I keep Pynchon reviews short; I can’t add much to what’s already there. It’s my third of his, and I already know all subsequent reads in his catalogue will be varying levels of five star reviews. There is no way to properly summarize or synthesize everything contained in this novel in the amount of time I choose to spend on my reviews here. So I’ll refer to the text.

Among the many images that will stay with me for a long time, the one that comes closest in my opinion to a snapshot or a key to understanding “V” is the story told by a minor character of his having come across a sailor alone on a damaged vessel in the Mediterranean, having lost his entire crew, vigorously applying a new coat of paint to the side of the slowly sinking ship. He refuses to be saved and ignores all pleas to leave the boat, focused solely on the (his final) task at hand.

Absolutely stunning work. Cannot go wrong here.

These days I find the task of reviewing a "difficult" Capital-L lit book rather daunting. In my 20's I might have popped off with some smarmy hyper-referential, multi-clause/multi-syllabic para-block, like some of my amazon reviews from ye olde days; no more. I usually find my time better served in reading thoughtful reviews by thoughtful reviewers here on goodreads, or in focusing my writing time on my own fiction (probably resulting from the specter of old age; not enough time / too many words; but what am I doing, then, browsing aimlessly some afternoons? please, the goad:) --

--all that wankery aside, this 'review' will be exactly that: a review of some of the passages I marked down as exceptional or memorable from Pynchon's V., a book I will never again read in full (too many tedious sections) but certainly deserving a periodic survey across its dozens of brilliant points.

My favorite sections include the descriptions of the priest converting the rats of NYC sewers (assigning them the role of the meek; engaging in a torturous Catholic-guilt ridden affair with one; arguing fruitlessly with a rascally Marxist vermin); and the horrific sections concerning Imperialist malaise in Africa. The callback to "Under the Rose" (from Slow Learner) with altered scenes / POV is sort of cool, if suffering from the original stories' same guidebook-regurgitation.

The quotes below are from the original hardback edition, acquired through interlibrary loan and read in the beginning of 2013. Apologies for any misspellings or transcribing mistakes.

---

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world’s affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence. For them the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains of tourists like a Dance of Death. They stood on the curb, gazing at one another, jostled against by hawkers and sightseers, lost as much perhaps in that bond of youth as in the depths of the eyes each contemplated. (p. 201)




That night, April 15, David Ben-Gurion warned his country in an Independence Day speech that Egypt planned to slaughter Israel. A Mideast Crisis had been growing since winter. April 19, a cease-fire between two countries went into effect. Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monoco the same day. The spring thus wore on, large currents and small eddies alike resulting in headlines. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history’s rags and straws. In the city of New York alone there were at a rough estimate five million different rathouses.

So much for Art. What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
t“Mathematically, boy,” he told himself, “if nobody else original comes along, they’re bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?” What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.
tIt scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure. (p. 297)



O Malta of the Knights of St. John! History’s serpent is one; what matter where on her body we lie. Here in this wretched tunnel we are the Knights and the Giaours; we are L’Isle-Adam and his ermine arm, and his maniple on a field of blue sea and gold sun, we are M. Parisot, lonely in his wind-haunted grave high above the Harbour; battling on the ramparts during the Great Siege—both! My Grandmaster, both: death and life, ermine and old cloth, noble and common, in feast and combat and mouring we are Malta, one, pure and a motley of races at once; no time has passed since we lived in caves, grappled with fish at reedy shores, buried our dead with a song, with red-ochre and pulled up or dolmens, temples and menhirs and standing stones to the glory of some indeterminate god or gods, rose toward the light in andanti of singing, lived our lives through circling centuries of rape, looting, invasion, still one; one in the dark ravines, one in this God-favoured plot of sweet Mediterranean earth, one in whatever temple or sewer or catacomb’s darkness is ours, by fate or historical writings or still by the will of God.

…The dog days have ended, the maijstral has ceased to blow. Soon the other wind called the gregale will bring the gentle rains to solemnize the sowing of our red wheat.
tMyself: what am I if not a wind, my very name a hissing of queer zephyrs through the carob trees? I stand in time between the two winds, my will no more than a puff of air. But air too are the clever, cynical arguments of Dnubietna. His views on marriage—even Maratt’s marriage—blow by my poor flapping ears unnotices.
tFor Elena—tonight! O Elena Xemxi: small as the she-goat, sweet your milk and your love-cry. Dark-eyed as the space between stars over Ghaudex where we have gazed so often in our childish summers. Tonight will I go to your little house Vittoriosa, and before your black eyes break open this small pod of a heart and offer in communion the St.-John’s-bread I have cherished… (p. 310)




For a matter of months, little more than “impressions.” And was it not Valletta? During the raids everything civilian and with a soul was underground. Others were too busy to “observe.” The city was left to itself; except for stragglers like Fausto, who felt nothing more than an unvoiced affinity and were enough like the city not to change the truth of the “imressions’ by the act of receiving them. A city uninhabited is different. Different from what a ‘normal’ observer, struggling in the dark—the occasional dark—would see. It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together, their pathological fear of loneliness extends on past the threshold of sleep; so that when they turn the corner, as we all must, as we all have done and do—some more often than others—to find ourselves on the street… You know the street I mean, child. The street of the 20th Century, at whose far end or turning—we hope—is some sense of home or safety. But no guarantees. A street we are put at the wrong end of, for reasons best known to the agents who put us there. If there are agents. But a street we must walk.
tIt is the acid test. To populate, or not to populate. Ghosts, monsters, criminals, deviates represent melodrama and weakness. The only horror about them is the dreamer’s own horror of isolation. But the desert, or a row of false shop fronts; a slag pile, a forge where the fires are banked, these and the street and the dreamer, only an inconsequential shadow himself in the landscape, partaking of the soullessness of these other masses and shadows; this is 20th century nightmare. (p 323)





“Nothing surprises me,” answered Porcepic. “If history were cyclical, we’d now be in a decadence, would we not, and your projected Revolution only another symptom of it.”
t“A decadence is a falling away,” said Kholsky. “We rise.”
t“A decadence,” Itague put in, “is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.”
t…
t“Your beliefs are non-human,” he said. “You talk of people as if they were point-clusters or curves on a graph.”
t“So they are,” mused Kholsky, dreamy-eyed. “I, Satin, Porcepic may fall by the wayside. No matter. The Socialist Awareness grows, the tide is irrestible and irreversible. It is a bleak world we live in, M. Itague; atoms collide, brain cells fatigue, economies collapse and others rise to succeed them, all in accord with the basic rhythms of History. Perhaps she is a woman; women are a mystery to me. But her ways are at least measurable.”
t“Rhythm,” snorted Itague, “as if you listed to the jitterings and squeaks of a metaphysical bedspring.” (p. 405)



…This is a curious country, populated only by a breed called “tourists.” Its landscape is one of inanimate monuments and buildings; near-inanimate barmen, taxi-drivers, bellhops, guides: there to do any bidding, to various degrees of efficiency, on receipt of the recommended baksheesh, pourboire, mancia, tip. More than this it is two-dimensional, as is the Street, as are the pages and maps of those little red handbooks. As long as the Cook’s, Travellers’ Clubs and banks are open, the Distribution of Time section followed scrupulously, the plumbing at the hotel in order… the tourist may wander anywhere in this coordinate system without fear. War never becomes more serious than a scuffle with a pickpocket, … depression and prosperity are reflected only in the rate of exchange; politics are of course never discussed with the native populations. Tourism this is supranational, like the Catholic Church, and perhaps the most absolute communion we know on earth: for be its members American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids, and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them; their Bible is clearly written and does not admit of private interpretation; they share the same landscapes, suffer the same inconveniences; live by the same pellucid time-scale. They are the Street’s own. (p. 408)



Here were the borders of this city’s Disruptable Quarter; Stincle looked around with much curiosity. It was all the same. What a warped idea of cities one got in this occupation…
…Massive public buildings with characterless facades; networks of streets from which the civilian populace seems mysteriously absent. An aseptic administrative world, surrounded by an outlying vandal-country of twisting lanes, houses of prostitution, taverns; ill-lit except for rendezvous points, which stand out like sequins on an old and misused ball-gown.


Strada Stretta; Strait Street. A passage meant, one felt, to be choked with mobs. Such was nearly the case: early evening had brought to it sailors ashore from HMS Egmont and smaller men-o-war; seamen from Greek, Italian and North African merchantmen; and a supporting case of shoeshine boys, pimps, hawkers of trinkets, confections, dirty pictures. Such were the topological deformities of this street that one seemed to walk through a succession of music-hall stages, each demarcated by the curve or slope, each with a different set and acting company but all for the same low entertainment. Stencil, old soft-show artist, felt quite at home. (p. 468)


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-flooded sea of cerebrospinal fluid. And there he would float before final assault on the gray hemispheres: the soul. (p 471)


They worked their way thus round Marsamuscetto in near-darkness. Reeds whistled in the fens. Behind them the illuminated city seemed tilted toward them, like some display case in a poor souvenir shop. And how quiet was Malta’s night. Approaching or leaving other capitals one always caught the sense of a great pulse or plexus whose energy reached one by induction; broadcasting its presence over whatever arête or sea’s curve might be hiding it. But Vallette seemed serene in her own past, in the Mediterranean womb, in something so insulating that Zeus himself might once have quarantined her and her island for an old sin or an older pestence. So at peace was Valletta that with the least distance she would deteriorate to mere spectacle. She ceased to exist as anything quick or pulsed, and was assumed again into the textual stillness of her own history. (p 474)

Thomas Pynchon has written some of the best pieces of English fiction that I've ever read. He projected worlds in Against the Day and in Mason & Dixon that were amazing, magical, utterly enthralling. The world he tries to project in V., however, went over my head.

The writing feels upolished, unrefined, not really the Pynchon I've grown used to. The sub-plots and digressions, which are rambling to an extreme degree even for Pynchon's standards, are less-than-stellar most of the time. Except for some funny moments -- some sewer crocodile hunting in New York, and a somewhat unusual bus ride towards the end of the book, to mention two of few -- there happens almost nothing here that is noteworthy, nothing, to my mind, that is particularly memorable. There are glimpses here and there of what Pynchon is capable of, but for the most part, this book is simply not any fun.

The themes so present in, say, Against the Day are here too to some degree, but as with the writing, the themes' presentation feels unrefined. You know, the duality thing, change (universal and political), the nature of knowledge and, well, everything, the opposites: like it says on the back of the book, one man "looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose." There are Wittgenstein references and hints of something philosophical under the surface, but it's impossible to garner the strength (or will, if you will) to really care about all that and to dive deeper into it when the book is generally so boring. A massive disappointment.

Thomas Pynchon... twenty six years old... first novel... twenty six... first novel... twenty six?

Reads like The Adventures of Tintin on hallucinogens. Full of great comic scenes mixed with political espionage and paranoia amidst philosophical comments on the nature of politics, religion, death, time, sexuality and war. V. is undeniably complex and I can admit that there were moments of mind numbing confusion, but the book is so beautifully written that you just go for the ride. It's a haunting and frequently hilarious postmodern satire.

V., to me, represents enlightenment, or finality. The quest itself is a long journey, hence the time and globe spanning nature of the story. The book itself is like a series of interconnecting short stories that sweeps through the majestic settings of New York, Paris, Malta, Egypt, Africa and Alexandria. The nature of V seems nurturing, motherly and caring in times of stress and suffering. Pynchon is operating on a metaphysical plain, where particles and matter can be seen and felt and the world is different from our own 20/20 vision. V is eventually seen, felt and experienced for those who are willing to take the necessary steps. Too many times are we fed little slices of fear from the characters who contemplate the nature of dying, growing old, separation from mans ignorance. These men in search of V are, in some way, in search of an ego death, to cure their fears in the face of God, a maternal presence of spirit, a being of upmost enlightenment.

Obviously, there is so much more packed into this near 500 page novel, but that's what I got out of it first time around. Political theory is examined extensively through different countries and characters. Sexuality and youth seems prevalent within The Whole Sick Crew. There are some comments on the Christian Church and Christianity in general. Freudian psychology, science and mathematics pop up and colonialism is touched on as well.

Or you could be a schlemihl and take Benny Profane's approach: "I haven't learned a godammn thing."

I know of machines that are more complex than people. If this is apostasy, hekk ikun. To have Humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. (302)

V. is a paranoia-steeped tale of swirling conspiracy and political intrigue, where lowbrow characters with highbrow philosophy do silly and obscene and profound things, where the language sings and the reader is often frustrated but well-rewarded for perseverance.

In so many ways this is a denser Lot 49, a weightier Inherent Vice, a quicker AtD and a more forgiving Gravity's Rainbow... My lord, Pynchon did it all from the start.

5 stars.

*First read-through, 2017:

I haven't often been as excited to start a new book as I was to start V. Daddy's first Pynchon! I was eager and abuzz for a while--the man has been adjective-ized, for crying out loud. Consider the greats that have that honor. Dickensian. Kafkaesque. Vonnegut-y. What in the world does it mean to be Pynchonian? I couldn't wait to find out. And reading Pynchon's first novel felt like a good place to start.

Based on V., I'd say reading Pynchon feels dense and dream-like. There's a lot of surreal weirdness, and an overarching ambiguity that you must embrace to move forward. Things aren't plot-driven so much as mood-driven; characters and scenes wash over you, wave-like. Here is a world of shark-toothed sailors, bohemian subway performers, girls in need of nose jobs, captivating clocks, international espionage, sewer alligators and oracular skeletons... Sentence by sentence, Pynchon's writing is dazzling. I started dog-earing examples I might point to and quickly found myself marking every other page, feeling for all the world like an entomologist describing the diverse jeweled shells of some species of beetle:

"Snow fell in tiny glittering pinpoints, the alley held its own curious snowlight: turning Pig to black-and-white clown's motley and ancient brick walls, dusted with snow, to neutral gray." (15)

"He walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright, gigantic supermarket, his only function to want." (31)

"Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?" (35)

"It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion." (149)

"Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it." (158)

"For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence." (216)


Taken one after another, these elegant sentences have a soporific effect, so that by the bottom of a page it may be hard to hold onto what you read at the top. Certainly this is not a novel to rush through, and one that can frustrate with its jangling, jazz-like composition. But if you trust Pynchon to set the pace and follow along, enjoying what's laid out immediately before you, this is a remarkable novel, deep and thoughtful in a way unlike most I've read before. And as it continues on, an impressive sort of craftwork is revealed in the structure that amplifies the meaning.

4.5 stars out of 5. Truly a massive talent, but there is a streak of juvenalia here and some wholesale repeating of phrases which highlights the fact that this is Pynchon's first novel. It's a bit rough or strained in a few spots, plus there's a strange and repetitive tendency to include song lyrics. Still, what a debut! I thought of it more as an artistically-crafted piece of entertainment than an entertaining art piece (if you catch my hair-splitting drift) but then--smack!--there comes into this rollicking montage of characters and patchwork of conversations some profound insight into art, society, humankind. I am eager to read more of his oeuvre, to see what's come after he refined a bit more.

(Read in 2017, the twenty-second book of my Alphabetical Reading Challenge)

https://pepperlines.blogspot.gr/2017/...

One of our greatest wielding his 25-year young erection for all to see. A mind too big to contain itself;

A reread; my last may have been as long ago as 1995. I noticed a lot of new stuff this time around, maybe because I'm a more focused reader, but more likely because I have more experience with Pynchon's idiosyncrasies as a writer. It certainly also helps that Wikipedia was invented between then and now, to say nothing of the rest of the internet.

One thing I've learned is that, if, in passing, Pynchon mentions some historical geopolitical event, it's rarely just some finial or curlicue to add interest — there's a good chance that it's load-bearing structure. For example, one of the characters in the Florence chapter briefly talks about being present for some ugliness in Khartoum around 1884 or 1885, by way of explaining why he wanted to get away and go on an expedition to a completely different place afterwards. This reference appears to be incidental, but if one takes the trouble to look it up, they will learn that that ugliness was the eleven-month Siege of Khartoum, which was followed by the Battle of Omdurman in which British forces killed some 12,000 Mahdists while only losing 47 men from their own side. Combine this with the Egypt chapter's Fashoda Incident setting and the horrific flashbacks to von Trotha's response to the Herero uprising of 1904 and you start to make out a broader and very disturbing picture. By the end I realized that I had the answer to my question, "Why 1956?": the Suez Crisis, which closed the book on Great Britain's power in Egypt and which Wikipedia helpfully describes as signifying "the end of Great Britain's role as one of the world's major powers." Aha.

Another thing I noticed is the repeated use of the word decadence in the portions of the book that take place in '56. It would be a natural assumption to think that this is meant in the sense of simple hedonism, since there is certainly plenty of that in V. (not to mention the whole extra-textual beat generation thing that would have been fresh in the mind of 1963 readers), but in fact the word is meant in the much more negative sense of cultural decline. At one point Pynchon just comes right out and says it: "'A decadence,' Itague put in, "'is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.'" So, if we take the character "V." as a symptom or symbol of some enormous historical development (and the book repeatedly drops hints that we should) and mix in all the various references, you could argue that the point of the novel is that something pretty uncool has been happening in our world since the middle nineteenth century.

In typical fashion, there are also certain things relating to the theme that loom so enormous that Pynchon simply omits them for being too obvious. The Holocaust is mentioned just once in passing, despite it taking place only eleven years before book-time and despite the main character being half-Jewish and his romantic partner being fully Jewish, but a great invisible authorial finger is pointing directly at it. In another rare explicit passage, the spy Sidney Stencil is bemused by the twentieth-century bafflement over where the barbarity of World War I came from, since the nineteenth century seemed so darn civilized. Pynchon very harshly disabuses us of this innocent foolishness by describing the German genocide of the Herero people — Auschwitz prelude.

This time around I also paid more attention to all the stuff about Malta — in my earlier readings I think I was experiencing Pynchonian detail fatigue by the time I got to those parts — and so I was better able to see how it fit into the larger story. It's more British colonialism, of course, and fascinating in a ghoulish way because its strategic importance to Britain in World War II led to twenty-nine months (months) of heavy bombing by the Axis.

Another thing I noticed was that I was a little more conscious of little flaws in the book on rereading it again. In the past I felt that the prose was not quite as quicksilver-agile as that in his later work, but in addition to that I now sometimes felt that the story had been stitched together from different pieces that didn't always fit. I certainly could have used a lot less of the Whole Sick Crew material, since it's simply not as interesting as the the more intense historical stuff. The book also suffers from characters whose psychology and motivations are implausibly abstract; put two of them together and their conversations can be frustratingly cryptic. "Mondaugen's Story" is the worst offender in this respect, on top of also being psychologically traumatic.

Still, though, there are many wonderfully engrossing bits, and lots of jaw-dropping prose, and where else are you gonna read about alligator hunts and nose jobs and and iridescent monkeys?

I'm suffering from a painfully drawn out flu so I feel bad enough already. It can't be made worse by trying to review V. on gr. (If I wanna hit my head in frustration, well, it already hurts plentiful.)
V. was my first Thomas Pynchon. I chose it because it was cheapest (used). I like discounts. The notes in the margins for a college paper were fun too. I'm proud of my mercenary side. Now the self-congratulations end and I'll wrestle my mind and alligators in those mental gutters to convey why this is one of my favorite books. Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew. (Love those guys.) Getting through life without sketching circles in the sand. Yeah, going through life not quoting the philosopher Belinda Carlisle (it's too late for me). (Slacker characters appeal to me. I have an inferiority complex. It's torture to read fantasy novel after fantasy novel about over-achievers.) He Ventures out and has another friend, Herbert Stencil (stencilling in the sand? Shutup, Mariel) who sets him on his quest for the mysterious Victoria. I'm not gonna win this battle. There's no Victoria for me. It's gonna eat me alive. (Shit, maybe I need to consult that kid's notes.) (Because I never shutup: we'll get a "V" on our paper. V for venarial diseased.)
My pet alligator wants me to write that this book is about alligators who live in the sewers of New York City. (Her name is Gatorella. I can tell she is a she because of the bow on top of her head. Gators are reptiles and therefore don't have penises. Not that I checked.) (Could've been mutated into pizza loving ninjas in those sewers where people dump all manners of things like radioactive chemicals, in addition to taking a dump, after all. Anything is possible.) Shutup, you cold-blooded monster. It is not! There are alligators in the book though, those mythic gators flushed down the sewers when their humans (rightfully!) grew tired of them. I remember vividly reading Benny's time in those sewers, hunting and feeling hunted, not just by toilet reptiles but by nagging thoughts of right and wrong. (Gatorella says she wants to flush my review down the toilet.)
Argh. Yeah, it's dense and rambling and worth it for the spending of the time. Benny Profane, Stencil and the poet Fausto. V. connects to them as a circle: round and round unprogressively. And a line, like a connecting thread between them, because Pynchon does get somewhere about history and how it fucks with us. History doesn't make sense, and only rarely do we get to see the little man (or angel) it made in the snow. It takes its toll. Any place, any time.
It's easier to review books one doesn't like. Like breaking up with someone and you can name some reason to explain everything away (if it doesn't cut it. It just is what it is, is all) and explaining love is really hard to do if you're me. I like to ramble. I like reading the ramblings and looking for the happy and sad moments of clarity in the engaging messes. I know I felt something. That's love for me. Now I'll get eaten because Benny didn't kill all those gators.
p.s. I like the Sarah Silverman joke about getting raped by a doctor being bittersweet for a Jewish girl. Reminded me of Rachel.

After I finished this book, I think my being frustrated at not "getting" V. translated into my not loving the book, initially. But then I realized that (a) I'm completely missing the point of Pynchon's novels if I reading them to "get" them, and that (b) you don't read Pynchon's novels to get them, you read them because for the experience they give, because you want something different, because you want to work hard and be gratified at the end.

One of the best things about V. is that it shows how masterly Pynchon's juggling of tones is. On the one hand you've that goofy slapstick tone that he uses with Profane and Stencil, and then you've got this very serious tone he uses with the historical sections of the book. The historical vignettes are probably the best parts of the book, balancing the setting and themes and tone, shifting periods back and forth from Profane to Mondaugen, from young Stencil to old Stencil, etc. Not to mention the way he describes one of the character's getting a nose job, that one . . . phew, that was quite something.

Pynchon does something really beautiful here: you're reading a dense passage and not understanding as much as you'd want to, and just when you think he's just playing with you--the reader--just then will he turn around everything you have read and felt so far, all within a single sentence. You, in a way, feel in a way disorientated; disorientated now not by the dense prose or language, but by the change in setting and tone of the piece. But he doesn't twist things or shatter expectations by being cold on the characters or on the reader, neither does he do it in a Haha-I-got-you-you're-stupid kind of way. (This whole change of emotion reminds me a bit of McCarthy's Suttree.)

There's a difference between V. and his next novel, The Crying of Lot 49 in that you're not detached from the characters of V. as you are from the characters of Lot 49. Lot 49's all Oedipa and the book is three times shorter. V. has both the multiple characters and the heft of later Pynchon. They're just different books, V. is more like Gravity's Rainbow, where as Lot 49's more like a detective novel.

But there is something deeper in V., something deeper than the absurdity, the weird character names, the goofy humor, the equations, the mathematics, the historical references; beyond the pyrotechnics and beyond the ostensibly "cold and pretentious" things Pynchon's known for: there is a heart and a soul inherent in his writing; but you'll have to look for it, because V. by no means is a casual read. And this book captures what I found "lighter" Pynchon novels like The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice couldn't capture, i.e. the human aspect of Pynchon's novels. Maybe it's a result of V.'s difficulty and length, if so then it's a testament to the fact that books like these gratify a reader who's patient.

As for the things I didn't like so much about this book: I think Pynchon is a master of prose and V. is good proof of that, but I must add that there are a few instances in this book where the sentences just aren't great and sometimes they're just not clear: some long sentences could've been done better, some of them are a little muddy--but that's just like 5% of the sentences. The book also on the whole can seem a little uneven, too, maybe it's the structure, maybe it's some of those sentences, I don't know. Some parts--the historical ones--are just clearly better than the other ones.

And oh did I mention that the historical vignettes are easily the best parts of the book?

I definitely will read this book again soon; I can only imagine how wonderful and rewarding the second reading will be. I'm now through with the early works of Pynchon and am now going to move to his later books, like Bleeding Edge and Vineland.

So I opted to tango once more with Thomas. The results are a mix of the same frustrations I had with the first 150 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow (dropped thereafter), and a newfound appreciation for the most famous maximilist’s skill for writing sentences of incredible inventiveness, rhythm, and frenetic lunacy. After 300-odd pages of this novel, the niggles (new and old) returned—the introduction of innumerable madcap characters and their endless zing-flinging dialogue in the same voice; the overabundance of plots and their incoherent-seeming natures; the constant battle to nail a lucid understanding of every third or fifth sentence; the repeated use of ‘whaa’ in the mouth of too many characters; the painstaking detail and brilliance of contextless scenes that could not be appreciated without sufficient foregrounding or a roadmap; the guilt at feeling ennui when so much is happening on the page that screams ‘appreciate this’!; the screwball humour that lapses into searing pain through excess—and reading to the end turned to work. On the plus side, for the first 300-odd pages, I was zipping along on Thomas’s often divine prose style, allowing myself to be taken into weird and wonderful places, regardless of their driftless-seeming drift, and for a few days, I at last had a window into what ecstasy the Thomas fanboys experience when reading their man. It went many, many places, and somehow also nowhere, and for a little while, I ‘liked’ Thomas Pynchon. Triumph!

4.5/5

Knowledge is a funny business. Everyone pretends omniscience in the classroom, but god forbid you spout off like an intellectual outside of it. And then you have the subculture of people making an effort to read Pynchon in public, and the other subcultures that amuse themselves at their expense. The verdict seems to be know it all, but please, spare us from your efforts to prove it.

I'd sell my soul to write like this at the age of six and twenty. There, I admitted to lack of know-how when it comes to the realm of Pynchon. Of course, the reference to souls might not be worth much coming from someone with no memory of being religious in any sense, but I'd like to think the Catholic upbringing accredits the statement somewhat. My horse may be hitched to atheism, but I can still appreciate good theological diatribes with healthy roots in philosophy and literature.

Which is what I'm getting at here. Roots. Easily graspable statements with esoteric legs to stand on. A sense of context that spans the contemporary as easily as the ancient, and ties the two together in the delightfully tangible sense. Ivory computers, porcelain circuitry, old materials caking the eternal Street from 1955's Norfolk to 1919's Malta and beyond. To say the word 'automaton' and have the images of golems and cyborgs seamlessly interweave on the succeeding pages.

This isn't your banal tactic of cultural references and knowledge dropping at every turn. I suppose I should give credit to Neal Stephenson for setting up an apparatus of tin foil and pipe cleaner, to better display Pynchon's idol of ebony and titanium. The desire to imitate that deceptive depth of story is understandable. Not everyone can write in the style of the yo-yo, apex to apex, apocheir to apocheir, without the bottom ponderously dropping out or the string severing at the zenith or the snagging speed making the ride sickening to the stomach.

And again, six and twenty! 1963! In the US! Did you know that this book passes the Bechdel Test? I wouldn't have believed it either, least not without reading it for myself. Or believed without experiencing for myself how conscious the story is of life and its seeming coincidences, long lines of 'plot' drifting back and forth from immediate relevance to useless trivia. It never forsakes the surface details for the underlying meaning, and vice versa, and there's even spots of real humor and true beauty to be found. It's a rare talent that belies Pynchon's youth, to describe the passions that drive the intricate clockwork of the small days, and contextualize them in the themes that have, do, and will span for millenia. And to switch from one to the other without any noticeable jerks or shuddering! It makes one question the validity of the categories of knowledge that we function in, conventional discourse that so many gain use of by sacrificing the essence of their critical thinking. Puzzle pieces guaranteeing a pretty picture, inherently forsaking its right to a blank canvas.

n  "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words--"events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic"--pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty, round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.n

So, knowledge? Pynchon has it, and shows it in endless waves of connective tissues. I don't claim to understand all of it. But I have to thank him for my new-found way of thinking about this reading business of mine, my yo-yoing along the V shaped tracks of books like his, picking up bits and pieces with every passing over the same old stomping grounds. There's a surface of tin cans and plastic rubbish in those lands, and a wind whistling of ages past that sounds all the clearer the longer you walk. You can walk forward, and you can walk back, but to tread the same way twice is an impossibility, for better or for worse.