EDIT: I give up again. 'V' is a travesty of juvenile puns, unconvincing dialogue, and (my own pet peeve) characters with impossibly trite names. Seriously, what gives?

EDIT: I decided to try reading it again.


have you ever had the feeling that an author is simply trying to bludgeon you over the head with abstruseness? have you ever read one of those books that all of the "serious readers" swear is an infallible masterpiece, despite its meat-fisted appropriation of the stylistic innovations of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, et al.? If you haven't, then read 'V'.

(seriously, though, 'V' is a great book. i just read it too soon after my Ezra Pound phase, and it sort of rang hollow and derivative. i'm sure i'll love it when i read it again in a few years.)

Sometimes, when what we've sought is almost within our grasp, we make our faith a lie so that we don't have to give up our quest by achieving its goal.

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

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”



Thomas Pynchon's V has long been one of my favorite novels. Describing it, however, is next to impossible (for me at least). There are a host of fascinating characters including including Benny Profane, Rachel Owlglass, Stencil, a group of artists known as the Whole Sick Crew and as well as the mysterious entity known as V who seems to represent one thing and then another and is tied up in endless webs of conspiracy.

Pynchon goes back and forth in time between Profane's yo-yoing on the subways in Manhattan in the present to Stencil's search for clues to V's identity in the late 19th and early 20th century. This isn't the easiest of books to tackle, but it pulls you in and is nothing short of fantastic! If you aren't ready for this one but want to experience Pynchon, you might give The Crying of Lot 49 a try. It's more accessible and much shorter, but definitely another great book! V, however, is my go-to and a book I will return to again and again!

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 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.

It’s a long distance from 1963 to 2009. The prior, V.’s pub date. The later, when I thought maybe I had found perhaps the Pynchon key in Inherent Vice. I unlocked a bunch of great stuff with that key. Fantastic stuff. Stuff I dug. Stuff I got lost in. Against the Day. The newest thing. That one from the early ‘90s. I’m still waiting to see if it fits Mason & Dixon. Gravity’s Rainbow is next, but I’ve already done 2/3 of that one and know I don’t need no damn key for it.

That key doesn’t fit V..

Well, at least it didn’t key it open in the kind of immediate manner a million+ candle Klieg might have brightened it up. In other words, to my only slight disappointment, it’s still the same damn novel it was back when I first tried my hand at it ages and ages ago with the mere assistance of Sam Adams. I don’t think Sam Adams or any of his kin are helpful in the reading of V.. And probably not helpful for reading other Pynchon either. But that might just be my thing about disavowing any pretense about drugs of various sorts making entertainment products better. Drugs are entertaining enough on their own without the supplement of other artistic genres.

But speaking of drugs of various sorts, what one should point out is that the distance between 1963 and 2009 is a length of 46 years. That’s a pretty damn old Scotch. And I’ve never been able to afford one. These later vintage’d Pynchons have treated me very very well. And GR is being sweated with a great deal of anticipation by me. But this V. thing would require a third pass through to get itself cracked (or key’d, depending on our metaphor here) by Yours Truly. And it doesn’t need to be cracked by My Truly. You’ll do just fine with it. I liked lots of stuff it in though. To be sure. There’s a lot of that stuff that pops onto a wave length I’ve tuned myself to and I really like it and there’s other stuff where you know the sentences don’t really follow from themselves so much the way I prefer my sentences to follow themselves. And they really don’t need to. I really liked the way sentences followed themselves in Against the Day.

On thing I really like about Pynchon, and a thing I noticed first when reading his 2006 novel, or maybe it was his 2009 novel, is that when you’re reading along and you get this recollection of something that happened a while ago and you start paging backward to find that thing that happened a while ago and you realize that what happened a while ago happened only three pages back not thirty pages back like you had anticipated because that’s how long back things like that usually happen in other novels you read. I had that experience with V. and really kind of appreciated it.

I guess so the reason maybe why I’m hemming and hawing is that I sort of failed to do that part where the reader picks up his part of the task and sews the whole damn thing into a unity. And I know that with someone like a Pynchon that unity is designed to be frustrated, but dammit! there’s still a unity even within that fracturing. So the episodic stuff of course is de rigour these days and I dig it; making a novel out of a collection of short stories. Which is emphatically not what V. is. So with a bit of a synchronic approach I have no doubt that I’d be able to zip this thing into a proper novelistic unity were I to read it a fourth and fifth time. (I really can’t believe that in this post-structuralist age folks still think novels need to be written and read diachronically!) That’s not the thing. The thing is, the thing that sort of bugged me or kicked me out or left me cold or didn’t work for me was the way the sentences didn’t exactly follow themselves. And thank the gods they didn’t! because in 1961 The Novel needed some shaking up. And I’m glad Pynchon shook it up. And I’m glad he continued to write novels because I think he’s written some of the Best Novels Ever. This is just not quite one of them. Maybe. Still and all, it’s Pynchon so lots of good people will read it. Some will love it. Some will move on with great Begeisterung back to GR and M&D. (That’s me!)

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

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

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

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

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

At one point in V., one of Pynchon's characters is pontificating on his Beat Generation ennui, and decides that the best tact in life is to "Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it; keep cool but care." Much of this novel seems to be about Pynchon's post-college struggle to find a way of living— some middle road between existential despair and the Romantic path of old. Both of the narratives involve groups of people struggling to find meaning against the backdrop of perilous moments in history. This struggle mainly manifests as endless bouts of drinking and fornicating, and ponderous pseudo-intellectual conversations about whether life is worth living.

Whether you like or hate his style, you can't deny Pynchon is a great writer. His descriptions of places, and his embodiments of characters, are the work of a singular, almost preternaturally prodigal genius. But whether by intention or mistake, he has trouble organizing his plots, and often this book seems like a heavily embroidered set of short stories hanging off a pretty thin connective narrative. If you're just out of college and struggling with the big existential questions (what kind of life is worth living? is there Destiny, or is it all chance? does anything really matter?), and you're an above average-reader with some time on your hands, you'll enjoy this book. But if you're into your middle years, you might feel like Pynchon is just trying a little bit too hard.

I didn't want this book to finish. First, because I enjoyed reading it too much. Second, because once I finished it, there would only be one Pynchon's book left for me to read :( (Mason&Dixon)
Review will follow (at some point).
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REVIEW TITLE: The little review that could (because it wanted to be the last review of 2017).
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This being the penultimate Pynchon book I read, I can see all the later Pynchon in it, but filtered by his 26 years of living on this planet. I repeat, 26th. All the themes and techniques that will mature in the later novels are showing their younger faces here. (Interestingly, paranoia is less prevalent in this book. Entropy is key. Also, less funny.)

V. feels like a balloon violently exploding from wayward intelligence and talent that were much better harnessed in Pynchon’s later works. In a way, reading this book, I could somehow see the masterpiece, but I could also see the seams behind it, the stuffing of the creation. But having said that, I can’t say that it affected my enjoyment of it. Maybe because I find exploding genius minds, Videodrome-style, fascinating. And I can’t help but feel amazed at the foresight this 26 year old had in ‘63, about where this century is going.

You have this young writer who decides he’s gonna tell stories but he’s not gonna be confined by the usual way of telling them. Because, you see, he can effectively write like any of his predecessors and literary influences, so he sets out to find new ways to tell stories.

So, he puts stories inside stories, then puts these inside other stories and the point of view changes continuously, like when you are in front of a rotating carousel and it’s crowded,both on it and around it, and the story plays inside the carousel but each viewer sees a different angle of the story at each given moment and the book is the final collection of the stories these people see, plus each viewer’s and merry-go-rounder’s personal story.

The yarn of a story tossed all over by kittens.

As expected, Pynchon won’t serve you his book, you’ll have to claim it. There is so much information in it (and he’s only 26 at this point, I repeat) that each reader can focus where he wants and each exit with a different book at the end of the maze.

For example, I can’t forget the story of the man that fought the desert and the desert won. Or the disassemblement of the woman priest. Or the end. Or cheese danishes.

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

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

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