Og think nasty writer-man laughing at Og.

ايه دة في ايه

Update: I finished re-reading this, about a week ago. I wanted to let my thoughts percolate before committing to an opinion here. My verdict: Nope, still didn't like it much, but I didn't hate it so much this time. I took it slowly, going back to re-read passages to make sure I had the characters straight. There are a LOT of characters, all with weird names that seem to have significance, but don't. Ha ha. Fun.

Okay, fine, Pynchon fans. I'll give you that it's an interesting plot - the idea of a secret, underground mail service, with its symbol hidden in plain sight for those in "the know". Oedipa Maas, our heroine, while executing the will of an old boyfriend, stumbles onto this underground postal service, but can't quite believe in its existence. She goes in search of the truth, and learns that nothing is for sure. She is cut loose from all her old ties, free from the mental tower of self-imprisonment and disconnect she had been in at the beginning of the book.

I liked the portrayal of southern California in the 60's, and all the little sub-cultures. I liked the creative mish-mash of history and crazy theories and wordplay, up to a point. I didn't like the oddly structured sentences and the obfuscatory word choices. See, you probably didn't like that I used the word obfuscatory. Or maybe you're contrary, and you did. If so, this is the book for you.

I can see this as being a book that grows on you with re-readings. Once you know the characters, and know where the story is going, it's possible that you can appreciate the vignettes, the wordplay, the arcane mysteries of Tristero. I'm not quite there yet.

***
Okay, everyone. Hold onto your hats! I'm voluntarily re-reading this frustrating morass of a book. I'm 38 pages in, and so far it seems more penetrable than the first time. I'm crossing my fingers...

Old review from my previous reading: I read this my senior year of college, and it was so beyond me I could not forgive it. There were so many obscure references crammed into this book, it reminded me of a fruit cake, dense and filled with unpleasant bits that you weren't sure what they were. Maybe if I'd read it for class, with an English professor helping decrypt it for me? But I just felt like an idiot, and totally lost. Weird names, murky motivations, and who the hell knows what was going on?
However, my college roommate loved it, and recommended it to me. He is my dear friend, and we are both big readers, and librarians, but oh boy, our book tastes do not overlap very much!
Maybe I read it too soon, but I can't say I'm all that excited about trying it again.

"Shall I project a world?" -Oedipa Maas

You need to get past the names thing and the fact that it is very hard to care about an underground postal service. This is a book that transcends its socio-historical matrix, at least in the realm of the intellect, even if the humour does not raise a chuckle, the patterns of language consult with the basal ganglia. So, where to begin? Our W.A.S.T.E. of time may recall an image. The image not of a letter purloined, but of an entire postal system that is merely attemptedly purloined for not just the course of the book, for the course of the history of the postal service via the history projected by the book. And since we know that "a letter always arrives at its destination," we have here now the exception which both proves and disproves the law of the excluded middle: either Trystero exists or not, but if he doesn't then he has to. Or it just doesn't matter because you've gotten up off your ass and are committed to missing your next tupperware party in favor of stagger-gaiting your way across golden campuses that are jumping at times that they shouldn't and boozing through lounges where no one is in search of love. And you've never been more alive or full of suffering.

If you don't know what I'm talking about here, I don't blame you. The key reference here is Lacan's Seminar on Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined Letter," and Derrida's deconstruction in "The Purveyor of Truth." Good, challenging reads both.

The relevancy here is that Lacan uses Poe's story, wherein we never find out that which is written as a vehicle for explaining his method of analysis. He calls the letter pure signifier (without signified). Derrida gets ruffled by this and replies with a deconstruction of Lacan's seminar text, where he points out a few important limitations to Lacan's reading, (i.e. that we damn-well can infer most of the meaning of the letter from the story without ever actually reading the letter) which may not completely apply to Lacan's text depending on your interpretation of both Lacan and/or Derrida. Huh? Well, just like Pynchon's names seem completely stupid and loaded with symbolic meaning in a way that is obvious, they also resist that same interpretation with their stupidity. Who wants to search for symbolic meaning in names that are so ham-handed (e.g. Mike Fallopian, Mucho Maas, etc.)? Not this guy. But as those names seem so pre-loaded with meaning, aren't all names already associated with same? Aren't they big set-ups for self-fulfilling prophesies or for refusal to assign meaning to arbitrary signifiers? Pure Signifiers with no signifieds? And don't "we" as selves really feel ourselves to be the precise opposite, Pure Signifieds?

Pynchon's work is rife with such recursive iterations and excluded middles. If language is already pre-loaded with meanings then the novel itself is impossibly alienated from the real of real life. We are always already living life mediated through language. Syntax always precedes semantics.

Pynchon invited us to deconstruct a novel that so reeks of constructedness and in our unraveling we come away with nothing. The process of a reader reading the book parallels Oepida's search. But it is that glory of formalism where the undeterred reader taps his aesthetic draught. And you'd never think there could be so much foam but so much body and depth in clauses that Pynchon lays down freshly, bringing the roiling stuff of life to the surface. A string of signifiers that I'm glad were strung.

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1...

3.9/5 (because the enjoyment I found to be mostly intellectual, though I could relate to the search for patterns, Baader-Meinhof effect jazz daguerreotype)

Dumb. Overrated. And the only plus here? That it's a short novel.

A mystery with no solution. I think the only person that can pull this off is David Lynch. But he's no novelist. This is absurdism and pretentiousness at its utmost. I really did not enjoy trying to "figure out" a, truth be told, lost cause.

Skip. Please vanish from the 1001 Musts list! We do not need a hybrid Don DeLillo, Nathaniel West, David Cronenberg. Truly. Sort of a ridiculous embarrassment.

Reading The Crying of Lot 49 reminded me of the first time I watched Mulholland Drive. There was hair pulling. There was rewinding and pausing and what?!what?!thefuck?!what?! The remote was flung across the room. There may have almost been tears. It was wonderfully frustrating and deliciously delusional. Yes, Mr Lynch, Mr Pynchon , you're so so clever and lil average me is a mere mortal squirming around on your chess tables...

But I don't care. Confuse me. It's better than most of the crap out there. I'd rather be scratching my forehead than slapping it.

Chaos. The 1960's. 'Shrooms. Change. Awakening. Sleep. Dreams. Life. Ahhhh, yeah.

Es un libro cuya lectura no es nada sencilla y que a mi no consiguió generarme interés en ningún momento.
Luego del primer capitulo ya toda la novela se convierte en un desvarío total en la que no dejan de sucederse escenas de lo mas delirantes; pero eso no sería nada malo si de fondo el relato condujera a algún lugar, pero como no lleva a ningún lado, la lectura para mi se fue desinflando completamente.
En el centro hay una trama conspirativa con un misterio por resolver, hay mucho juego de palabras (la mayoría se pierde en la traducción), hay un gran despliegue de erudición por parte del autor y hay algo de detectivesco que no termina de prender en ningún momento y un poco por eso la lectura se me hizo poco estimulante y cada vez mas aburrida.
Ya terminado el libro todavía no alcanzo a entender a donde me quería lleva el autor con la lectura; si solo se trataba del delirio per se, como un juego, no le encuentro el atractivo.
Claramente no era para mi y por eso solo 2 estrellas, lo que no quita que pueda ser ser del agrado de otros, pero tengan en cuenta que es bastante críptico y no se lee fácil.

Genius. And now I need to read it five more times to find even more genius.

..."Un significado de otro orden detrás del evidente o ninguno. O Edipa en el éxtasis circunvalatorio de una paranoia auténtica o un Tristero real. Porque o había un Tristero tras la fachada de la herencia americana o sólo existía América y si existía América nada más, la única forma que por lo visto le quedaba a Edipa para continuar y engancharse a ella como pudiese consistía en recorrer el ciclo foráneo, insurcado, asimilado y completo de alguna paranoia"...

“Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.”

― Pythagoras

There are days when you feel you don't have much to say on anything...muteness prevails...

Hubs and I have a tradition of getting inked to celebrate the major milestones of our marriage. We are tragically overdue for our done-bought-a-house tats, which have less to do with buying our first home and are, instead, tributes to our literary heroes: HST for him, a whole mess of influential wordslingers for me, including the venerable Richard Python because, in a year that has been overflowing with some really great books and has (re)introduced me to some brilliant writers, it's my ever-growing affinity for T. Ruggs that stands out as 2012's most enjoyable development. My intended fleshy nod to Pynchon was lifted directly from this novella (I figured an otherwise unmarked book with a muted-horn bookmark would be an appropriately obscure enough tip of the hat) -- more than reason enough to revisit the book that started it all so many years ago, right?

I loved this when I first read it, though I realize that I didn't fully appreciate its myriad little treasures until now. What dazzled me on the brink of post-college life -- the word play, the deft navigation of a tricky plot, the delightfully symbolic and outright goofy names -- were just superficial (but still mighty rad) delights. Having a better understanding of the wonderful things that happen when Pynchon's at the helm made this nothing short of a densely packed little gift that just keeps on giving.

It's not a Pynchon novel without it also being an engineering lesson, a history class, a science experiment, a physics overview and a crash course in pop culture, all told in ten-dollar words. It had me researching the histories of both the U.S. postal service and philately (which I didn't even know was a word until this book forced me to look it up -- it's the study of stamp collecting), additional resources regarding Maxwell's Demon (though Pynchon laid it out pretty well), WWII tragedies masked as collateral damage, the effectiveness of LSD as therapy (thanks for laying that groundwork, Mister Huxley!) and God knows what else, which all prove my next point: It's also not a Pynchon novel without necessitating the consultation of at least three secondary sources and the whole damn internet. I learn more about a scattershot sampling of specialized subjects reading Pynchon than I do from any other life experience because the man crams three times as much story into his books than the page count suggests. I am just batshit over how even his meatiest tomes are deceptively short compared to the wealth of information they contain.

"The Courier's Tragedy" stood out so much more this time. Masterful imabic pentameter and a story-within-a-story that hasn't been this well executed since Shakespeare set the bar for such things at dizzying and humbling heights? Yeah, this book is proof that Pynchon rushes in where only The Bard dares to tread.

A book that still weighs heavily on my mind. Perhaps, some type of review soon.

Edit: Basically a year to the day that I finished and I don't remember a damn thing about this book (even though it DID weigh heavily on my mind at the time), but hey, I must've been humored, entertained and loved the craziness of this, huh? And yeah, don't you just love those types of reviews that say 'review: coming soon!' just to be left empty for the remainder of time? Yeah, me too.

I will read more of Pynchon this year! Woohoo!