much!
Maybe I read it too soon, but I can't say I'm all that excited about trying it again.(less)

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Feb 02, 2012 Ian Pardo rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'll be the first to admit, The Crying of Lot 49 contains some of the most confounding sentences I've ever encountered in fiction. But when I'm not tearing my hair out trying to understand paragraph-length sentences about entropy and thermodynamics, I was utterly enthralled by the postal conspiracy that Oedipa Maas tries to unravel. Reading Pynchon's prose is like cracking some secret code - something Oedipa herself tries to do with the cryptic post horn symbol.

Do I fully understand the novel? N...more

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Jul 10, 2012 Jane rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I wish I could write a profound review, stelliferous with jargon and theories.
Pynchon, for me, was associated with hipsters and students of literature loving their post-modern analyses disappearing into some sort of meta-xyz or deconstruction. He had never been on my list of authors to read, mostly due to my reluctance to read any more American authors than I already had, feeling the list had already grown disproportionately long and dulling my token effort to not melt into the hegemony.

I don'...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Stephen M rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: A hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning

Recommended to Stephen M by: marchin' thru the Pynchon battlefield

Shelves: i-dont-even, mentions-mitchell, too-mass-pin-cushion

The first and only time that I read Hamlet was in my High School AP english class. The teacher, being by far the best english teacher that I’ve had throughout my oh so illustrious english career, was a wonderfully animated and intelligent fellow. For our reading of the Oresteia, he drew stick figures on the board, highlighting with screaming delight the furious eyebrows of Clytemnestra. Every class was a surefire combination of zaniness and intelligence that I came to love from one day to the ne...more The first and only time that I read Hamlet was in my High School AP english class. The teacher, being by far the best english teacher that I’ve had throughout my oh so illustrious english career, was a wonderfully animated and intelligent fellow. For our reading of the Oresteia, he drew stick figures on the board, highlighting with screaming delight the furious eyebrows of Clytemnestra. Every class was a surefire combination of zaniness and intelligence that I came to love from one day to the next. Although his antics could (and should) be retold in much more depth than here, it is perhaps the subject for another review. But somewhat tangentially relevant to the book in question, his insights into the play were some of the most profound that I’ve heard and most certainly kept me from tossing my copy out the window. One of most intriguing moments of the class came during the famous ‘play within the play’ part of Hamlet, where Hamlet puts on a play to show the king that he knows what had really happened to Hamlet’s father. Although our teacher outlined the importance of the scene and the role it served, when the audiobook got around to the dialogue of that meta-play, our teacher held up a flapping hand, speaking loudly over the recording telling us that there was no need to pay attention to this scene, as it was literal gibberish nonsense, its meaning so obfuscated so as not to even be bothered to be given any thought. This came in the middle of an intense dissection of the play, no verse had been left unanalyzed, no word untouched by the scrutiny of close reading and informed discussion. I found it to be quite funny and especially refreshing to have an entire section of a play written-off by an english teacher as nonsensical. But even more than that, I found it profoundly intriguing. Shakespeare, being as dense and difficult as it is, when descending into a deeper level in the play—the play within the play—becomes that much more difficult to understand, as if the further from reality one gets into its fictional universe, the more tangled and confused it becomes. The meta layers of literature twist meaning and significance the deeper it gets. I have since found this Inception-like increase in difficulty in a few other stories of meta-fictive delight. As were the meta-tales of Goatwriter in Number9dream, I found the play within the book, The Crying of Lot 49 to be completely divorced from comprehension. As evidenced by the fact that I can’t recall a single bit of the play now, I have never felt like such a sloppy reading idiot while navigating the threads of this thing.

It is, of course, the point of the book and despite being aware of it from the get go, I can’t bring myself to love the book. I will say that the first chapter is brilliant, among the top all time opening chapters. And I was with the story then, despite it being slightly demanding, I breezed through it with an air of self-gratification, quite pleased with my progress. Perhaps this speaks to Pynchon’s genius, but I felt lulled into a sense of false security by my understanding of the opening pages. That beginning promises a roaring good book, equal parts entertaining and profound but most of all, a book that has meaning. Alas, no book was delivered. I was reading pleasantly, assured of my own understanding, as I said, when a hairspray can begins flying around the room of the Pynchon-verse for an extended period of time, shooting off at improbable angles for much longer than anyone is comfortable reading. The what-the-fuck-is-happening-right-now alarm began to warm up. And as I plunged further through the book, it didn’t get any better at all. My incredulity and my anxiety over missing important details mounted. Among all the loose threads of Tristero and W.A.S.T.E. that the protagonist herself is trying to make sense of, I saw not some profound meaning behind it all, but instead the long, protruding middle finger of the author, accompanied by the condescending chuckle of a man much smarter than myself, scorning my foolish attempts at making sense of it all.

IMEANYEAHIGUESSTHAT’SHOWLIFEISBUTCOMEONDUDE,ISITTOOMUCHTOASKFORALITTLEBITOFMEANINGINASTORY??????

Thomas Pynchon is no doubt a genius and I completely envy his ability to create masterful sentences but damn, his books sure are frustrating to read.

*****Everything else aside, ya'll should check out this lecture on the book. I may have enjoyed it more than the book itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dtqt0...************(less)

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Sep 08, 2008 Holly Goguen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Holly by: hollygoguen@gmail.com

Shelves: goguen-bookclub

I have never quite read a book like this before...a book I had to take notes on, and a book where I was left wondering if it was necessary or not in the end. The names and places thrust upon you while reading tease the corners of your mind...beckoning you to associate, connect, describe, make sense of it..because that is what our brains do in the end. We fill in breaks and gaps with logical connections that may or may not be real, and to me, this book questions that practice. Are we the cause of...more I have never quite read a book like this before...a book I had to take notes on, and a book where I was left wondering if it was necessary or not in the end. The names and places thrust upon you while reading tease the corners of your mind...beckoning you to associate, connect, describe, make sense of it..because that is what our brains do in the end. We fill in breaks and gaps with logical connections that may or may not be real, and to me, this book questions that practice. Are we the cause of our own insane paranoia, or is it society...OR. even more frightening,...is it real? Is it all real?

The paranoids, a group of teenage rockers, remind me of a greek chorus, in a way....reflecting the society around the main character, Oedipa,...which is somewhat careless, sex-obsessed, and destructive. She stays in Echo courts, in the city of San Narcisus..references to both greek mythology and the nature of southern california.

There's an interesting theme of water in the novel, and mentions of the Peter Pinguid society, the Admiral, the talk of the pacific ocean as a redeemer for southern california, Mike Fallopian's name, and lake inverarity, as well as the discussion of the moon and the tides,
all the lakes mentioned in fact...seem to me to bring up the relationship between water and the unknown..the deep and dark corners of the unconscious.

The theme of symbolism, hieroglyphics, geometry and communication is constantly mentioned, but it seems only to be a distracting thing rather than an informing thing...which seems like the author is saying that real communication is impossible or is just bound to be interpreted in the way that the person getting the message sees everything anyway...that we are destined to fail at this. We make patterns, we pass judgements, we interpret...but it all may be for naught.

Lastly, and most importantly, this book taunts you with the constant effort to distinguish between reality, hallucination, plot and conspiracy...and whether or not it is even worth it to try. Perhaps that's why our heroine is so confused....does she even really want to see anything in particular? Is she a reliable source?

As for her story, Oedipa has used men in her life as a way to fill the metaphysical void, and when they are all gone...she's not sure she has anything left to pull together into a coherent life philosophy. She's not sure that all the constant running has left her with anyway to construct a meaningful existence. Sadly, I don't think she trusts herself or life. Each hero that goes on a spiritual journey into self discovery has to experience a breaking away from an old and outdated self. They see the world around them disintegrate or challenge them in new ways. Oedipa's brain tries to make sense of all this chaos, and personally, I think the patterns are real,regardless if the conspiracy is as well.

The fact that Oedipa must follow it to the end shows me her journey is not over, because she is still searching for external verification for events that are largely internal, at least in significance. Perhaps Oedipa is Socal at this time... or even the aspect of society that felt this way in the 60's...searching for greater meaning...trying to make sense of the chaos and connections...but ultimately, discovering, that in this personalize type of journey inward, no one can show you the way. There is no answer, its a process. (less)

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Dec 04, 2007 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: post-modern snobs (meant in a good way, I think...)

Shelves: fiction

This book was strange on a lot of levels. Though it is short, every word counts. Most authors tend to fluff out their stories with lengthy descriptions, and details. This is the book that would result if you boiled it down to the bare-bones narrative. Only what is necessary to drive the plot remains, and you're forced to give ample weight to each word on the page. Something I admit to being unaccustomed to doing.

After a bit of a learning curve to really focus on what was being said, I was able...more

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Brian Heh - my bad! Let me try that again..... (with Spoilers. BEWARE!!! Woooooo-ooohhh)
----------------------------------------------------
A of literary po...more Heh - my bad! Let me try that again..... (with Spoilers. BEWARE!!! Woooooo-ooohhh)
----------------------------------------------------
A of literary post-modern aloofness at it's greatest. Centered around the LSD-fueled wanderings of one Oedipa Maas (and you can count on zanier names as you progress - they only get worse) trying to uncover what is sure to be the lamest conspiracy ever.

Though answers are as fleeting as sensible dialogue, you'll eventually learn that there seems to be a second "underground" postal system in this country. And if you've ever seen the re-issued .41 cent R2-D2 stamps at the post office, you'll understand the need for an alternative.

As an added bonus, all W.A.S.T.E. transmitted packages come with that baked in smells-like-urine hobo goodness. Because being hosed by USPS isn't bad enough, you'd apparently want to receive tuberculosis with your monthly power bill.

Why you'd want to keep such a lame secret, I can only guess. I suspect having a name like "Mike Fallopian" might send you searching for any conversational alternative you can get your hands on, and would be happy to settle on a gem like the underground Pony Express. Everyone seems to know about WASTE except Oedipa, which apparently drives her nutty to get at the truth. (She never does, which probably saved Pynchon from writing the grisly details of her inevitable suicide when she realizes she's wasted a generous portion of her time chasing after a secret as inexplicable as the book's premise).

Lastly, the frequent appearances of a muted post horn symbol should keep your phall-u-philes busy for weeks at a time. As an added bonus, Pynchon cleverly hid the date of the Apocalypse in an algorithm derived from totaling the number of references to the horn, divided by your attention span, and added to theoretical physics examples like Maxwell's Demon. Don't see it? Well, you're probably just not as smart as your average post-modernist. So there......and our books are like, totally deep and stuff……..

Also, our Dad's could totally beat up yours.
--------------------------------------------------

Don't know if that was any wittier, but it was fun to write! My sub-conscious must be angry at this book though - I sensed a lot of anger in my words.... You'd think I'd be better connected to them :)
(less)
Dec 04, 2007 09:11pm

Brian I think the better question is "Why don't they medicate people who think of this stuff?" I mean, surely some pharmaceutical company is hard at work on...more
Dec 04, 2007 09:46pm

Brian So I revisit this post some 4 years later, and whoever I was having a discussion with has deleted their profile, which took their comments with it. So...more
Sep 23, 2011 09:35pm

Nov 23, 2010 Ashley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: post-modern, classics

This book epitomizes exactly what bothers me about postmodernists. You could spend your life decoding all the images and symbols and patterns and names and places and endless conspiracy theories that Pynchon has so densely packed into only one hundred and fifty pages; you could think and think and ask yourself "What's real?" to infinity; you could do that, sure, but all that effort would essentially be pointless, because in the end, none of it means anything, because there is no meaning but what...more

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Aug 29, 2012 Chance Maree rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary

Off-beat, sometimes in an interesting way, sometimes not so much. Oedipa Maas, a decent enough lady runs from a boring husband to take on responsibility as executor of the will of a former boyfriend. She becomes obsessed with a puzzle or puzzles and follows clues that eventually reveal.....self-realizations, realizations about life, America, and more. The novel is deceivingly thin, and deceptively accessible. Read simply as a story, the stars would only blink link a bored cat. If one dives with...more

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Dec 08, 2011 Jeremy added it · review of another edition

Shelves: american-fiction

I've never read Pynchon before, but his style, those winding, iridescent sentences seem like an important reference point for a lot of American authors who come after him, people like Don Delillo, Donald Barthelme, David Foster-Wallace, Johnathan Franzen, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson etc. He's able to synthesize obscurant historical references, pop culture, conspiratorial paranoia and drug use into this funky, swirling melange. It would almost be a kind of metaphysics, if it wasn't so kooky a...more

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May 18, 2012 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: those who wonder if something is up

Shelves: novels, lrp-going-further, metafiction, brain-pain, read-in-2012, yale-291, author-north-american

Awesome! If you weren't a paranoid conspiracy freak before, you will be after you read this book!

Oedipa Maas takes a journey in good faith to execute the will of a former lover, but instead finds herself on a journey of discovery as she tries to unravel the mystero of Tristero, which may or may not exist, in an America of secret signs, hidden meanings, and mysterious couriers carrying mysterious messages to mysterious people in mysterious places.

Take a trip through the paranoia and drug-addled l...more

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Jan 22, 2008 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A slapstick parody/send-up, resembling Kafka meets the Marx Brothers, of sixties culture; targeting psychology, the military/industrial complex, right wing whackos, movies, literature, and views of reality and history. One of Pynchon’s lightest and most inconsequential works (though not the worst which is Vineland); and his most dated (it just screams “written in the sixties). The fun lies in digging through his wealth of allusions and references (Jacobean drama, psychology, The Beatles, science...more

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Jul 12, 2008 Juliana rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: couldn-t-finish

Ok, so I didn't actually read this book, but I did try. It sounded cool from the description, and I've often come across references to it. Amazon.com recommended it to me, and I tend to agree with their recommendations. I generally give a book about 50 pages to hook me, and this book just irritated me more and more as I went along. I found the "ironic" wordplay more annoying than funny. Some of the characters seemed like they had potential, but not enough for me to care. I think I got to page 60...more

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Jan 02, 2008 Ricky rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library-books

Harold Bloom (and apparently everyone else I know) is clearly out of his G.D. mind. This book is not hilariously funny. I did not appreciate the humor in this book at all. I liked the bit about the play but the book seemed too cutesy and gimmicky to me. I've been looking at reviews all over and (much like the reviews for the film No Country for Old Men) I seem only to find the same old enthusiastic descriptions of the book and no compelling reason for why I should appreciate the longest 183 page...more

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About Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American writer based in New York City, noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. (1963...more

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Quotes from The Crying of Lot 49

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.” — 69 people liked it

“Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?” — 36 people liked it

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