Goodreads | The Crying of Lot 49

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Who Do Pynchoff's Influences Sound Like?	1	18	11/13/2007 12:18PM

Dusty rated it:

(review of isbn 0060931671)

03/17/08

Read in March, 2008

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...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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_inbetween_ rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

04/17/08

Read in April, 2008

GR and FF ate my review that explained the two stars and in which I took more care than usual and even quoted nicely. Before I go cry bitterly over spilled words: in all fairness this book would deserve at least three stars from me!

But I kept wondering constantly if the critics would have hailed Robert Rankin similarly if he'd been the first to write that sort of novel? This type of plot, with the protagonist stumbling from everyday life over more and more odd little things that lead to vari...more GR and FF ate my review that explained the two stars and in which I took more care than usual and even quoted nicely. Before I go cry bitterly over spilled words: in all fairness this book would deserve at least three stars from me!

But I kept wondering constantly if the critics would have hailed Robert Rankin similarly if he'd been the first to write that sort of novel? This type of plot, with the protagonist stumbling from everyday life over more and more odd little things that lead to various real or supposed conspiracies, not actually fantastic or surreal, but just at the edge of it, is esp. favoured by male authors (mostly from GB).

In my lost review I had better examples, but before I forget everything, let me compare this novel to those of Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Sharpe, both of whom I disliked after one book, and the less lauded, not(yet?)consideredliterary Tom Holt (who lost over time) and Lemony Snicket (who gained over time). What Pynchon has is a "deeper" plan or message, if not meaning then question, I'll concede that.

While the theatre director and analogous Oepida are read as searching for meaning or representing how we see patterns .. *lost* .. I like what I see as the summary of the situation, that there probably isn't "a secret richness and concealed density ... maybe even on to a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody" and that he doesn't see the solution in drugs is a plus; if the idea would have been born without them is uncertain though. The dichotomy cannot be melded into one satisfying whole; "Either Oepida in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero."

But - as I spent two hours formulating for naught - in the end all that is just intellectual. While hating such distinctions myself, numbers prove it a very male book in the sense that all these kinds of stories have thishappens-andthenthishappens and I don't know any female authors writing them.
In the end the heroine (whom I liked, btw), who had those few lines that I found funny (I did not find the whole thing funny, let alone hilarious) was TOLD to be bereft due to the loss of other people. But there was never any actual connection to those people, no emotion, and that that could easily have been done, in literature, in books of this kind even, is a fact.
It was both this lack of shown emotion in a story supposedly about the human condition, and what I saw as a break in the character towards the end, when it switches from what was perhaps Pynchon in the dry witty lines to his imagined woman in the breakdown, that made me give it two stars in protest.

The longest chapter is like a dream, an LSD dream perhaps (except that Pynchon actually speaks out against that drug, says it wipes out who people are even while they think they are so much more aware, so it's happily not too Beat). But this is followed by the penultimate part, which I liked, Oepida seemingly strong, or at least more hale than the others - just before the end, which I didn't like, which increased further and further like Kerouac's ending, except there was no Pooh Bear: Pynchon cut off just before the revelation, leaving it completely "open".

The style is fast paced, there are long run-on sentences reminding me of Beat poetry, but if one concentrates it's also clear and unmuddled. Frequent mention of "negroes" were odd to read (mostly because I wondered about reissues), while Pynchon does take his (only) stand against Nazis - even though Dr. Hilarius actually is interestingly complex, and actually funny. The references (written in the 60s) were obvious to me. The painting he describes really exists, though Pynchon misremembers it (perhaps purposely), the Jacobean play doesn't, but it's explained at great length and could easily have been real. Tristero being so much less gory and horrible is supposedly meant to be forgotten as the plot "thickens" - and ends in a modern (fashionable) "open" fashion, that still always seems a bit of an easy way out to me.

...less

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mary rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

03/21/07

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 ...more

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Anna rated it:

08/20/08

Read in August, 2008

recommended to Anna by: jesse

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

I absolutely loved it.

When I finished reading it, I felt like I had been tricked! The novel is very well constructed, and the author leaves us in suspense. It's as if the whole narrative was going somewhere, leading us towards an unavoidable conclusion, but actually we end up not knowing anything. The last few pages break down what had been cleverly put together.

The novel is a bit like a mystery, as you follow Oedipa Maas who discovers an underground postal organisation when she is try...more

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Holly rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

09/07/08

bookshelves: goguen-bookclub

Read in August, 2008

recommended to Holly by: hollygoguen@gmail.com

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, kind of 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 stay's 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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Krystal rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

03/10/08

Read in April, 2008

After numerous attempts, I have finally achieved what I once thought to be an impossible task: reading a Thomas Pynchon novel. Admittedly, his shortest and "most accessible", yet I still feel some pride at actually getting through it - and more than that, enjoying it. At first I tried reading it in small chunks, letting the page-long sentences wash over me without trying to figure out what was going on. Excruciating method that I do not recommend. Finally, this weekend I decided to rea...more After numerous attempts, I have finally achieved what I once thought to be an impossible task: reading a Thomas Pynchon novel. Admittedly, his shortest and "most accessible", yet I still feel some pride at actually getting through it - and more than that, enjoying it. At first I tried reading it in small chunks, letting the page-long sentences wash over me without trying to figure out what was going on. Excruciating method that I do not recommend. Finally, this weekend I decided to read it for real, going back to the beginning, reading aloud the interminable sentences until I began at last to get into the rhythm of his writing. Once that happened, the book flowed along more easily and I began to catch glimpses of the elusive idea.

[Here's a sample of the long, involved sentences:

Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust — and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath of the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes — it made him sick to look, but he had to look. (Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 4-5)

Yes. That was all one sentence.]

I still cannot say that I got it. The entire experience was similar to what I imagine an acid trip to be like: nothing I can quite pinpoint but an overall, overwhelming sense of seeing an idea much larger than myself. The crux was a passage in which Oedipa (the protagonist) is trying to figure out whether the entire series of events were fabrication (an elaborate hoax or hallucination) or fact. She is certain that one or the other must be true since that is the matrix of life: ones or zeroes, life or death, paranoia or reality. And yet, since this is never resolved, one is left with the third possibility of something that is neither one nor the other — She had heard all about the excluded middles; they were bad s*&#, to be avoided......less

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Jackie rated it:

(review of isbn 0060931671)

07/21/08

bookshelves: adultfiction, classics, humor

Read in January, 1984

recommends it for: tenacious fans of absurdity

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 o...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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Russ2 rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

07/19/08

bookshelves: deferred

With apologies to all of the people I know who love Thomas Pynchon, I have to say he is just not for me. I have browsed though his books on the shelf at Borders several times and none have ever appealed to me. Recently though I decided to try The Crying of Lot 49, which has been described as his most approachable, but have now put it down.

I'll be as generous as I can and say that the book, now quite old, must have been written for a different generation than my own. Perhaps neither...more With apologies to all of the people I know who love Thomas Pynchon, I have to say he is just not for me. I have browsed though his books on the shelf at Borders several times and none have ever appealed to me. Recently though I decided to try The Crying of Lot 49, which has been described as his most approachable, but have now put it down.

I'll be as generous as I can and say that the book, now quite old, must have been written for a different generation than my own. Perhaps neither the book nor I have aged gracefully, but I found the humor to be adolescent at best, although puerile also comes to mind for some. Drunken college students having reached the stage of giggling at inanities are a possibilty as well.

The protagonist is Oedipa Maas, for an auditory pun, Mizz. Maas, at one point, while her husband calls her Oed for short. Oxford English Dictionary, get it? The supposedly humorous names for characters and places continue with a Dr. Fallopian, Genghis Cohen, Emory Bortz, and Stanley Koteks, to name a few people, as well as the city of San Narcisco in California, which has a North Beach section just as its punned namesake does. Add in a radio station, KCUF, and spell it backwards for real rib-tickling merriment.

Passages which attempt to describe the drab sameness of the smog-covered California urban sprawl are simply limp to my ear, and not trenchant as I suspect the author intended. Any number of hard-boiled detective writers have done it better. I've lived there and seen it, so even as plain description, the author's narrative falls flat and neither captures nor parodies the actual reality. The story develops in essentially linear sequence, and the written style strikes me as undistinguished, despite some long sentences. It has been seen and much better done, and comparisons to Joyce, as on the back cover, are a plain travesty.

The book devolves into Mizz Oedipa's quest to uncover the workings of a supposed underground postal system that is competing with Uncle Sam's mail and using containers labelled W.A.S.T.E. as its letter drops. Finally, Mizz Maas was not an interesting cut of cardboard, nor was her quest of any interest either.

I put the book down about 2/3 of the way through, completely disinterested by then in whatever ending it might have, while fully realizing that many regard it as a work of hypermodern genius. If some say parody, instead, then I say poor parody.

Two stars is exceedingly merciful; one star is more how I feel about it....less

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Martine rated it:

03/02/08

bookshelves: modern-fiction, north-american, postmodern

Read in January, 2005

recommends it for: conspiracy theorists

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...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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n* rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

05/20/08

Read in May, 2008

recommends it for: Subversives everywhere

A really excellent introduction to Pynchon's complex, abstruse, brilliant, bilious, hilarious storytelling. If you're trying this one out for the first time, here's a hint: make a cheat sheet as you're reading of every character other than Oedipa. Every time you learn something about that character, make a quick note. Use your cheat sheet as a bookmark, and keep up with it, or you'll find yourself at page 25 with no idea who you're talking to or why. If you do it right, you'll find the kind of r...more A really excellent introduction to Pynchon's complex, abstruse, brilliant, bilious, hilarious storytelling. If you're trying this one out for the first time, here's a hint: make a cheat sheet as you're reading of every character other than Oedipa. Every time you learn something about that character, make a quick note. Use your cheat sheet as a bookmark, and keep up with it, or you'll find yourself at page 25 with no idea who you're talking to or why. If you do it right, you'll find the kind of razor-thin connections that prove Pynchon plans every word. He drives his heroine nearly insane with connections; stay with her. She needs you.

It takes a special author to make so many memorable characters exist in such a chaotic world that we can't keep them straight. It takes a genius like Pynchon to make that kind of effort worth it for a reader. Every once in a while, you'll come upon a line of observation that forces you out of your world--it's shocking.

It's amazing. I've read it uncounted times. I'm always left stunned, landlocked, hopeless.

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"He poured her more dandelion wine.
'It's clearer now," he said, rather formal. 'A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered.'
No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine"

"Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry."
...less

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Cheryl added it (review of isbn 006091307X)

12/21/07

"... She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she'd always had the hovering fear it would someday topp...more "... She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she'd always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them. Was that how he'd died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house? that only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew..."

"... Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them..." (p. 88)

"... She was overcome all at once by a need to touch him, as if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it. Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps ad sat, took the ma in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. she felt wetness against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. "I can't help," she whispered, rocking him, "I can't help." ..." (p.93)

"..."I came," she said, "hopping you could talk me out of a fantasy." "Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacles, 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."..." (p. 103)

"... either an injustice, or the absence of a wind..." (p. 136)

"... For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia..." (p. 137)

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Garrett rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

01/15/08

Read in June, 2007

I had high hopes for this after I enjoyed reading Mason and Dixon so much. In this respect I will admit disappointment. I was not very enamored with the slim debut of the Post-Modern king of kings. The story structure was relatively unexperimental. The names of the characters were, by and large, frustratingly irreverent puns ("Mucho" Maas, anyone?) that I found more distracting than entertaining. I suppose my biggest disappointment, though, was that slim as the novel was it probably co...more

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David rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

09/12/07

Read in September, 2001

If you go to the University City Public Library off the Loop in St. Louis, you should be able to find the copy of this book that I read. Youd recognize it by the crudely-drawn muted-horn on the inside back cover, along with my name and the date. Pynchon followed so closely in the footsteps of Salinger that it prompted a contributer to the Village Voice (back when it meant something) to claim that Pynchon was none other than the Catcher himself. This claim was not without merit, and in fact wa...more

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Jim rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

05/09/08

Read in May, 2008

Oedipa Maas has a dead boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, who named her co-executor of his will--a formidable task, given that the deceased had a myriad of real estate and business holdings, all of them tangled in unexpected, sometimes seemingly sinister ways, chiefly in connection with a shadowy, centuries-old, and possibly nonexistent postal conspiracy, the Trystero. Good luck, there, Oedipa. Along the way she will conduct affairs, sometimes literally, with an ex-child star lawyer, several species ...more

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Matt rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

05/28/08

Read in May, 2008

recommended to Matt by: Some guy I knew in grad school
recommends it for: Postmodernists, literary geeks, people who don't get stuffy about "grad student" books and can laugh

Thomas Pynchon is fairly famous as a reclusive and impenetrable writer. I'm not really intimidated by writers' reputations any more, but even so, I thought I'd rather get my feet wet by reading a 138 page novel than a 1200 page one.

The verdict? Pretty dang good. It was slow going, as I evidently have to be in a pretty specific mood to fully appreciate Pynchon's prose-- which is excellent, by the way. It probably would have been a much easier read if I hadn't been reading a library copy, with...more

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Carl rated it:

(review of isbn 0060931671)

05/13/08

Read in May, 2008

I loved this book, even though I'm not sure I can say exactly what the point was. Thematically it centers around human communication and interaction, but the novel also paints a rather sad picture of consumerist society and post-war restlessness. As the plot unfolds and the conspiracy at its heart is revealed, the focus turns toward our modes of communication and the various ways these are and have been manipulated.

This is where I'm still sorting out the point of the book, because it isn't ...more

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Brian rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

12/04/07

bookshelves: fiction

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: post-modern snobs (meant in a good way, I think...)

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...more

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Melissa rated it:

(review of isbn 006091307X)

11/02/07

Read in October, 2007

You really can't go wrong with the name of Pynchon's characters: Mucho Maas, Mike Fallopian, Stanley Koteks. Not exactly accessible and sometimes kind of annoying, but a fairly fun anti-spy-book spy book. Without any closure. Postmodernism, we love thee.

Slightly unrelated: Pynchon was, until fairly recently, very protective of his privacy: there are few published pictures of him; nobody knew where he lived; there were even rumors that he was actually JD Salinger under a different name. We...more

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