No estoy seguro de haber entendido nada, pero ahora sé por qué muchos consideran a Pynchon «el mejor de los escritores vivos».

The first and only time that I read Hamlet was in my High School AP english class. The teacher, being by far the best english teacher that I’ve had throughout my oh so illustrious english career, was a wonderfully animated and intelligent fellow. For our reading of the Oresteia, he drew stick figures on the board, highlighting with screaming delight the furious eyebrows of Clytemnestra. Every class was a surefire combination of zaniness and intelligence that I came to love from one day to the next. Although his antics could (and should) be retold in much more depth than here, it is perhaps the subject for another review. But somewhat tangentially relevant to the book in question, his insights into the play were some of the most profound that I’ve heard and most certainly kept me from tossing my copy out the window. One of most intriguing moments of the class came during the famous ‘play within the play’ part of Hamlet, where Hamlet puts on a play to show the king that he knows what had really happened to Hamlet’s father. Although our teacher outlined the importance of the scene and the role it served, when the audiobook got around to the dialogue of that meta-play, our teacher held up a flapping hand, speaking loudly over the recording telling us that there was no need to pay attention to this scene, as it was literal gibberish nonsense, its meaning so obfuscated so as not to even be bothered to be given any thought. This came in the middle of an intense dissection of the play, no verse had been left unanalyzed, no word untouched by the scrutiny of close reading and informed discussion. I found it to be quite funny and especially refreshing to have an entire section of a play written-off by an english teacher as nonsensical. But even more than that, I found it profoundly intriguing. Shakespeare, being as dense and difficult as it is, when descending into a deeper level in the play—the play within the play—becomes that much more difficult to understand, as if the further from reality one gets into its fictional universe, the more tangled and confused it becomes. The meta layers of literature twist meaning and significance the deeper it gets. I have since found this Inception-like increase in difficulty in a few other stories of meta-fictive delight. As were the meta-tales of Goatwriter in Number9dream, I found the play within the book, The Crying of Lot 49 to be completely divorced from comprehension. As evidenced by the fact that I can’t recall a single bit of the play now, I have never felt like such a sloppy reading idiot while navigating the threads of this thing.

It is, of course, the point of the book and despite being aware of it from the get go, I can’t bring myself to love the book. I will say that the first chapter is brilliant, among the top all time opening chapters. And I was with the story then, despite it being slightly demanding, I breezed through it with an air of self-gratification, quite pleased with my progress. Perhaps this speaks to Pynchon’s genius, but I felt lulled into a sense of false security by my understanding of the opening pages. That beginning promises a roaring good book, equal parts entertaining and profound but most of all, a book that has meaning. Alas, no book was delivered. I was reading pleasantly, assured of my own understanding, as I said, when a hairspray can begins flying around the room of the Pynchon-verse for an extended period of time, shooting off at improbable angles for much longer than anyone is comfortable reading. The what-the-fuck-is-happening-right-now alarm began to warm up. And as I plunged further through the book, it didn’t get any better at all. My incredulity and my anxiety over missing important details mounted. Among all the loose threads of Tristero and W.A.S.T.E. that the protagonist herself is trying to make sense of, I saw not some profound meaning behind it all, but instead the long, protruding middle finger of the author, accompanied by the condescending chuckle of a man much smarter than myself, scorning my foolish attempts at making sense of it all.

IMEANYEAHIGUESSTHAT’SHOWLIFEISBUTCOMEONDUDE,ISITTOOMUCHTOASKFORALITTLEBITOFMEANINGINASTORY??????

Thomas Pynchon is no doubt a genius and I completely envy his ability to create masterful sentences but damn, his books sure are frustrating to read.

*****Everything else aside, ya'll should check out this lecture on the book. I may have enjoyed it more than the book itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dtqt0...************

n  n

My first excursion into the Pynchonesque…and it left me disorientated, introspective and utterly confused about how exactly I feel about it. I’m taking the cowards way out and giving it three stars even though that makes me feel like I’m punting the responsibility football and doing my best imitation of an ostrich when trouble walks by.

I am going to have to re-read this. My assumption is that I began this book taking Pynchon a little too lightly. I decided to start my exploration of Pynchon here because it's widely considered his most “accessible” work. I figured even as addled as my brain is with wine sediment and Milk Duds, my big boy education would serve as an adequate navigator on this little journey.

Well, around page 21, I started getting that “I’m lost, have you seen my momma” feeling and there's not a single character in this story trustworthy enough to ask directions on how to get back to the plot.

This much I think I know:

Oedipa Mass (get used to monikers like that as every character’s name is a play on words) is a clever, self-motivated middle-aged housewife from California who isn’t above shagging the occasional stranger not her husband (hell it’s the 60’s). Oedipa’s ex-shag partner, Pierce Inverarity, dies uber-rich and leaves her as co-executor of his estate. Inverarity is a practical joker extraordinaire and so the idea that everything may not be as it seems is teed up immediately. However, Oedipa is the kind of woman who loves a mystery and she feels compelled to play the part that Inverarity has created for her.

n  If it was really Pierce's attempt to leave an organized something behind after his own annihilation, then it was part of her duty, wasn't it, to bestow life on what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the centre of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her.n

Those first 20 pages were cake and I was feeling very much in control.

Then page 21……..through the rest of the novel (about 180 pages) send Oedipa (and the reader) on a fragmented, surreal, allusion-soaked, reality-bent/warped/twisted sojourn that felt a bit like a David Lynch/David Mamet collaboration where nothing and no one is anywhere close to what they seem. Dense, compact, multi-layered prose and some memorable oddball characters make the confusion plenty entertaining, but grasping the central core of the piece was rather elusive (at least for me).

The framing, edgework of the story is as historical mystery centered on an alleged vast conspiracy involving a secret, underground postal carrier network known as Trystero. The calling card/icon of this shadowy organization is:

n  n

Which is a mockery of the horn symbolizing the real life postal carrier known as Thurn and Taxis.

Eventually, I gathered that the major theme being explored by Pynchon is the untrustworthiness of communication and that it’s impossible to verify information because the source is always distorted from the standpoint of the observer. Thus communication, when filtered through the lens of the recipient, often brings more confusion than enlightenment and more questions than answers. “Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.”

At least I think that is what Pynchon was getting at in this book. My problem was that I didn’t clue into that until late into the story and by that time I was simply riding the crest of the enjoyable language and mini-scenes into the finish line. Having now read the book, I feel like if I were to go back and read it again knowing what I now know, I will be able to get far more out of it. I guess I might also realize that I am reading too much into it and the emperor really has no clothes.

For now, I will give Pynchon the benefit of the doubt. Based on his reputation, he has certainly earned it.

Even given my less than perfect understanding of the nuances moving through the narrative, there is much to enjoy. There are some wonderful scenes and character interactions that I loved For example, the The Courier’s Tragedy is a play that Oedipa sees that actually touches on the themes of the wider novel. I thought it was fascinating.

There is also some magnificent passages that I could read simply to enjoy the language.

n   Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you'd have this big, God, maybe a couple hundred million chorus saying 'rich, chocolaty goodness' together, and it would all be the same voice.n

Language like that is always a pleasure to read. However, without the glue of understanding all that Pynchon was attempting to say, my enjoyment was somewhat muted.

That’s just me.

I enjoyed the experience of reading this and, as I mentioned to a GR friend the other day, I have thought better of this book during the days since I finished this than I did while I was actually reading it. That tells me that the book affected me and seeped into my brain more than I was able to consciously detect. Maybe that’s how Pynchon works, I’m not sure. However, it is a question I plan to investigate by visiting his other works as well as returning to this one.

3.0. Recommended (though a bit confused).

надцяте перечитування, тепер - перед читацьким клубом.
щоразу помічаєш щось нове, цю неймовірну гру лейтмотивів, жодного випадкового слова чи епізода, усе працює на загальну ідею.
сюжетно-композиційний принцип - з європейського кінематографа, хто бачив "Пригоду" Антоніоні чи "Вікенд" Ґодара - краще зрозуміють Пінчона.
німецька тема - найсильніша, купа алюзій для тих, хто читав "Веселку тяжіння".
ключ же загалом - операція Paperclip та програма MKUltra.

Well then.

Mister Pynchon.

How beautifully you write about an America that might not be real but is absolutely, only possibly America. Only possibly an America in the 1960s and 1970s, with its flowing rivers of possibilities and confusion, and endless boundless imagined realities. How precisely you connect with the paranoia of an age but make it literary, dancing with metaphor and the ever-present threat of meaninglessness, making that paranoia potentially timeless despite its clear connection to place and translucent connection to time.

On first reading, though, I have to be honest. I'm not sure I haven't read these themes before, even if they were then handled much less originally and with less shimmer.

On first reading, I must wonder about your pacing and your layering, and about the precision of your metaphors. I must wonder about all the rabbit holes that you sent my desperate-to-unravel brain down. I must wonder if this was perhaps part of your intent, to make me paranoid that your book about paranoia was actually going to be about nothing. Which is isn't, just barely. But perhaps that is my desperate-to-unravel brain desperately unraveling something from nothing.

We do, after all, need metaphors to help us light our way.

Mister Pynchon.

I'm going to read this again some day. In fact, I almost started it all over again after having finished it but knew I needed a break. I suspect, though, that I'll be reading this again in the near future, and I hope that then I will be reading a slightly different book. One whose cadence and rhythms I can sensibly understand, and whose ideas, so primly discovered in the final five pages, are sprinkled delicately throughout. What a delight that will be.

Also, thank you for the laughs, Mister Pynchon.

..."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"...

Y’all like paranoia?

Harold Bloom (and apparently everyone else I know) is clearly out of his G.D. mind. This book is not hilariously funny. I did not appreciate the humor in this book at all. I liked the bit about the play but the book seemed too cutesy and gimmicky to me. I've been looking at reviews all over and (much like the reviews for the film No Country for Old Men) I seem only to find the same old enthusiastic descriptions of the book and no compelling reason for why I should appreciate the longest 183 page book I've ever read. A W.A.S.T.E. of time?

Pues una recomendación de un genio... "La subasta del lote 49" de Thomas Pynchon, con una cercanía más que rotunda a la prosa de Joyce,nos deleita con una joya indescriptible, cargada de poesía, ambigüedad, multirreferencialidad, imaginación y extravagancias lingüísticas... adorable! Una obra maestra imprescindible.

He who controls the means of communication can control not only the content of the message, but the world as well.

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.

This novel is a great introduction to Thomas Pynchon, the sardonic sentimentalist. It opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of the will of Pierce Inverarity, a filthy rich real estate mogul from the fictional Californian city of San Narciso, and a former lover of Oedipa herself. This event catalyzes a leap into the major conspiracy of the Tristero, a secret society that operates through the underground mail-system of W.A.S.T.E.

Oedipa bumps into characters, geographical vistas, symbols of meaning, and grapples with historical fact. She encounters The Paranoids, a group of American rockers who sing with English accents. She meets Metzger, a child prodigy actor turned lawyer turned aspiring actor. She encounters on the freeway of San Narciso the hyperreality of Californian buildings and places; buildings and places that seem to be made for nobody.

Pynchon does many things in this short novel. Most popularly noted, Pynchon makes fun, cracks jokes, and cynically distances the reader from any notion of final revelation. We are never made fully aware of whether the Tristero exists; whether it is a personal construction by bored American housewives and lonely desperados, whether it is fabricated by some nefarious other in high places, or whether it is in fact entirely real, every bit of it. The seminal question at play here seems to be: Who/what is in the world, and who/what constructs it? There is no answer to this question, and Pynchon presents the fruitlessness of an attempt to discover the facts of the world. To couple the chaotic patterns of communication, noise and power into a coherent semiotic symbol of meaning, will inevitably lead nowhere: God is always on the next stop and never the one you walk out on.

That being said, Pynchon nevertheless emphasizes the significance of the social. Under the freeways of San Narciso Oedipa encounters anarchists, crazies, impoverished and lonely people, who all seem to communicate by the Tristero mail-system and who all seem to be aware of the symbol of the muted post-horn. These people, although they may be as bonkers as Oedipa, are also characterized by a shared system of communication. Within this system are experiences and dreams and longings and despairs, that make up their shared fantasies. The shared fantasies and dreams and desires of those under the freeway, coupled with the hyperreality of everything above it, of advertising and skyscrapers and controlled lines of travel and communication, make up the dual reality of San Narciso, and also, as Pynchon notes, of America itself.

In Deleuzian terms, Pynchon has constructed a minor literature of minor characters. Characters that stutter and stumble with passion and paranoia against the conservative humdrum of traditional American life, and for Oedipa, in particular the American family unit. Pynchon's characters are almost always outsiders, weirdos, geeks, lunatics and radicals, who nomadically move through life in revelatory ways.

Pynchon has also constructed a minor literature within the constructs of postmodernism. While Lot 49, and all Pynchon novels for that matter, are clearly major postmodern works of fiction, they are also a parody of the genre itself, and more importantly, offer routes of escape. Pynchon wrestles against some of postmodernisms main tenets: of sardonicism, meta-cynicism and irreverence, by also tendentially presenting its antithesis: sincerity and compassion and sentimentality. Pynchon did the whole new-sincerity schtick long before the Wallace’s of the world had dreamed it.

Pynchon’s novel is a clusterfuck of hilarious, weird, cynical and funny goodness, coupled with real tearjerker moments. It is written gorgeously, with Pynchon’s long sentences weaved with meaning and references and inter-references. It is incredibly funny. It is incredibly sad. It is also enticing, with its mysterious landscapes and symbols. Everything that is good and annoying about Pynchon is found here, to a lesser or larger extent. It is better than Inherent Vice and V. It is not as good as Against the Day, Mason & Dixon and Gravity’s Rainbow. In writing this novel, Pynchon has, in usual Pynchon fashion, projected a world that is very much our own, a world that both reveals and utterly confuses.