“Keep calm and be kind”

Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V, is often labelled a prototype for Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon himself considered V as juvenilia. Despite not particularly enjoying the experience, it’s still a fact-filled odyssey.

The story jumps back and forth in time, one moment focusing on New York delinquents refusing to embrace adult/submit to conformity, and another moment being in British-occupied Egypt in the 19th century.

So why didn’t I enjoy it? Well, for one thing I didn’t really feel much for the characters. Whilst I sympathised with their disillusionment with society, I never really connected with them on a deep level. It also requires a serious amount of focus. One small lapse in concentration and it all becomes a jumbled mess.

Pynchon’s Seafaring days in the Navy are reflected in the novel as is his obsession with European/colonial history. It’s really impressive to think he published V when he is 27 years old.

As mentioned before, Gravity’s Rainbow looms large when reading V. The books are very similar in a number of ways and even features a character that appears in both stories. All of Pynchon’s trademarks are here, including archaic language and an abundance of wordplay and double entendres that ensure the reader’s brain is rattled throughout.

Some of the chapters are easy to comprehend whilst others, such as Chapter 3 (painful to even think about it), are a complete mess. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, I found the plot more challenging than each featured in Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon.

Maybe it was because I was less engaged with the characters and their fates, but I was regularly checking how many pages were left. Of all the books I’ve read by Pynchon, V and Vineland both feel the least essential, particularly because he covered sinilar themes but more successful in Gravity’s Rainbow and Inherent Vice, respectively.

So why didn’t I rate V lower? Like all of Pynchon’s novels, it’s filled with a plethora of historical detail that never ceases to impress. There are numerous lines that are hard to shake and I’m sure that I would gain more from a re-read.

P.s. I didn’t realise but Radiohead’s Fog features the lyrics “baby Alligator’s in the Sewers” due to Thom Yorke reading this novel (I wonder if Paul Thomas Anderson introduced Pynchon’s work to the band).

“Every night to the Dog and Bell
Young Stencil loved to go
To dance on the tables and shout and sing
And give is’ pals a show.
His little wife would stay to home
‘Er ‘eart all filled wiv pain
But the next night sharp at a quarter to six
‘E’d be down to the pub again. Until
That one fine evening in the monf of May
He announced to all as came wivin ‘is sight
You must get along wivout me boys
I’m through wiv rowdiness and noise.
Cause Stencil’s going home tonight.”


Pynchon Ranked:

Gravity’s Rainbow
Mason & Dixon
Inherent Vice
Vineland
V
Slow Learner

Pynchon to Read:

Against the Day
Bleeding Edge

“Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.”

V is for Virginia, V-Note, Victory, Victoria, Vendetta, Vibration, Voice, Vision, Valletta, Voyeur, Vodka, Vieux, Villas, Villages, Voluptuous, Vainglorious, Vinegar, Vistas, Vomit, Victims, Vehicles, Veins, Vocal, Vice Versa, Voodoo, Volunteer, Virtue, Vertical, Vicious, Vanity, Vanishing, Vitality, Vacated, Ventures, Visible, Virgin, Venery, Veiled, VaudeVille, Vantage, Vegetables, Vicinity, Valley, Verge, Villiers, Violence, Vagrant, Voslauer, Vague, Violation, Vast, Varkumian, VelVet, Vatican, Veronica, Viennese, Violin, Vocalist, Vibes, Vultures, Volume, Vessels, Via, Vheissu, Vecchio, Vaporetto, Venus, VoVV, Veil, Veteran, Venezuelan, Vicinity, Vice, Vials, Vaulted, Vat, Vary, Vindicating, Vogt, Viola, Volcanoes, VesuVius, Votes, Vada, Void, VergeltungsVVaffe, Van, Veldschoendragers, Vera, Vogelsang, Vestiges, Vernichtungs, Vellum, Vampire, Versailles, Virility, Vibrato, Vaterliche, Vile, Valediction, Vinyl, Vittoriosa, Vulnerable, mons Veneris…V is for V.

Like the number 23 enigma, V is eVeryVVhere if you look for it, and once you see it your Vision is irreVersibly altered/altared.

In general, Pynchon’s prose is quite unique and the generous amount of songs he includes, depending on the context, sometimes feel Lynchian, like VVhen Mondaugen leaVes the communal shelter in South-VVest Africa, other times they giVe a musical Vibe (and by “musical” I mean the noun). There is an epically long sentence in chapter nine, a sentence of utter VerVe, something I VVish occurred more often, not just once.

The stories, taking place around the VVorld, including NueVa York, France, Egypt, and Malta, do not eVolVe but orbit a black hole of misinformation, noninformation, or VVhat one could simultaneously call a (non)eVent horizon. “V.’s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth.”

There are a lot of great scenes, including the Visceral rhinoplasty, the alligator hunting in the seVVers VVhich has an eVen stranger substory about a priest VVho VVent beloVV the streets to conVert rats and VVho may have sodomized a rat VVhose name begins VVith, you guessed it, V. Alas, some scenes are not as interesting as all that and I ended up ploVVing through them to see VVhat VVould come next.

I found all the characters more or less unlikeable, but I simply cannot understand the notion of reading something in order to ‘like’ (or like like) the characters, it seems immature, VVhich is not say that I’m unable to haVe fondness for characters in noVels, it’s just that this is not a criteria for my enjoyment, and if anything, disliking characters might help me understand my oVVn misanthropy. Jokes aside, does our ‘antihero’ learn anything at the end of the noVel? VVell, this is hoVV he puts it: “Profane didn’t have to think long. ‘No,’ he said, ‘offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing.’”

OVerall, this is a great first noVel, complex and richly peopled, but this is not Pynchon’s masterpiece, yet there are seeds of a masterpiece in here that I hope blossom as an arbor Vitae in GraVity’s RainboVV, VVhich VVill probably be the next Pynchon I read. Voilà!

I first read V. and Pynchon ,for that matter in 1999 and I was blown away. I probably understood 5% of it but I was amazed at the writing and some plot points.

20 years later and this reread was much needed.

The basic plot is about a spy who discovers a line about a mysterious character called V in his father’s journals. He then dedicates his life to finding out who V is.

But this is Pynchon so nothing is so straightforward. There are many plot diversions, false leads and seemingly unconnected scenes. I say seemingly because Pynchon drops clues and then returns to them. Even most absurd plotline has a deeper role. V is like a huge jigsaw , where the final piece makes the reader understand the plot.Like all Pynchon novels, there are songs, rhymes and bizarro set pieces, which lead to some funny moments.

It goes deeper though.

V is about the futility of war, the stupidity of mankind,our obsession with technology and our need to destroy. This is seen in the major set pieces in Cairo, Florence, South Africa and Malta.

If you deeper you’ll find out that t

The whole novel is a homage to Wittgenstein’s theories but I only caught hints of that.

There is no doubting that V is a masterpiece and one of the foundations of experimental literature.Unlike what critics say, The text is not unreadable and Pynchon does help the reader with the journey. Not the easiest of reads but a fun and rewarding one if the reader perseveres.

Well well well, here we (I) are/am again in that penumbral off-kilt offing into the vortex of Pynchon-land where everything is or is not what it seems 'cause the seams don't quite gather, opposites, while apposite gather nicely to one another. I (we) who enter this realm know one for sure thing: there can be no pellucid "review" per se to this or any other "P" novel due to its [by design?] complex reconditity, its various IT factor of exponential entendre, its plethora of wackily named wacky characters, its scope of theme and historiography, its sheer density of layer upon layer spun in centrifuge and splattered like a Pollack parabolic in calf's blood and fingered signed. It simply doesn't scan to logic of plot. But so but, what can we (I) do but stab a make onit, right. So then here's a go and let fly shall we?

The book which preceded this in me reading trek was: "The Man Without Qualities". V.'s main "squeeze" (protag.) one Benny Profane a self proclaimed schlemiel might better have fit the glove of that hand than that nebulous "Ulrich" of former, period piece (dud according to me) book. Benny's a schlemiel and/or shmuck from stem to stern, a nautical navy cast-off "yo-yo-ing" his haphazard way throughout this yarn of a faux detective sort novel where "V." is not nor ever fully to be illumed in that always shadowed Pynchonian foreground. Chiaroscuro is his chosen method albeit as he paints realism within these confines describing things accurately with precision like a surgeon's rhinoplasty or historical events post WW1 (and years later) on the island of Malta, Italy. Pynchon zooms in zooms out, he swaps eras and dabs liberally a touch here a splotch there. V., is an ongoing enigma, she sometimes a girl/woman/place/theme (?) - hey, last night's VMA awards show had that conspiratress Beyoncé fashion her on-stage entourage (as viewed from above) into a "Venus" symbol - this would scan nicely into the web of V. paraphernalia were it warped and wefted in, wha?; just sayin' - it's not so out there that it couldn't be in there.

So and so, "V.", is the first of TRP's several novels that, having read them all I now see as connected, by recurring characters, themes, paranoiac disturbance and arch tounge-in-cheek wackiness including his penchant for song lyrics and 'singling up lines.' I read this time through armed with a sensibility of known unknowns, abstract assuredness of NOT needing or wanting to connect (for sure) any dots (splatters) but rather to sit quietly, engulfed into the murky cloud of "animate AND inanimate" matter - this go more ready for recognition, more attuned to ah-ha moments but still, like a child at an old-time candy counter mesmerized by choice of what gooey substance I'll select to mac my maw. It's a pot store and it's legal! Ima gonna smoke and Ima gonna inhale. Bring on Oedipa Maas!

Ngộ ra bản thân tiệm cận ngưỡng vô tri sau khi đọc cuốn này, khác cái là, thay vì một hòn đá, chỉ èo uột tựa cọng cỏ.

23rd book of 2024.

This book was my companion last week as I was in Malta with my brother. We walked the usual 20,000+ steps a day when travelling, had no dinners and instead opted for liquid dinners (big lunch at 3pm, then in the evenings drink local Cisk beer), and woke every morning to the Basilica view our fairly large apartment gave us.

V is far easier to read than the other Pynchon's I've read, save perhaps Vineland. Of course, Gravity's Rainbow remains the most challenging (but at times, the most rewarding). Pynchon's writing here is sometimes exceptional, and he wrote this aged 26. I actually found the Whole Sick Crew and the modern bits a bit gratuitous; I wonder how much is autobiographical or just Pynchon enjoying writing about yo-yoing and getting drunk. The historical bits were more interesting to me, particularly Mondaugen's long story in chapter 9 (which I read almost entirely in Malta International Airport). One of the standouts, as many have already said though, has to be Profane hunting alligators in the sewers and the bit with the priest and the rats. But generally, the same old problems I have with Pynchon persist: there's too much going on, loose threads, too many characters, it's difficult to care about anyone or anything; it is enjoyable at times but a lot of the time, I just felt like he was waffling, even showing off. Alan recently sent me something about Pynchon from James Wood, which I won't quote in its entirety but,
n  

There are pleasure to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases [e.g. Pynchon's novels], and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really exists.

n
And I think I agree with that; as much as I start to enjoy a passage or a chapter of Pynchon, by the end, everything is a wash of silliness, fart jokes, puns and cardboard characters with no true menace or heart. Or he goes the other way, like in Vineland, and made me sick with the heart. Perhaps I'm impossible to please.

Nutshell: orthographic mystery spins out of control as narrative ponderously stencils over trifling profanities.

Quite an achievement. Probably should’ve read this prior to reading Underworld, Dissident Gardens, or Bleeding Edge--all New York stories, working out of the same imaginary as Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. The first chapter of V is the closest to Selby, and it’s almost unreadable. After that, it calms down and is readily digestible in large pieces.

Ian Vance is correct that the marxist rat is awesome (123 ff.). First chapter regarding protagonist spy Stencil is very impressive, also--involving the perspectives of eight others into whose ambit the master spy moves. One of the best things that I’ve ever read, though, is the scene wherein one character gets a nose job (104-12), which is told with fine attention to detail of the clinical language of the physician, but also mixes in bizarre sexual commentary from the physician’s assistant during the procedure, with reference to the tools entering patient‘s face (she remains aware under local anesthetic!): “Stick it in…pull it out…stick it in…ooh that was good” (108)--and, eventually, the physician starts mingling German into his speech, like in Dr. Strangelove (“Now ve shorten das septum, ja” (111)), which kinda hammers home the nastiness of elective cosmetic surgeries. (Patient ends up screwing the doctor, incidentally.) Novel contains several great set pieces in the Stencil sections: intrigues in 1899 Florence, then 1922 Namibia (lotsa Germans excited about Mussolini, killing natives in preparation for WW2, apparently), then Paris 1913, then Malta during the second world war.

Central, eponymous mystery is disclosed early: “His journals, his unofficial log of an agent’s career. Under ‘Florence, April, 1899’ is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: ‘There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report’” (49). The Florence 1899 episode is laid out later when Stencil is at therapy with his psychodontist, and involves a mission to:

"a place called Vheissu, [...] on camel-back over a vast tundra, past the dolmens and temples of dead cities; finally to the banks of a broad river which never sees the sun, so thickly roofed is it with foliage. The river is traveled in long teak boats which are carved like dragons and paddled by brown men whose language is unknown to all but themselves. In eight days’ time there is a portage over a neck of treacherous swampland to a green lake, and across the lake rise the first foothills of the mountains which ring Vheissu. Native guides will only go a short distance into these mountains. Soon they will turn back, pointing out the way."  

(179). Revealed that the clouds, “they are Vheissu, its raiment, perhaps its skin,” but “beneath?” Answered: “I wondered about the soul of the place. If it had a soul. Because their music, poetry, laws and ceremonies come no closer. They are skin too” (181). Rather, “dreams are not, not closer to the waking world” in Vheissu, but “they do seem more real” (181-82) (cue baudrillardism).

Easy then, at this early point of the novel that V. may well be Vheissu, a place rather than a person, a place similar to many others in the British Empire (180). That was my initial reading, considerably complicated as the text spun out.

Nevertheless, same chapter describes a caper to steal a painting of Venus, enacted by one of the few survivors of elder Stencil’s Vheissu mission. So: V. as the Venus? Or is it Victoria Wren, who re-appears in this instantiation? No idea. Not sure I really want to know. Other chapters note a Vera, Viola, the city of Valletta, Veronica (a sewer rat, of all things), Vesuvius, the V-2. It’s a mess.

More interesting: the novel is structured around the distinction animate/inanimate, and I suspect that a close neo-formalist reading will bear out the structuration. The binary shows up repeatedly, both expressly and implicitly:

Pig Bodine: “in times of crisis he preferred to sit in as a voyeur” (9) (dude likes to hit on women with “What do you think of Sartre‘s thesis that we are all impersonating an identity?” (137));

Profane’s desire to piss out the sun is rooted in the fact that “inanimate objects could do what they wanted. Not what they wanted because things do not want; only men. But things do what they do” (19-20);

Profane’s search “for something too to make the fact of his own disassembly plausible as that of any machine” (35);

Servile types are considered “as much a feature of the topography as the other automata” (69-70);

Bongo-Shaftsbury as a “mechanical doll” (80-81);

The physician’s favoring of “allograft: the introduction of inert substances into the living face” (102); physician is expressly in “alignment with the inanimate“ (103);

Godolphin carps that he “was nearly killed in something that could not have been an accident, a caprice of the inanimate world” (207);

Profane muses that “anybody who worked for inanimate money so he could buy more inanimate objects was out of his head. Inanimate money was to get animate warmth, dead fingernails in the living shoulderblades, quick cries against the pillow, tangled hair, lidded eyes, twisted loins” (230);

“Community may have been the only solution possible against such an assertion of the Inanimate” (296);

Regarding voyeurism: “At least he was to experience a for him rare Achphenomenon: the discovery that his voyeurism had been determined purely by events seen, and not by any deliberate choice, or pre-existing set of personal psychic needs” (301);

Dude who paints only cheese danishes explains his “revolt against Catatonic Expressionism” as “The beauty is that it works like a machine yet is animate. The partridge eats pears off the tree, and his droppings in turn nourish the tree” (307);

Profane understands what I mean: “In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on more as a heat-engine, about 40-percent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs x-rays, gamma rays, and neutrons” (310). Profane feels a kinship with crash test dummies, especially one which is “the first inanimate schlemihl he’d ever encountered” (id.);

Profane is of course dead wrong, as he himself is a schlemihl from page one of the novel, and admits that he is the opposite of the “master of the inanimate,” is rather a “schlemihl, that was hardly a man: somebody who lies back and takes it from objects, like any passive woman [!]” (314);

Great bit wherein a series of accidents are catalogued as “the world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate” (316);

Maijstral’s confession (very well done, this) complains that he “Was meant only to live at the threshold of consciousness, only exist as a hardly animate lump of flesh, an automaton” (339) (much relevant in the confession). The confession advises that it “will limit the inevitable annotating to this request. Observe the predominance of human attributes applied to the inanimate”--which is a key instruction in the reading of this novel, asking the reader to turn back to page one and mark out each and every prosopopeia (I haven’t done this.);

We find that the “Bad Priest” (another reiteration of V.) is disassembled (381-82) piece by inanimate piece, like the fable of the golden screw (34) and Profane’s desire to be disassembled, supra;

And so on, proliferating to the end, including theatrical automata and a proto-fascist complaining about decadence in pre-WWI Paris, how “we foist off the humanity we have on inanimate objects and abstract theories” (450).

We see, then, that the first appearance of V., supra, is marked out with passive verbs and relative pronouns, a dearth to be filled by something else (viz. readers): what is she, not who; what is behind or inside her. (stick it in…pull it out…oh that‘s good). V. is primarily something therefore that lacks grammatical animation. We know that animate/inanimate is grammatical in the novel because one character laments that “he had the Saxon habit of attaching diminutive endings to nouns, animate or inanimate” (246).

Just to prove that all of those horrible Ayn Rand books that I’ve been reading aren’t a complete waste: one character is noted to be an aspiring novelist--“All her characters fell into disturbingly predictable racial alignment. The sympathetic--those godlike, inexhaustible sex athletes she used for heroes and heroines were all tall, strong, white though often robustly tanned, Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and/or Scandinavian” (132). Pretty good description of randian output and theory.

Anyway, lotsa inventiveness, humor, great turns of phrase, good politics, &c. Some kinda analysis of tourism, perhaps placing it in dialectic with espionage or exploration or surveying, which show up repeatedly. Hard to say. Forms a nexus with the animate/inanimate stuff, late: “This is a curious country, populated only by a breed called ‘tourists.’ Its landscape is one inanimate monuments” &c. (454). A similar pre-occupation with surface/depths, as in Bleeding Edge. Much more going on here than my little review lets on.

Recommended for those with some intention of pissing on the sun to put it out for good, readers who adhere to Heroic Love (i.e., screwing five or six times a night, every night, with a great many athletic, half-sadistic wrestling holds thrown in), and persons with a complex system of pressure transducers located in a marvelous vagina of polyethylene.

V is fantastically rich with perspectives on society and our place in it. A recurring theme is our movement from the animate to the inanimate via one’s role in society which leads to an increasingly mechanized response to life. As depicted in many great books, the dilemma of facing ultimate decay and death boggles the mind. Society offers an answer but is it simply a delusional one?

V symbolizes and offers two approaches to this question that in the end converge. One approach is that of Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew. Thumb your nose at society. Have fun, don’t buy into the delusion, but in the end what are you left with. The other is represented by the elder Stencil and his colleagues in the Foreign Office. They dedicate their life to do something good and important for themselves, their country and the world, but in the end the world simply moves on leaving them with an empty feeling. “’Am I only getting old?’ Stencil wondered. ‘Perhaps past the time I can change the world.’”

This theme is beautifully illustrated in the scene with the felucca (traditional wooden sailing vessel) Peri. Old Stencil and his ship’s master, Mehemet, set sail from Malta and encounter the Peri, severely damaged in a storm and listing badly with a lone crew member painting its sides. He says, “’The master is gone. The crew is gone. I am here and I am painting the ship.’” He is asked to abandon the Peri. “He never answered merely continuing dipping the brush in his earthen jar and slapping it smoothly on the Peri’s creaking sides. What color? It looked gray but the air was dark. This felucca would never again see the sun…I watched the fellah until it was too dark: becoming smaller, inching closer to the sea with every swell but never slackening his pace…alone on the sea at nightfall, painting the side of a sinking ship.”

In conversation with Stencil, Mehemet reprises, “’Because we do paint the side of some Peri or other, don’t we. We call it society. A new coat of paint, Don’t you see? She can’t change her own color?’”

V. My mistress. My love. My place of belonging. My Venus. My Vhiessu. My Victoria. My Veronica. My Valleta….the light at the end of a dream street. The plunge from the steepest of cliffs……

V. The person, the idea and the pursuit:
V’s origin lies in United kingdom, growing up as a young catholic girl named Victoria wren. Her life’s journey is one of transformation. Symbolized through her trysts in transvestism and lesbianism. Her path towards the inanimate (the wider world around. As natural as the wind. As matter of fact as that the sun will always shine. As devoid of feeling and as nebulous as coincidences and accidents), towards the loss of her humanity, towards transcendence into the ether of abstracts, concepts and things beyond mortality was paved through her willingness to fall and fall further away from god’s grace. Adopting decadence as a way of life, that slow death of the soul. And It is in that final death, that V is born again as an idea, a concept, something that permeates through the very consciousness of humanity. We are all infected with V in one way or another. The pursuit of V. is not something unique to stencil and his father before him. It is something that we all partake in. We are all those who look for V in one form or another, V’s on larger and smaller scales. Each with his own romantic ideal of how things should and shouldn’t be. But deep down, we know and stencil knows that the truth of the matter is much simpler, much more mundane; that V. Is within our grasp. Always has been. That it is not truly a pursuit. V. is the escape that we envision from a life of suffering. The ultimate end or just an end. The death that is love (Profane’s unwillingness to love, to truly be vulnerable was symbolic of this fear of death. Of losing who he was. Even though he was stuck in a cycle of nothingness. Stuck in the self-induced mindset of the schlemihl, the unlucky one. But even to be the unlucky one is to be special in some way. The one that this world’s implacable inanimate has taken notice of. The one that animates the inanimate. But profane’s reality is one of wandering. One of mindless pleasures, taking whatever this world gives him. It is only in the end that he truly escapes the cycle. Infected with V all alone, he succumbs and accepts that blissful silence. The end of the cycle is the end of playing to Their tune. The end of following Their designs. The end of Their providence over your soul. But did They really exist? Were you truly that special? So special that the cabal that ruled this world actually took notice of you, actively sabotaged you? Or were you just no one in particular, nothing notice…nothing to remark about? Nobody special). To love V. Is to love death. To love a freedom that is purer than any form of freedom that can be found in this life. The “freedoms” that we accept in this life are but compromises, lesser, bastardized versions of V. the death of the soul. The death of an identity. Ideas of escape that tangibly keeps us trapped in Their world. These “freedoms” that they allow us, to allow our souls to fall into decay are but other forms of control. We are aware of this. And we who do not seek that ultimate end to our lives, that true freedom, must continue the farce. Must continue the search. Must continue the pursuit. Must continue the cycle. Must continue to live in Their world. Must continue to labor under gravity’s tyrannical rule. Must exhaust every possible lead (just like our old buddy stencil) all the while knowing that V. can be reached with but the mere acceptance of a single thought. The one that tells you to just stop walking, to run towards the light at the end of that dream street. To plunge from that cliff into the dark dark depths.

Fausto’s relationship with god:
To Fausto, god was something he believed in fervently before the war in Malta. As befit a citizen of Malta, a country where Catholicism is the dominant branch of religion. Hence his pursuit of priesthood. God to him was an ideal of peace, prosperity and the good times. It is during the war that a certain detachment and loss of faith will come to afflict Fausto. As he asks Why? Why must it be so? As the bombs drop on Malta, as its buildings fall and its streets no longer lead anywhere, as the corpses pile up, an epiphany or more a way to preserve god’s image in his mind strikes Fausto, he attributes the bombs falling to the way things just are. The way they always have been. Part of a state of mind that suggests that the bombs are as implacable and inanimate as the wind for example. One cannot command the wind. It blows in whichever direction it blows. A certain passivity that decides not to question god or his own faith in god. A sort of covenant he has struck with god. A bargain where Fausto will still believe in the existence of a god, but god cannot expect worship from Fausto. He still contextualizes his suffering in a way that a wavering Christian might. He still believes that god is not dead. This period of bargaining and acceptance for Fausto are the periods of time where he is Fausto the 2nd. But the single event that throws Fausto into a complete loss of faith is the death of his wife, Elena. Upon losing Elena, fausto loses all that was human about him. He could no longer afford to believe in an ideal that does not hold to the reality he sees around him. A period of shuffling as a hollowed out corpse is what characterizes Fausto’s time as Fausto the 3rd. A period of absolute nothingness. Not even purgatory. He no longer sees the world from the lens of Christianity. That is until he chances upon the disassembly of the bad priest…it is during the last moments of a dying woman, that Fausto regains a kind of empathy, a compassion for the sinful soul of another. He is reminded of his duty once as a priest. The duty he had abandoned so long ago now. And so he mouthes a prayer for this dying woman. And thus Fausto 3rd returns to humanity and begins then the slow transition into Fausto the 4th. As Fausto the 4th, fausto cannot truly reconcile his experience with the war, his reality of death and pain, with the ideal of a benevolent, all-loving god (this fracture is also evident in his inability to reconcile his many different identities into one. Choosing to leave each part of himself with a piece of his history, soul and emotions. Each part a separate identity, a wholly different person, a particular period in his life. The whole can never be regained, an unbroken man exists in innocence and a simple world. And Fausto is anything but unbroken). He comes to believe in god’s existence again, but he does not believe that god resides or presides over war in particular. He sees war as the ultimate loss of everything, as the blank space in god’s vision. He looks at god as only something that can exist in peace, not in war. Not in this chaos. Not this overwhelming death. So god for him becomes more a prayer for good health, peace and happiness for his daughter who’s faraway from here.
“And God at this moment is far away. May he be closer to you.”

One last thing:
Pynchon’s tendency to take seemingly unrelated parts and ultimately connect everything somehow in the end…..i just love that shit man.
To Pynchon, a book is the never-ending conspiracy. The one that keeps us speculating and on the edge of sanity. Paranoia to Pynchon is a way of life even at the risk of going insane. It is healthy to keep doubting. To keep an honest outlook on this uncertain world. To keep just keep living. To not accept things for the way they may seem from the outset. Nothing is ever truly simple. And remember, keep pursuing V until the ends of the earth…..

When I’ve been reading V. quite a while ago I couldn’t get out of dictionaries and encyclopedias – the book is a carnival of words and ideas.

Say a man is no good for anything but jazzing around. He’ll go live in a cathouse, he’ll jazz it all over town.

People like anything: gossip, rumours, hearsay, tall tales, myths… The only thing they don’t like is truth…

Geronimo stopped singing and told Profane how it was. Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over Nueva York bought these little alligators for pets. Macy’s was selling them for fifty cents, every child, it seemed, had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown and reproduced, had fed off rats and sewage, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, all over the sewer system. Down there, God knew how many there were. Some had turned cannibal because in their neighborhood the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror.

V. is a luscious and scrumptious salad of baroque urban legends, frilly drinking bouts and fanciful history lessons.

Love’s a lash, Kisses gall the tongue, harrow the heart; Caresses tease Cankered tissue apart. Liebchen, come Be my Hottentot bondsman tonight, The sjambok’s kiss Is unending delight. Love, my little slave, Is color-blind; For white and black Are only states of mind.

The style and language of the tale is a quintessence and epitome of that lush, rebellious, tumultuous and alchemical epoch.

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

And somewhere in the wings of history stands a cosmic actress – a capricious, mercantile, decadent and frigid harlot.
And this omnipotent cocotte is entropy. And entropy rules equally the doom of a soap bubble and the destiny of human being, therefore any human life is nothing but a soap bubble.

I'm pretty convinced Thomas Pynchon might actually know everything. I was explaining a typical Pynchon reading experience to my partner during this, my first go-around with V. (Pynchon's first novel written while he was a twenty-something in college (!)): When you know everything, it's probably really hard to stay on any kind of narrative track. Every proper noun could be (and often is) a potential springboard into a lengthy digression. Using the word "butterfly" in a metaphor? Well now we have to write a 50-page scene set in 1938 so we can include American actress Butterfly McQueen playing a student in the Broadway comedy "What a Life," which will somehow tangentially (and more than likely symbolically) relate to the main story.

20 pages in and I had already Googled at least 20 different words or events, including the siege of Malta in World War II, the South African Bondelswarts Rebellion in 1922, Muammar Gaddafi, the History of Veneuzuela (1830-1908), the Fashoda Crisis, and what a Mahdi is (a messianic figure in Islamic eschatology). Pynchon could probably rewrite by heart most articles on Wikipedia having to do with any event in world history from the 19th century to now.

Most readers struggle with Pynchon because he is a "systems novelist"; a writer much more interested in how an entire society and its ideologies work, and how those ideologies provide a regulating framework for the action of its people. His characters are often mostly well-meaning losers who are hopelessly caught up in these giant systems, yo-yoing around events beyond their control, trying to uncover what seems like a larger conspiracy to it all. It's not about traditional story -- if you're looking for an A-to-B plot or character development, you're not going to get it from Pynchon. You have to try and look at the bigger picture behind the bigger picture.

Most Pynchon novels have so much going on that it's impossible to summarize, and V. is no exception. The main "storyline" consists of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane bouncing around between different jobs and locations in the 1950s. He eventually ends up in New York and falls in with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and gets caught up in the quest of an aging traveler named Herbert Stencil who aims to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V."

Understanding who (or what) V. is is instrumental to understanding the novel, and Pynchon doesn't make it easy for you, particularly because we often aren't sure if it's the same person (or even a real person), and the effort to track V. down is often interrupted by large, seemingly unrelated chapters in different time periods with lots of kooky characters.

I was just enjoying the ride (which is the best advice I can give to any Pynchon newcomer), but eventually started to piece together an interpretation. V. shows up in various points throughout time, always in places right on the verge or war or violent rebellion. These are times of decadence, where the evil powers-that-be are enjoying the remains of their money and influence (mostly by enacting violence on slaves and having fabulous orgies) right before their fall. As one character tells us: "To have humanism we must first be convinced of our own humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult." Had this novel been written today, you could pretty much envision V. showing up in our current society as it seems to be reaching the end of a period of decadence.

As V. moves throughout time, she also becomes less human quite literally, by becoming more and more inanimate, slowly replacing parts of her body with glass, stones and prosthetic appendages. V. descends into automation throughout the 20th century along with our society; and Pynchon makes it clear that it IS a decent. He seems to imply that the West's rise into mechanization has proportionally declined our humanity.

You could also read V. as representing religion, and as we fall fuse further into technology, we fall further from God, worshipping objects instead. Or maybe V. is our declining humanity pushing us towards fascism, as there are allusions to V. serving to represent the ideals of Mussolini and Hitler.

It's striking how much is there when you start to look for it in what could otherwise read like 500 pages of seemingly unrelated nonsense. But Pynchon is a master at making it feel like you are peeking behind the ultimate curtain, giving you just the tiniest glance at the real Truth behind it all, and then making you question if you really saw anything at all.

Each Pynchon novel is a treasure and this one is no different. I'm only giving it 4 stars because it was basically a dry run for Gravity's Rainbow, which takes a lot of the themes here and cranks it to 11. Any time I'm in a reading rut, Pynchon never fails to get me out of it.

There is an image that I will always remember from this book. The main gal, V, wears spike heels all the time, and lives in NYC, right? And so there's this scene where she is described as the kind of girl who can walk over sewer grates in these heels, and always lands square on the intersection of the beams in the grate, you know? So she never falls in or fucks up her shoes.