Having read this twice previously (20 and 10 years ago, thereabouts) I was fully expecting, after the multitudinous cosmopolita of V, a funny and mysterious romp, a bit of a breather before taking on Gravity's Rainbow. Nothing of the kind. This is a very special, endlessly intriguing novel, the page count of which is irrelevant re: its impact. That said, you might have to read it at just the right time -- I think much of this flew right over my head first and second time around. Truly superb. Savagely witty and strange and poised right on the edge of deeply disturbing.



'As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself; but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away. There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. When it turned out to be Pierce she'd happily pulled out the pins and curlers and down it tumbled in its whispering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass. But dauntless, perhaps using one of his many credit cards for a shim, he'd slipped the lock on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, had true guile come more naturally to him, he'd have done to begin with. But all that had then gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower. In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedies Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?'

This was nasty. A horrible predictable car crash – no! Don’t drive when you’re angry! Aieeeee! Whump! Glass splinters!

Some authors you kind of think

a) you really should read at least something by them, they being so terrifically important and all, which people do not let up about; and

b) but you just have that bad feeling about them like when you catch the eye of some drunk in a bar (uh oh, let’s get out of here!) - I thought I am so not going to like this guy with his patent acidhead paranoid style and his 900 page novels that it’s just possible some readers do not actually finish what? I never said that. But I found that he’d written one that was less than 900 pages long.

The thing is that this guy’s thing is that he’s got everyone convinced he is using silliness (comedy character names, ludicrously complicated comedy plots which avoid resolutions like the bubonic plague, frantic references to the detritus of the everyday (car lots, plastic filters), conspiracies heavy in the air like Paco Rabane at an FBI convention, and plenty of LSD in the water) as a mask: because actually he is Deadly Serious.

There is a bright vibrant collection of writers who also use this headachy palette of loud screechy colours - Nathaniel West, Philip Dick, Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, (it does seem to be a boys club) – and yes – it does seem that all these guys do this paranoid we’re all living in a Matrix thing better than Thomas Pynchon, if The Crying of Lot 49 is anything to go by.

I didn’t like this novel, it was mostly nails on a blackboard - (but I will say that Mr Pynchon can really sculpt a lovely surprising sentence, I would quote one or two but they are like a page long insert eyeroll emoji) - all the nonsense about private postal companies at war with each other since the 19th century, give me a break. And the Beatle parodies haven’t aged well. And the casual misogyny, well, that goes without saying. Sorry I even mentioned it.* This must be a Bad Pynchon, surely his other stuff must be better. One would hope.


* But for an exploration of that succulent topic, see Ioana’s review here

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

This story reminded me of works such as Robert Shea's and Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus Trilogy" released in 1975 and Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" released in 1988. This is a book written by an American writer (little is known about Pynchon's identity) , released in 1966, telling the weird story of a young married woman, Oedipa (or Oed) Maas, who, quite unexpectedly, becomes the executor of the late Pierce Inverarity's will .

Her seemingly tranquil and conventional life turns upside down as she has to solve a mysterious and extremely complicated case. The author manages to fit into his work a cryptic miniature of this world, building a modern maze of faces, events and situations that seem to have the coherence of an electronic circuit board, the duality of a computer, and the transcendence of a secular religious phenomenon.

Αυτό το βιβλίο δεν είχα πρόθεση να το διαβάσω. Το διάβαζε ωστόσο ένας καλός μου φίλος, ο Γιώργος, και μόνο από περιέργεια, είπα να ρίξω μια ματιά στο κείμενο, και μάλιστα στο αγγλικό πρωτότυπο. Δεν χρειάστηκε κάτι περισσότερο. Δεν ξέρω τί είδους μαγείας ήταν αυτή, αλλά ό,τι κι αν είναι, με καθήλωσε και μου ήταν αδύνατον να το αφήσω από τα χέρια μου, μέχρι να φτάσω ως την τελευταία σελίδα. Στο μεταξύ σχολιάζαμε διάφορα επί του περιεχομένου με τον Γιώργο, ο οποίος μου έδωσε δυο εξαιρετικά χρήσιμα links με επεξηγηματικά και ερμηνευτικά σχόλια:

Από pynchonwiki
Από sparknotes

Η ιστορία αυτή μου θύμισε έργα όπως η «Τριλογία των Illuminatus» των Robert Shea και Robert Anton Wilson που ξεκίνησε να εκδίδεται στα 1975, το «Εκκρεμές του Φουκώ» του Umberto Eco που κυκλοφόρησε στα 1988. Πρόκειται για ένα έργο γραμμένο από έναν Αμερικανό συγγραφέα που ακόμα και σήμερα ξέρουμε ελάχιστα για την ταυτότητά του, που εκδόθηκε στα 1966, και διηγείται την αλλόκοτη ιστορία μιας νεαρής παντρεμένης γυναίκας, της Oedipa (ή Oed) Maas η οποία, εντελώς αναπάντεχα βρίσκεται να έχει οριστεί ως η εκτελέστρια της διαθήκης ενός μεγιστάνα ονόματι Pierce Inverarity. Η φαινομενικά ήρεμη και συμβατική ζωή της αναστατώνεται, καθώς στην πορεία καλείται να εξιχνιάσει μια μυστηριώδη και εξαιρετικά περίπλοκη υπόθεση.

Ο συγγραφέας καταφέρει να χωρέσει στο έργο του μια κρυπτική μικρογραφία αυτού του κόσμου, χτίζοντας έναν σύγχρονο λαβύρινθο από πρόσωπα, γεγονότα και καταστάσεις, που φαίνεται να έχει τη συνοχή μιας πλακέτας ηλεκτρονικού κυκλώματος, τη δυαδικότητα ενός ηλεκτρονικού υπολογιστή και την υπερβατικότητα ενός εκκοσμικευμένου θρησκευτικού φαινομένου. Και όλα αυτά είναι δοσμένα με άφθονες δόσεις χιούμορ πετυχαίνοντας μια εξαιρετική ισορροπία ανάμεσα στη δράση και στον στοχασμό.

«Μετά την έκδοση του V (σσ το πρώτο βιβλίο του συγγραφέα) στα 1963, ο Pynchon αναδείχθηκε σχεδόν αμέσως ως ένας από τους σημαντικότερους μεταπολεμικούς συγγραφείς που εξέφρασε τις φαντασιώσεις και τους φόβους μιας γενιάς η οποία μόλις έβγαινε από την εποχή του Μακαρθισμού, και σύντομα έμελλε να ζήσει έναν μακρύ εφιάλτη που περιείχε προεδρικές δολοφονίες, κοινωνική βία και τον πόλεμο στο Βιετνάμ [….]

Πρέπει να μπορούμε να διηγηθούμε, αυτό ακριβώς τονίζει το συγκεκριμένο μυθιστόρημα. Νιώθουμε την ανάγκη να δημιουργούμε και να προσλαμβάνουμε συγκεκριμένες δομές μέσα σε όλα όσα διαβάζουμε ή κάνουμε. Έχουμε την ανάγκη να βρίσκουμε τις διασυνδέσεις ανάμεσα στα περιστατικά της προσωπικής μας ζωής και τα μεγαλύτερα εξωτερικά γεγονότα που αποκαλούμε ως Ιστορία.

Ωστόσο μέσα σε αυτό το δίλημμα που ενυπάρχει σε όλα τα έργα του Pynchon, αλλά πρωτίστως στο συγκεκριμένο, αυτή η ανάγκη να καταλάβουμε και να αντιληφθούμε τα μοτίβα που διέπουν ένα κείμενο, τη ζωή και την ιστορία, μπορεί εύκολα να οδηγήσει στο δίπολο μιας παράνοιας εξαιτίας την οποίας από την μια υπάρχει ο φόβος του παραλόγου και από την άλλη η επιθυμία μας να βλέπουμε παντού διασυνδέσεις, συσχετισμούς και συνοχή».

(Βλέπε: Patrick O'Donnell, Emory Elliot, New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, εκδ. Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Θεωρώ πως πρόκειται για ένα βατό κείμενο, πιστεύω πως άνετα μπορεί να διαβαστεί και από το πρωτότυπο, έχω ακούσει πως γενικά ο Pynchon θεωρείται δύσκολος συγγραφέας, μην έχοντας διαβάσει άλλο έργο του πιστεύω πως το συγκεκριμένο είναι κάτι περισσότερο από προσπελάσιμο. Είναι απολαυστικό και περιπετειώδες, ορισμένως αινιγματικό και εξαιρετικά παιγνιώδες, κάποτε ιδιαίτερα τρυφερό, γεμάτο ανθρωπιά και ευαισθησία, κάποτε σκοτεινό, γεμάτο από μυστήριο και βαθιά υπαρξιακή αγωνία. Το προτείνω σε όλους ανεπιφύλακτα.

Αισθάνομαι την ανάγκη να εκφράσω κάπως πιο αναλυτικά ορισμένες σκέψεις μου επάνω στα όσα διάβασα, αλλά δεν γίνεται να πω όσα θέλω χωρίς να προδώσω την υπόθεση. Οπότε όσα έχω να πω θα τα κρύψω.

Από εδώ και πέρα αρχίζουν τα spoiler:

Όσο διάβαζα για τη ζωή της Oedipa, στην επινοημένη πόλη του Kinneret, με τον νευρωτικό και ανασφαλή σύζυγό της και την τακτοποιημένη μικροαστική ζωή της, στην αρχή, πριν ξεκινήσει ο καταιγισμός των εξελίξεων, είχα συνέχεια στο μυαλό το έργο ενός άλλου σπουδαίου Αμερικανού συγγραφέα το «Babbitt» του Sinclair Lewis, που εκδόθηκε στα 1922 και αναφέρεται στη ζωή των ανθρώπων μιας εξίσου επινοημένης πόλης, του Zenith.

Αυτό που με εντυπωσίασε είναι η εξέλιξη της αμερικανικής κοινωνίας αλλά συνάμα και η στασιμότητά της. Και στα δύο έργα απεικονίζεται ο ίδιος ρατσισμός και η περιθωριοποίηση των αδύναμων. Και στα δύο έργα αυτοί που κινούν τα νήματα και κατευθύνουν την κοινή γνώμη είναι οι οικονομικά ισχυροί. Νέοι εγκλωβισμένοι σε μια επιφανειακή ευμάρεια, ενήλικες με κλονισμένο νευρικό σύστημα, δέσμιοι όλοι ενός ματεριαλισμού, ενός συλλογικού φαντασιακού που αποτυπώνεται στις κινηματογραφικές αίθουσες κι αργότερα στις τηλεοπτικές οθόνες, μια κοινωνία νέα απαστράπτουσα, μοντέρνα η οποία ωστόσο φαίνεται δομημένη επάνω σε έδαφος ασταθές, που εμφανίζει ρωγμές και που όσο περνάνε τα χρόνια, αυτές μεγαλώνουν και δεν μπορούν πλέον να καλυφθούν πίσω από μια φαινομενικά αψεγάδιαστη πρόσοψη.

Κατά την άποψή μου η Oedipa είναι μια θηλυκή εκδοχή του Οιδίποδα. Καλείται και αυτή να λύσει ένα αίνιγμα. Και πάνω από όλα είναι υποχρεωμένη να ερμηνεύσει όλα εκείνα τα στοιχεία που παρατίθενται μέσα στο έργο, όπως ο Οιδίπους καλείται να ερμηνεύει έναν χρησμό. Επίσης μου έδωσε την εντύπωση μιας μητρικής φιγούρας. Είναι μητέρα για όλους τους άνδρες που συναντάει και σε πολλές περιπτώσεις, άλλοτε περισσότερο και άλλοτε λιγότερο υποβόσκει το ερωτικό εκείνο στοιχείο που συναντά κανείς στη φροϋδική ψυχολογία.

Το Τρίστερο ή Τρύστρερο ως μυστική οργάνωση θεωρώ πως είναι μια σύλληψη με πολλές αδυναμίες και λογικές ασυνέπειες. Αλλά ως σύμβολο είναι μεγαλειώδες. Το μυστικό ταχυδρομείο των περιθωριακών. Η ελεύθερη διακίνηση της πληροφορίας, ο φόβος των ανθρώπων πως είναι δέσμιοι, υποχείρια μια καθεστηκυίας τάξης που απομυζεί την δημιουργικότητά τους, υποκλέπτει τα όνειρα, τις σκέψεις, τις ιδέες τους, τις εμπνεύσεις και τις καινοτομίες τους, η ανάγκη για ένα αντίβαρο, ένα αντίπαλον δέος είναι αυτά που αιτιολογούν την αναγκαιότητα της ύπαρξης μιας εξουσίας που δρα στο παρασκήνιο της επίσημης ιστορίας.

Προσωπικά δεν πιστεύω πως υπάρχει στα αλήθεια. Πιστεύω όμως στην ανάγκη των ανθρώπων να αντιταχθούν σε ό,τι τους καταπιέζει. Το Τρίστερο δεν είναι ούτε ο υπερασπιστής ούτε ο εγγυητής της ανθρώπινης ελευθερίας. Είναι η σκοτεινή, ενστικτώδης αντίδραση των ανθρώπων που δεν έχουν ούτε τη δύναμη, ούτε την ωριμότητα να καλυτερεύσουν τις ζωές τους οπότε λειτουργούν αντιδραστικά. Ίσως να μην συνειδητοποιούμε πως δημιουργώντας το αντεστραμμένο είδωλο μιας νοσηρής κατάστασης λειτουργούμε εξισορροπητικά στηρίζοντας τελικά εκείνο που υποτίθεται πως αντιστρατευόμαστε.

ΥΓ: Λευτέρη Λ. δεν θα σε ξεχάσω ποτέ:
«Οι έσχατοι καιροί ήρθαν! Όλοι θυμάστε εκείνο το σημάδι στα ουράνια!»
«Κομήτης ήτανε κύριε! Με καταγεγραμμένη τροχιά και ονοματεπώνυμο!»

Πολύ ενδιαφέρον βιβλίο... ο άνθρωπος πατάει ��λλού, πραγματικά!
Αξίζει οπωσδήποτε για τον καθένα να μπει λίγο στην τρελή/λογική αυτού του συγγραφέα.

Αναγνωστικά είναι ''γονάτισμα'', εγώ πήγαινα σαν χελώνα όσο το διάβαζα. Αλλά είναι εμπειρία που δεν τη μετάνιωσα... Το τριάρι είναι περισσότερο εκδίκηση, αφού, αντί να διαβάσω 3 βιβλία διάβασα ένα!

Okay, I didn't understand this book. Maybe another time in future, but not today.

ايه دة في ايه

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to be searching my shelves for a particular book when I came on this one, squashed between two other books on a high shelf so that its slim spine was scarcely visible. And even though I have a lot of other books to read, I got a surge of pleasure out of finding one I'd completely forgotten about. I bought 'Lot 49' soon after joining Goodreads because everyone seemed to be talking about Thomas Pynchon at that time though I hadn't heard of him before. But the burst of Pynchon enthusiasm I experienced must have been short lived because the book never got opened and moved from one lot of unread books to another over the following ten years until somehow it ended up lost on that high shelf. When I found it again, I decided it was a sign: it was time for 'The Reading of Lot 49'.

Well, reader, I started it that very day and was intrigued enough to read several chapters—though it was all quite mysterious and I was a little confused as to what was going on. Then we had some visitors, and one of them had gone to the trouble of finding a book for me he was certain I wouldn't have read. He was so interested in getting my reaction to the new genre he was introducing me to that I set 'Lot 49' aside and began reading Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle instead. A couple of chapters in, I was finding it mysteriously confusing. And I had a déjà vu lu moment. Hadn't I been reading something quite like this very recently? Still, I was intrigued enough to continue reading but the more of it I read the more confused I became until I picked up 'Lot 49' again, when it all became clear. Or rather the two books remained confusing but I had a revelation about the déja lu feeling: both books are set in the 1960s with much of the action happening in California. Both reference WWII a lot, especially the Germans. Both present a kind of alternative history. Both feature fake memorabilia. And both have a befuddled woman character, prone to believing in signs, who is intrigued and confused by a mysterious book.
I really identified with those two women characters!

Am înțeles cam tîrziu că e vorba de un roman parodic, de o luare în rîs a cititorului foarte grav, foarte serios, care vrea povești „adevărate”, nu fantezii haotice. Pînă am înțeles acest lucru simplu, lectura a mers destul de lent. După ce am întrezărit, dincolo de text, chipul ironic al prozatorului, m-am destins și m-am putut bucura de lectură.

Lipsită de însemnătate, neverosimilă, amuzantă uneori (scena cu doctorul psihanalist Hilarius e mortală), intriga este numai pretextul unui tur de forță stilistic.

Citez această enumerare:

„S-a mai întîlnit cu un sudor cu o deformație facială, pe care urîțenia sa îl bucura; un copil ce cutreiera în noapte, căruia îi era dor de moartea dinaintea nașterii, așa cum le este dor unor proscriși de vacuitatea adormitoare a comunității; o negresă cu o cicatrice marmorată în chip complicat pe moalele obrazului...; un paznic de noapte în vîrstă, ronțăind dintr-un săpun Ivory...” (p.144).

Și răspunsul nimicitor al protagonistei la întrebarea unui reporter:

„- Cum vi s-a părut acest incident cumplit?
- Cumplit, spuse Oedipa” (p.164).

Un roman instructiv pentru cei care gustă ironia și umorul...

My bro loved this one back in the day!

He is woke. I'm Christian - but a psychiatric retread - and so am taking it seriously, with a little mischief from my Daemon to add to its pea soup density.

Density AND intensity.

I am like the heroine's affluent husband, Mucho (get it? He’s Too Much). Like him, I thrive on daily Spotify easy listening music to counter the woke subculture's sharp jabs to jar me awake at three AM, as her mad shrink tries to do.

And as Spotify publicly nails my listening habits.

For when her Ex is the first one to call them at that ungodly hour, her hubby tells her to hang up. She does. (Her name, btw, is Oedipa, for like Oedipus, she’s seen it all and done it all.)

But Oedipa’s Ex hears Mucho’s curse, and curses HIM to a life in what amounts to the beginning of The End Times. Then the Ex dies - or at least he disappears, after naming Oedipa his executor. Mucho says, get out of it! Call our lawyer, Metzger.

What Mucho gets, in other words, is the Jungian Shadow. He takes his meds (his cozy music anodyne) but the world doesn’t. The world is infected, he has built up immunity.

Well, Metzger finds Oedipa in her sleazy motel - unwinding under her cone of silence to unravel the will - and comes on to her (after checking every other motel in Frisco) by revealing that his good looks landed him once as a tot in a string of successful movies as the new male Shirley Temple.

Help!

It's like a Pandora's Box, the End Times. Or like COVID.

Apocalypse Now! You see, now the curse has backfired on the Ex.

So the world teeters on the brink, and hubby grooves to the lulling crooning of a solo saxophone and 101 Strings, as a rich radio deejay. And Oedipa untangles the will and her lawyer - though the lawyer, once tangled, is a leech!

Same thing happened to me in 2022! COVID isolation drove me nuts. And now it seems to have taken social media with it. But I relaxed. And I have my solid faith. I appear to be OK.

If I DNF this, my bro won't let me off the hook.

So I'll slog thru its pea soup dutifully till the end:

Or to my own end…

Whichever comes first.

Though, gotta admit the bit about the Confederate Navy’s attack on California was to Die For!

This is one of those books – you know, those books where the author would be too clever by half if he wasn’t so clever to be able to get away with it. There is something very ‘adolescent male’ about this book – accept it is probably just too smart to be really understood by your average adolescent male. It is also, at times, very funny.

I was going to write a review that would be just the string of discordant images this book throws at you at machine-gun speed – but instead I am going to put myself on the line and say this is a book about information theory. Okay, I know it’s not only about that, but stay with me. There’s the postal service – which, if anything, is fundamentally about transmitting information. There is the discussion of entropy and Maxwell’s Demon – two central ideas of info theory. There’s all of the stuff at the start about her having sex with her lawyer and all of the ‘mixed signals’ each is sending the other. There is the will she is trying to sort out – and what is a will if not a final message to the world that invariably needs to be interpreted. And there is the story itself, with so many other stories within stories and allusions and self-references that it is impossible to know what is signal and what is noise.

I thought it was clever, for example, that the husband at the start of the book had worked in a used car lot and had hated it. What is it that the crying of lot 49 means? It is all too easy to say it is a reference to how the book ends – but perhaps it is also a reference to how the book starts and maybe it doesn’t really mean at all. Nothing is simply what it is, nothing is clear, everything is up for interpretation and doesn’t the author stress that fact! There is the lovely line (mentioned at least twice) that of all the alternatives that would explain the particularly strange world our heroine has found herself in, she hopes that her own insanity is the actual explanation. “Oh no, it’s fine, I’m just nuts.”

What is message, what is truth, what is fact and what is reality? Any wonder the guys that started this whole information theory thing said information is entropy and patterns so that as long as there is signal and noise and those can be somewhat separated, that’s as good as it gets, don’t ask for more meaning than that.

This is a very clever book – perhaps too clever, hard to say. I found the homosexual humour particularly funny – the next gay bar they were going to go to was called Finocchio’s (Italian for both fennel and gay man – not quite sure why) and when she left the gay bar she did so via ‘The Greek Way’. All of this is presented completely deadpan – as is the stuff about the band at the start that are an American band trying to learn English accents in a kind of mirror of The Beatles singing in American accents. His songs, dross all, are particularly funny. Especially the one about the various companies involved in the military industrial complex.

I haven’t mentioned the play, LSD, the broken mirror, WASTE, Freud, Gallipoli, the actor who had been a lawyer who is acting a lawyer who had been a child actor and who sometimes goes back to acting even though being a lawyer is pretty much the same as acting anyway. But then, I need to leave you some reason to read this book.

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!

We’ve obtained three four seven ate TEN!!! Likes so the following Float is no longer necessary. It has been removed.

I published this “review” about five minutes ago and have received no Likes. So I’m Floating it.


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And so is inaugurated what became known as Pynchon Lite.®*

It’s a step up in the game of Pynchon Prose.®** From V.. But a step down in page count (you noticed?). Thing is that it’s as if Lot 49 (TCoL49 is atrocious ; maybe “L49”?) were a chapter, not a novella. But maybe that’s just me. Short stories and novellas always look like lost little abandoned novels or fragments thereof. And that’s really kind of what V. is, isn’t it? It salvages a bunch of/several novellas and hinges them together into a pleasant novelistic unity. Friend Curtainthief has a link to a nice little article which grabs this hinging thing from Heidegger’s Beiträge Zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis ; check it HERE. This kind of novelistic unity is pretty common.

So anyways. Statistics. I’ve read it three times now. Although in all pedantic honesty, I’ve still got a few pages to go. But the first two readings were ages and ages ago relative to the age of our planet. CoLt49 was probably the first Pynchon I read. There’s no reason not to make it your own Virgin Pynchon ®*** too. Why not? It’s 183 pages long. It’s nearly twice as popular on gr as is Gravity’s Rainbow which is his second most popularly read work. 117 gr=Friends of mine have added it ; which really isn’t enough given how sort of syllabustic/canonical it is.

Lot 49 is a short story really (in the novellette it’s  a selection of forged Trystero stamps being sold at auction) so it shouldn’t be the basis of any kind of sophisticated opinion about Tom’s work in general because that opinion should be built upon all those works which are not Pynchon Lite® although, truth be told, your opinion regarding Tom in relation to his Pynchon Lite® will not diminish on account of their relative low calorie count. But seriously, folks, Everything Is Relative we are told until we say something like “Pynchon Lite®” and then that principle is oddly dropped and it is objected unto us that, Those books are just as Heavy Duty, Judy . Fine, but, you know, I have to say in response that if you object to the connotation but have no quibble about the denotation then I say, You Sir! possess a serious lack of vocabularic imargination!!

My gods people! you think I’m going to disparage Pynchon? Me?! People object to the weirdest things. The phenomenon itself -- I’m speaking of Pynchon Lite® -- has long deep rich historical roots, reaching way back at least to 1990 when those Cultists of the Divine Rainbow were asked to read Vineland and not somehow react with WtF? I rreally like Vineland (and all of Pynchon Lite®!) and I like it so much that I am overjoyed not to have read it in 1990 and have been faced with such utter disappointment. The faithful were of course shortly rewarded with the Magnificent Mason & Dixon. So there’s that.

[Paragraph hinge.]

It (back to LOL49) kind of suffers from what I’m going to call The Great Gatsby Complex®**** What do we mean by “The Great Gatsby Complex”®? Just that if it’s a perfect novel then it’s not a novel but a novella (which in German just means “short story”, so there’s that). I mean because a novel, by definition and transcendental constitution (and even by socialistic constructivisticness), has something wrong with it. Flawed. Fallen. In a state of sin. Missed the mark (hamartia, for you with your Greek NT’s). Which is of course what makes it that most human and anti-divine of all artistic forms. And but then if it is a novel, then it’s not perfect. See, if there where just a second half (You Bright and Risen Angels contains an unwritten second half, thereby solving the problem of perfection once and for all -- just amputate half of the thing), making The Lot 49 a diptych, even if that second half were lost, we’d be able to declare it a Perfect Novel in the precise sense of having something Seriously Wrong with it, an entirely full half-fraction missing! See? This is what V. accomplished, it salvaged a bunch of perfect little novellas and mussed them up by hinging them together into a kind of bafflingly impossible unity.

[Paragraph hinge.]

Okay so I just wrapped up those last few pages. I won’t spoiler nothing. But I do have a Fresh Hypothesis. That is, if and only if Closing Reading is still hip because I heard that there’s a thing called Surface Reading. Probably about the only thing I ever do. Skim across the surface. Er, well, since my hypothesis is in fact a surface, a superficial, a not-deep hypothesis. That hypothesis is that Lots(for=sale)49 isn’t so much about Tristero (whether it.... etc) but muchmore about HCE. Seriously, he’s there. More so than Kilroy in V.. Just try to read this thing without seeing HCE everywhere everywhere you can h’imagine! Sometimes it’s just an H and a C and you say to yourself, Where’s the E? (drop a tab of?) or you find a C and an E and you wonder where the atch e double hockey stick is that H? Kind of thing. It’s maddening!!!

None of this may be true of course. Mathematical formulae notwithstanding.





* Not absolutely certain I’m to blame/credit for this felicitous phrase ; but from the looks of my Bleeding Edge review it would seem reasonable so to suspect. So then this apologia. There is no controversy regarding the term’s extension ; it gathers together a set of Pynchon novels which are not V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, or Against the Day. The objection is the association with such Amerikan products as the one from Miller and the one from Bud. Fine. But there’s no need to make that association (fucking-close-to-water). But I’m gunna stick to it as the more felicitiously flowing phrase. Compare :: Session Pynchon (what they’re doing with Session IPAs, for instance, is fantastic) (but then Real Ale advocates will start whipping you if you do anything over 3.5ABV or whatever their arbitrary number is) ; Table or Tafel Pynchon, you understand, is simply atrocious (although Du Pont’s Avril is quite nice) ;; you could also go with Lawnmower Pynchon cuz that California sun can get rather hot -- but then some jackass would object that growing (lawn) grass in CA is kind of a waste of precious resources) ;; Single Pynchon (in the row: single, dubbel, tripel, quad) is just going to confuse the hell out of folks, so we won’t bother although New Belgium’s recent Single (they call it “Porch Swing”) is pretty damn good) ;; so I go with the widely recognizable “Lite” (assuming that Sam Adams “Light” was a failure) (and besides, the issue here is not one of luminosity).

** Have fun with this one!

*** So obvious it’s dumb.

**** If you object to this terminology herein invented and coined, then your right to make use of “The Holden Caulfield Complex”® is revoked.