4.5/5
Brazen and smart. Pynchon's debut is a work of many layers. To be re-read to catch what I am sure I missed the first time.

The books moves rather fast despite Pynchon's heavy prose. The book reads like an examination of post war malaise and fear that many surely felt. Perhaps it mirrors Pynchon's own restlesness.

In Profane, we see that malaise clearly: drunken and clearly directionless. And in Stencil we see the fear in the fact he never wanted to visit Malta because he inherently knew it would end his quest for V.

The fact that V. was written when Pynchon was so young is incredible. I will say this book, along with Inherent Vice, has made me a Pynchon fan, eagerly awaiting to read Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, which have all been purchased in the last few weeks.

V. spoke to me in a way few novels can, with its encyclopedic breadth and sly humor. It is recommended to those who seek a challenge and who have faith in the power of a novel.

Update 8/22/15 - Moving this to 5 stars.

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.

Tomas Pincon, pisac koji je sam po sebi misterija kao i sama V. ko god ona bila ili sta god to ona predstavljala anti junacima ovog anti romana ili vama koji ga citate.
Ali dodjavola Tomase kako si sa 26 ili 27 godina baratao ovolikim, po meni cesto, i nebitnim informacijama. Bio sam na korak do ludila toliko puta dok sam citao V. i taman kada pomislim da su reci samo bujica Pinconovih buncanja on nekako uspe da poentria kroz jednu recenicu ili jedan pasus. I kao da je je celo delo samo jedan fragment njegovih misli dok se u pozadini odvija nekakava opipljivija i bitnija radnja koju se nije setio da prenese na papir. Puno borbe, puno atmosfere, previse istorije, premalo nade i na kraju osecam samo ljubav prema ovoj knjizi ali ne i dovoljno odlucnosti da joj dam pet zvezdica.

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 said the next Pynchon book I'd read was Gravity's Rainbow; then I found a copy of V. Considering V is Pynchon's debut and an introduction to his style I thought it might be good to have it under my belt before attempting to get more than 100 pages into Gravity's Rainbow again. I think I was right to do so. I wasn't sure what to expect going into V but found it to be another interesting piece in the Pynchon puzzle.

The criticism I often see of V is that it's too disjointed and more so a sign of things to come rather than a fully fleshed out concept. I kind of have to agree. This book is segmented into two different stories; the conspiratorial mystery around Stencil and his search for V and the vagabond romp of Benny Profane. V is far from the first book to have two narratives that eventually converge, it's also not the most successful at doing so. I think it does a fine job of telling these two stories simultaneously but there wasn't anything spectacular about how it was done. It felt rough around the edges, something that is a bit of a theme for V.

Personally, I was more drawn to the chapters revolving around Profane and his "Sick Crew". The dialog and shenanigans that they get into with their endless parties is some of what I've enjoyed most from previous Pynchon reads. He knows how to craft a lovable bum character who gets up to all sorts of hijinks.

Unfortunately, the other half of the book is where the real weight and literary prowess is and that didn't always grab me in the same way. I think this is just what an initial read of any Pynchon book will do to the reader. You initially are drawn to the fun and absurd of his writing and in later reads really catch the weight and nuance to what he is writing.

What truly lost me the most was the chapters surrounding Malta and Maijstral, which is unfortunate because that's where the central focus of the book lies. I found these sections to be a slough to read through and limiting in what kept my interest. I think this is for a few reasons. One the sheer length of the main chapter that depicts this part of the story which is about 70 pages alone and my lack of historical knowledge of Malta.

I'm someone who loves history and international conspiratorial espionage, you'd think this book would be the perfect thing for me. Maybe on a reread it will be. The other sections of the Stencil tale caught my attention to varying degrees. I loved the section on modern day Namibia and enjoyed the chapters covering Italy and Egypt although I won't say I caught all he was going for here. I think this was because I had a better understanding of the history of these regions and time periods being discussed. When it comes to Malta I really only have a basic cultural and geographic understanding of the country. I had no idea what Sette Guigno was until I looked it up after finishing the book. I think centering the book around such an obscure country and time period is what offers one of the major barriers to this book, but I'd imagine that is why Pynchon picked it.

While I wasn't fully engrossed in the story I did appreciate this book for what it stands for in the grander literary landscape. With this being Pynchon's first novel it obviously means a lot for his bibliography but it also means a lot for all of the post modern and maximalist literature that came after it. In the 60 years since this book was first published we've had multiple generations try their hand at writing maximalist novels; we're at a point now where the blueprint that was laid out here has been perfected. Many of the rough edges have been sanded down and we are left with the "perfect" plan to structure a novel like this. Reading a newly published maximalist novel in the 2020's can almost feel too formulaic and predictable, falling on genre troupes and cliches (I'm looking at you Adam Levin).

While these newer books may leave you feeling more satisfied after a first read, it is those rough edges and unexpected elements that bring you back to a reread and keep your mind pondering the work.

Of course there were authors that came before V that did a lot for the post modern and maximalist genres, Joyce and Gaddis being the two that come to mind. While I have not actually read works from either author, the work that I have actually read that I drew most comparisons to was John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. Many of the time period, location, and character jumps in the narrative felt very similar to what I read there. I think Dos Passos did a much better job at combining these story elements to convey one theme but I also know Pynchon grows and improves from this point with his following works.

I've now read three Pynchon novels, Inherent Vice, Crying of Lot 49, and V, all of which I've rated 4 stars. Each of these books had their own unique issues and pleasures for me. Currently I'd say Inherent Vice was the most fun, Crying of Lot 49 had the most interesting mystery, and V has been the most impressive from a literary perspective. I've got high hopes for Gravity's Rainbow and will be reading it before the end of this year (its 50th anniversary).

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)

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prMAv...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017

A puzzling but glorious read that is, paradoxically enough, both breath-taking fast and extremely broody, thrilling and self-absorbed. It will require quite a lot of dedication to be fully enjoyed.

That four's more of a 4.5, and I've toyed with the idea of kicking it up to the full five, because here's a book that's really resonated with me. See, I used to live like the Whole Sick Crew. If you've read this book, you know what I mean. If you haven't, imagine this: going from a low-wage job straight to the home of the guy with the weed, staying up until absurd hours partying, reading the beatniks and Palahniuk for the sake of looking like some sort of countercultural badass, and discussing works of art you can never dream of finishing. Anywhere between five and nine of us used to do this five to six nights out of the week, before it all fell apart. And believe me, the collapse was violent and dramatic: I slipped out just before things allegedly got ugly.

I read this book just as I was starting to break with my real-life Whole Sick Crew, and oh was I feeling what Benny Profane felt.

The chapters that follow Benny are populated by lost souls. No one you'd call bad (which is more than I can say for the real-life Sick Crew I ran with - once you've settled down from the wine, you realize you've been staring manipulative folks, paranoids with rage problems, and malignant narcissists in the face for a while), but plenty of irresponsible, petty, shallow, immature sorts. The priceless essay that kicks off Pynchon's later short story collection Slow Learner says that this novel was intended to savage the beatniks, whom Pynchon perceived as immature, and as far as I'm concerned, he hits his targets dead on.

The second strand of V. follows a man named Stencil, seeking a mysterious entity (or, perhaps, mysterious region) known as V. If Pynchon the satirist, the Pynchon behind The Crying of Lot 49 and so forth, was born in Profane's chapters, the Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow - he of the impossible quests, mind-bending conspiracies, and genre crossbreeding - was born here. Readers of the Benny Profane (and his associates, such as the recurring Pig Bodine) should expect biting satire and strong characters; readers of the Stencil chapters should expect a grand, multigenerational, occasionally confusing adventure full of romantics, reenacted historical events, assassinations, political intrigue, and swashbuckling.

Either way, you're guaranteed a terrific read with V. Since it's Pynchon's first novel and features many of Pynchon's favorite tropes, it's not a bad place to start with the guy by any means. It doesn't always read like Pynchon, being more lucid than usual, but that might help people who otherwise find him impenetrable get into him. V. still isn't your average novel, and it wasn't written by your average novelist. For me, that makes it even more of a thrill to read. It helps that I've been there, of course.

Should you find the time, an inverse reading of Against The Day, Gravity’s Rainbow, and this provides a completely new, immersive look into the larger Pynchonian obsession with pinpointing where it all went wrong. The whole human mess, our whole sick crew of population. Read in this fashion, you’ll find different perspectives on key players (Blicero; Mondaugen) that, to me, reveal characters like Benny or Pig or Jessica or Mexico or (insert your name here) as window dressing and framing-devices; they, as literary analogues of the We, are nothing more than the ineffectual raspberry chorus unable to alter the Big Evil shepherding our transition into the anti-Individual, anti-literate, anti-Art, conformist modern era. Well, at least ‘We’ were goddamn funny, hey.

Combined, you’re covering the late 1800’s to, at least, the middle of the century. Considering the omniscience and intentionally-betrayed dispositions of the narrators of the latter two novels—the voice of America, looks like Kilgore—you’re offered a survey of centenary fuckery I’ll take over Proust’s any day.

Who is V.? V. was the spirit of intrigue, mystery, exoticism, and magic that was found, isolated, and liquidated from existence somewhere in the mechanism of the 20th-Century’s war machine-cum-boardroom.

The Earth isn’t flat, but it may as well be with the way we’ve pounded the fuck out of it.

I told a friend of mine recently that I was re-reading V for the first time in almost twenty years and he quipped, "That is one of those books that seems really cool when you're in high school and you 'discover' it, but it's actually not very good." Sadly true. As an admirer of Pynchy's shit over the years, I have often been confounded by the harshness directed at him and the opposing tidal wave of praise for him as a stupid 'postmodern' author. He isn't. His works are densely packed, poetic codes, hilarious, bawdy, and not really like anything else. At least, that's what I used to think. Re-reading this, I discovered that V, his first novel, mind you, is actually kind of terrible. The characters are virtually nothing, it isn't particularly amusing, and the overarching plot, the search for whoever/whatever V might be is very, very unsatisfying. There are a few moments that shine, and Pig Bodine appears here for the first time. No Gravity's Rainbow, however.

Is it still a bildungsroman if the person you're watching develop is the author, rather than a character within the novel they're writing?

This turned out to be my least favourite Pynchon novel to date. In saying that, I never tend to love his work on the first pass - it generally takes time for my feverish, obsessive love for his books to gestate. So let's give it time to see if a resonance starts to build.

Rather than attempt an exhaustive analysis of V in 2200 characters or less (for which I simply do not have the available cognitive capacity), I've excised a quote from one of its closing chapters that I feel encapsulates everything the novel has to say (swipe). That, and the simple sentiment "keep cool, but care".

V is basically TRP workshopping his hobbyhorses that we would later become patently familiar with in his major works. If nothing else, it was fascinating to watch his ideas develop. That, and the alligator hunting with the rat priest sequence.

Hope this one grows on me.

So I made it through the first novel by Thomas Pynchon, also the first I have read of his novels. If you have never read it and you look at the Goodreads summary above, it looks straightforward enough. It is not!

I felt lost for quite a while; lots of characters and two time lines that pay little attention to letting you know what happened when. There are a ton of wikis for V. on the web but I did not use them that much. After all, a new reader in 1963 had no wikis, so I pretended I was one of them. Eventually I fell into whatever groove there was to be had and went along for the ride.

The parts about Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew take place mostly in New York City in 1955. All very beat sensibility and Cold War ennui. Quite an unsavory bunch they are. Even though the European/North Africa parts were way more confusing, I liked those parts better. They had a spy thriller essence to them and several incidents took place in Alexandria, a city I have a fondness for from reading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. It is nice to have somewhere to feel at home when one is reading a chopped up, confusing story.

In the end, I felt it had been worth my time to read such an iconic book by an author revered by so many. I am actually looking forward to reading more Pynchon. His style reminded me of Michael Chabon whom I love. Also I found echoes of certain Beat authors I read in my 1950s lists.

One other thing: I was reading V. concurrently with Norman Mailer's Presidential Papers. Both were published in 1963 and the parallel ideas and sentiments and views about America at that time in both books were startling. I don't know if the two knew each other or ever hung out, but for sure they were reading the same stuff and thinking along the same neural pathways.

I have about 10 books left on my 1963 reading list and I am getting weary of the year, but V. was a breath of fresh air and a harbinger of things to come. The same thing happened when I was reading the 1940s and 1950s lists. About midway through each decade, I began to feel a shift with the older styles falling away the new ideas and concerns popping up.

I created My Big Fat Reading Project with the idea that I could learn about the whole big picture of the years I have lived by reading the important books of each one. I am thrilled over and over as I keep finding this turning out to be true.