After 70 pages or so that bored me silly I decided to give it up. I know the author was young (a mere 26 if I remember correctly) but this does not completely justify the sponge-like absorption of so many and so different influences (from Heller to Joyce and Virginia Woolf and magic realism and so on), that cannot really talk to each other so that the narrative seemed to me like a fabric whose threads were all cut and left hanging.

Maybe, another time (another life) I will try to read a maturity work. But for now, I've had enough.

V. is like some weird, half dreamed dispatch from a mind that is hermetically sealed off from the world. It's a book that seems to revolve more around a specific set of images and motifs, clocks, yo-yo's inanimate objects, Malta, espionage, etc. than around a set of characters, though the characters are often compelling and weirdly poetic in their own ways. It's hard to believe that this book is almost 50 years old. The way it tries to tie together so many odd, all but forgotten historical threads and to make you puzzle over them feels incredibly ahead of its time. Which probably goes to show just how widely influential Pynchon actually is. I feel like you could actually move into this book and drown in it.

Reread for a uni assignment I wrote on Pynchon's depiction of New York in this and Bleeding Edge. Coming to terms with the fact that a book I at one point would have called my favourite of all time is actually pretty middle of the pack for Pynchon, but that's not saying much because I've enjoyed them all and I still love it.

I know that Pynchon isn’t quite at his best here and that he would only get better and better with each work; I’m aware that there are a handful of sections that are imperfect—not to mention a bit dated—and it’s clear he was just getting his footing… but man, I’m 25 years old, and knowing that he wrote this thing when he was younger than me is absolutely insane. The way Pynchon explores humanity (and, reductive as it may be, that is all I can say in the confines of brevity [which, given how busy I am at the moment, will sadly have to suffice]) is just awe-inspiring. I like to think of V. as a series of threads, heaped atop and tightly among one another: tangles and connections are a given, but are they merely a matter of fortune in the form of proximity? or is there a greater design that goes beyond fate and fortune that drives this big ship of fools, i.e, mankind. A struggle for fulfillment, and the need to feel alive—animate—in the sprawling sea of that pesky decky-dance.

4.5/5

One of the worst novels I've ever read: bad prose, stupid idea of "humor", pointless fog and symbolism everywhere. Yeah, vaginas, we get it.

5* không phải vì nó là một kiệt tác gần với sự hoàn hảo như Anh em nhà Karamazov của Dostoevski hay Lolita của Nabokov (xin lỗi bác Cốp vì sự đặt cạnh này ;))- bởi vì V. có những đoạn đọc như tra tấn như Lời xưng tội của Fausto hay như việc Pynchon mềm tay quá mức khi viết về tình yêu (trừ tình yêu của V.) hoặc sư lan man tham lam quá độ ở nhiều chỗ hoặc đơn giản là nhiều chỗ mình không hiểu để đánh giá nó là 1* hay 5*- mà bởi vì ở V. có quá nhiều khoảnh khắc xứng đáng 5*

Khi đọc có lúc liên tưởng tới Conan. Tức là một thanh niên 26 tuổi có kiến thức - mà dựa vào những phần mình hiểu thì cho thấy - sâu sắc về quá nhiều lĩnh vực như chính trị, tôn giáo, nghệ thuật, triết học, khoa học, y tế, tâm lý, nhân sinh quan, địa lý... và nhiều cái nhỏ tí nữa. Đây giống như một tác phẩm cuối đời hơn là đầu đời. Không hiểu loại người nào viết ra cuốn sách này? Phải là người cả ngày ngồi trong phòng nghiên cứu đồng thời là người cả ngày xông pha thực tế khắp quả đất.

Thú thật là có khoảng 20% không hiểu khi đọc V.. Một phần vì khác biệt địa giới văn hóa, một phần vì đơn thuần là chả hiểu sao ông í tự dưng chêm cái đấy vào chỗ đấy. Chắc chắn phải ngồi đọc nhâm nhi lại một số đoạn không hiểu và có thể là đọc thêm bình để hiểu hơn.

Kết thúc thì thấy V. có phần giống Saleem của Salman Rushdie. Chi tiết thì đã nói ở phần kết, tức là như nữ thần Mara. Mà nữ thần thì luôn là hình ảnh thêu dệt từ hiện thực nói chung và khát vọng tương lai. Dạo này không hiểu do tư tưởng mình thay đổi hay thật sự do những tình cờ mà liên tục gặp những hình tượng lưỡng tính trong mọi sự như Abraxas. Mà có khi nó là xu thế, hay bản chất vũ trụ, tức là sự cân bằng bây giờ không thiết lập trên dữ liệu số lớn nữa, mà trong mỗi cá nhân.

Còn cơ bản, chủ đề của V. -theo cảm nhận bao trùm của mình của mình sau khi đọc xong - không phải là tìm kiếm nhân dạng V., cũng không phải phản chiến, mà là một dạng vô tri, đời nhẹ khôn kham như Kundera vậy. Con người, xã hội, đều chỉ hoàn hảo nhất ở trạng thái vũ trụ vốn sinh ra cho nó. Nguyên thủy, hãy tôn vinh nguyên thủy.

Với những bạn nào thấy V. quá khó đọc thì mình xin chia sẻ 1 típ là hãy note toàn bộ tên các nhân vật mà bạn gặp, nhớ các mốc thời gian và cẩn thận đừng để nhầm giữa Stencil bố và con.

Hiu hiu nghe đồn V. chỉ thuộc dạng 3* của Pynchon. Mong được đọc tiếp hiu hiu. Và ngoài ra thì Tao Đàn bị ngợp hay sao mà edit cuốn này sai lỗi chính tả mấy chỗ và nhiều chỗ đọc bản E còn dễ hơn V :-ss

Reading Pynchon is sometimes like being thrown into the deep end of the pool and not knowing how to swim. You either drown in the prose or fight for survival. Pynchon's first novel is dense like much of his work but that should not be off putting. Among the themes are the duality of man and the circle of life. Also the animate and inanimate world. " profane decided no to argue. So all he said was "it's probably a nice place, that Rusty Spoon. But out of my class." "Rot she said, class, Aristocracy is in the soul. You may be the descendant of kings. Who knows." All the while only in the process of learning life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a life time and stay sane."

following the continuous prolapsing of inert imagery I suppose the core of meaning lies here : "both agreed this was nowhere, but some of us do go nowhere and can con ourselves into believing it to be somewhere."

I've read four Pynchon books, and the only one I was healthy for was Lot 49, which barely counts. For Gravity's Rainbow I was not only violently ill, but also on a cross-country road trip with my also violently ill father and my long-suffering mother, who could do little more than look on while we fought over things like whether it was acceptable to order dessert. For Inherent Vice, I was recovering from having my wisdom teeth removed. And now for V, not only did I finish it with Hurricane Sandy knocking limbs from trees outside my windows, but I was at the depths of a comparatively mild cold.

The lesson is that one shouldn't read Pynchon when doped out on legal drugs, because all I remember of GR is an octopus, and I don't recall much from IV, either. On the other hand, I remember nothing from 49 despite having read it twice, and I suspect that's because it just isn't that good. This whole trend worries me some, but the good news is I won't be forgetting V any time soon, because it's a flat out masterpiece and, I suspect, better than GR.

'V,' in ascending order of abstraction, is a person with a robot eye, is a Utopia that large numbers of people think actually exists, probably stands for 'vagina' as in the source to which a large number of people wish to return, is a way of symbolizing reflection, either with reference to the mirror stage or reflection theories of vulgar materialism ('culture is simply the reflection of economics'), and is the convergence of two strands of the plot.

The two strands follow, respectively, Stencil, a paranoid obsessive, whose story should, according to the paranoid perspective, be perfectly coherent but is in fact an endless search for an indefinable x (V). The second follows a picaro (Profane the schlemihl) whose story, as with any good picaresque, should have no coherence whatsoever but is, in fact, a fairly good illustration of the twentieth century decadence ("falling away") that 'V' chronicles, and the despair that decadence can induce.

Various characters have various ways of coping with this decadence: different religions, art, drunkenness/hedonism, dentistry, and so on, but none of them can hold a candle to the disasters that follow everybody, like colonialism, war, unemployment, deracination and general ennui. The human beings slowly giving way: a nose job here, a belly ring there, becoming more and more object and less and less subject, more and more merely what "is the case" and less and less that which cannot be said(there's much play with early Wittgenstein here), more and more cyborg, less and live alive.

The two narrative strands converge in Malta; the guiding metaphor is siege (Malta, which was besieged by the Ottomans, French under Napoleon, and the Axis powers in World War II). The human being is under siege, and neither the paranoid truth seeker nor the schizoid schlemihl can cope. Those who can and do cope (e.g., Schoenmaker) are manifestly dehumanizing evil bastards. But the book's manic energy makes it much less depressing than this sounds, and after all, there's still wine, wo/men and song. Including song about Wittgenstein.

Books of which 'V' weirdly reminded me: Vile Bodies (decadence); Siege of Krishnapur (siege & colonialism); Graham Greene & Javier Marias for the spy thriller aspects; Roth for the 'Jews in America' aspects; Rilke for the ambivalent drive to become pure matter.

Many reviewers say this is a really hard book, but I think maybe they're over-reacting: once you know or work out that there are two narrative strands, one of which is 'present day' and one of which is historical narrative, you can make your way through this book pretty easily. Particularly if you eschew all the 'V moves through time' nonsense. V does not move through time. Stencil's paranoia connects a number of things that need not be connected, just as my paranoia has linked together many aspects of the novel. The difficult aspect of the novel is to read it not as another dull pomo pastiche, but as the late modern masterpiece it is, dealing with difficult psychological concepts and historical realities. You can only read this book with paranoia: the urge to connect and seek order. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

masterpiece

My battered trade paperback copy of V. began disintegrating in my hands even as I began reading it for the second time after more than twenty years—which seemed fitting, somehow. After all, the contents of Thomas Pynchon's first novel, originally published in the very year I was born, haven't all aged well either.

Oh, and don't expect to learn who—or what—or where—V. is, or at least not within the pages of this novel. There are many possible Vs. Pynchon doesn't even mention the titular mystery directly until page 53 (although there are Vs aplenty beforehand, to be sure), and, as late as p.386, we are still being told that "in this search the motive is part of the quarry." In between, Pynchon throws out V's like chaff from a burning biplane spiraling in to a crash landing.

Any landing you can walk away from, I guess...

And yet... V. remains a fascinating, exuberant, dreamlike conflagration of outrageous ideas; feverish hallucinations; terrible verse and worse puns; spycraft and stagecraft; modern myths and urban legends, all jammed together with Pynchon's trademark panache. Only parts of the book are terrible (some appearing much more so over time). Other passages are more lyrical, like say the first time we meet Rachel Owlglass at a Manhattan party thrown by the Whole Sick Crew:

You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements, making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.
—p.52

I did like this quote, too—it is, I suspect, a large part of why I write reviews myself (even motley, grab-bag reviews like this one):

That was the only real compensation, he supposed—God knew it wasn't the pay—a response from the children; buffoon's treasure.
—Girgis, p.86

*

V. is definitely mid-20th Century male-oriented fiction; "girls" outnumber women who have actual names, like Rachel, by a significant margin.

The first part of V. that I had real trouble with, though, was the interminable and gruesome (albeit, I assume, medically-accurate) description of Esther Harvitz's nose job. Why one would even want to trade one beauty for another this way is an exercise best left up to the reader. Even more excruciating, though, was Esther's subsequent reaction to her new face. I will not try to excerpt or quote from this section—but be aware that if you want to know just how a rhinoplasty was accomplished in the mid-1950s, the specific facial bones that need to be sawn through and broken, the tissues excised and discarded, the sutures and bandages required... Chapter 4, pp.101-110, delivers the goods—just before Esther drops her skirt.

*

Now, I was intrigued at seeing Pynchon's mention of prominent union leader Walter Reuther (p.112), whose childhood home in Wheeling, WV, still stands at the end of the quiet lane where my wife grew up.

However... a lot of V. is just... dumb. If you can read a passage like this without snickering, for example, then you're a better person than I:

Mafia his wife was in on the bed playing with Fang the cat. At the moment she was naked and dangling an inflatable brassiere before the frustrated claws of Fang who was Siamese, gray and neurotic. "Bouncy, bouncy," she was saying. "Is the dweat big kitties angwy cause he tant play wif the bwa. EEEE, he so cute and ickle."
Oh, man, thought Winsome, an intellectual. I had to pick an intellectual. They all revert.
—p.123

Or if you can read even this paragraph's beginning (it gets worse later) without cringing:

All her characters fell into this disturbingly predictable racial alignment. The sympathetic—those godlike, inexhaustible sex athletes she used for heroes and heroines (and heroin? he wondered) were all tall, strong, white though often robustly tanned (all over), Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and/or Scandinavian. Comic relief and villainy were invariably the lot of Negroes, Jews and South European immigrants.
—p.126

*

Continue reading V., though, and you'll find more inspired food for thought later on:

"Call it a kind of communion, surviving somehow on a mucked-up planet which God knows none of us like very much. But it is our planet and we live on it anyway."
—Evan Godolphin, p.194

We also find out that social bubbles are nothing new:

People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.
—p.225

*

Then... I ran into the stark brutality of Kurt Mondaugen's experiences in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Chapter 9 uses the "N-word" throughout... but that's the least of it. This chapter's unrelenting cruelty went far beyond mere words, and while Thomas Pynchon expresses no approval of the genocidal European colonists, he also conveys little empathy for their Black victims.

This was the most difficult chapter of all to read, at least for me, and I would not blame you if you wanted to skip it altogether.

*

However great a novelist I believe Pynchon to be, I have found that I can't stand his verse, in general—most of the poetry in V. (et. seq.) is awful, self-indulgent stuff. One exception to the doggerel, though, appears as by Fausto Maijstral:

At the Phoenicia Hotel

I remember
A sad tango on the last night of the old world
A girl who peeped from between the palms
At the Phoenicia Hotel
Maria, alma de mi corazón,
Before the crucible
And the slag heap,
Before the sudden craters
And the cancerous blooming of displaced earth.
Before the carrion birds came sweeping from the sky;
Before that cicada,
These locusts,
This empty street.
—p.317

Fausto observes, shortly thereafter, that

Poetry is not communication with angels or with the "subconscious." It is communication with the guts, genitals and five portals of sense. Nothing more.
—p.318

There are worse words to live by than these, too:

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.
—pp.365-366

*

Wha.

I haven't said much about Benny Profane, who is ostensibly the protagonist (or at least the central schlemiel) in V., and who is given to exclaiming "Wha" when he doesn't understand something (which is often). This omission is, at least partly, because Benny doesn't get many good lines—the most scathing remarks are to him, not by him.

For example:

"Can't you stop feeling sorry for yourself? You've taken your own flabby, clumsy soul and amplified it into a Universal Principle."
—Rachel Owlglass, p.383

*

What movie does this make you think of?

He indeed was visited by dreams in which he had shrunk to submicroscopic size and entered a brain, strolling in through some forehead's pore and into the cul-de-sac of a sweat gland. Struggling out of a jungle of capillaries there he would finally reach bone, down then through the skull, dura mater, arachnoid, pia mater to the fissure-floored sea of cerebrospinal fluid. And there he would float before final assault on the gray hemispheres: the soul.
—p.471

*

A note on the particular edition I read: V. is what comes up for the ISBN on the back of the book, but this edition has the front cover I actually see.

You may also find the Pynchon Wiki about V. to be illuminating, although I will note that I avoided consulting it much for this review, afraid that my own reactions would be unduly colored by its bewitching depth of detail.

*

Very late in V., quite near the end in fact, Pynchon describes the outbreak of armed conflict not as war, but merely as a "suspension of peace" (p.480).

Seems as if Pynchon understands a few things after all... every now and then, V. actually manages to justify its continued existence.

Which is pretty good show, really, for a thing at least as old as I am.

My head is spinning happily like a gyroscope perched between forces at a Lagrangian in space and time. Thomas Pynchon was apparently 92 when he wrote this debut novel and was about 25 when he wrote Inherent Vice 45 years later. The wisdom and scope in V is astounding, and it comes at you like a rollicking , swinging Louis Jourdan record. I had to look up about 183 references, each one worth it, and each one indispensable and placed effortlessly.
This is not an easy book, I had to sit up and turn my brain on, but it is a ride I cannot imagine missing out on. My favorites now are: Vineland, the Crying of Lot 49, V and Inherent Vice. I have more to read and can’t wait for his next one.