I'm if anything a fussy writer. The sort of guy who prefers to come up with excuses why all the factors surrounding the writing of some story or chapter aren't quite right, rather than actually sit down and let the thing get written anyway. I like to worry sentences, and I like to worry about sentences that sound like other sentences I've read so many times before. "She got out of the car and looked searchingly up at the sky." There's some piece in me that could never be satisfied with that sitting on the page.

For a while I thought this was big of me. I thought it meant I cared foremost about language. And maybe in the tiny, fussy domain of the short story it's the sort of thing readers won't like to be given, but in a novel such concern is a little ridiculous. Thinking hard about the ways I read novels I know that if everything's chugging along smoothly and I'm at full engagement with the story when I come across such a sentence all I do is register the information it gives me. Its blandness doesn't stop me in my tracks. And so there's room in novels for these sentences. James called novels shaggy beasts; finessing every god damn line will get nobody anywhere.

Oh, I imagine Pynchon has such sentences in this novel, but what I want to talk about are the other ones, the ones that won't probably ever get written again. Lots of the best sentences in this book spill down their pages. Some of them are "attainable," so to speak, in the challenge I made with myself as I read the book to assess my own ability to craft the sentences he already did. Ones like this one, where you just accumulate well observed details, aren't really that hard to write: "She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages (149)."

Do-able, right? Well, maybe not "planking" or "swung". Those words would never occur to me in the places they fall. But then look at these, just a page later: "Perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For now it was like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would be either a transcendent meaning, or only the earth (15)."

The former bit takes merely a good eye, perhaps some experience, and a decent way with words, all of which can be picked up in a short number of years. The latter, though, takes some new kind of mind all together. A nimble, fluid mind, that can make leaps of association that all sort of swell around one another.

Another thing that makes this book so rad is its subject: postal conspiracy. So nice to read something new. It's always very en vogue to write stories about "weird" types. For lots of uninspired writers with little imagination, weird gets translated into the noble rural poor. (I read at least 15 of these stories today for the lit-mag I screen for.) For others, and often for me, it translates to people with nontraditional jobs, the sorts of careers no one goes to school for.

Here the strangeness of philatelists, underground postmasters, and Jacobean community theatre folk all seems very closely strange, somehow. Maybe this whole entry is longhand for saying I can't find a way to call this book quirky. Is this only because of its age?

I’ve been curious about Thomas Pynchon for some time now. I know his books are held in the highest esteem, they’ve won the biggest awards, and he’s a famously reclusive writer, having not been seen in public for decades now. And I was also informed that his most accessible book is also his shortest: The Crying of Lot 49.

So a while back I attempted reading it - and nearly short-circuited my brain! I read about a dozen pages and gave up, utterly flummoxed by what I’d read, only knowing it was baaaaad. However! I decided to give Pynchon a fair shake and to attempt this book again, this time by reading 4 pages of it per day. It’s only 142 pages, so it wouldn’t take me that long. And this method worked - I finally finished the damn thing and me brain is still more or less in one piece - but I’m none the wiser as to what I read or why in particular Pynchon is revered as a literary master. The Crying of Lot 49 is awful!

The main character is Oedipa Maas (all the characters have stupid names like this: Ghengis Cohen, Peter Pinguid, Mike Fallopian - this must be the “humour” I’m told Pynchon’s books possess?) who is left something in the will of her wealthy friend. She has to learn how to become an executor of the will or something and this leads her on a bizarre and rambling quest where she finds out there’s a secret underground postal service and a lost Elizabethan play. Don’t ask me why these things feature so prominently or what they have to do with anything because I don’t know!

Honestly, Pynchon is such a bad storyteller that you could open up this book and select any random sentence and your understanding of the story would be the same as someone who had read the book up to that point. The characters are just names, the story is only ever vague, the themes (if the book has any) are murky, and the prose is so awkward and flat as to leave no impression or connection to the reader. This is the easiest book to put down because you never know what the hell you’re reading so you don’t care - and this is the state of play for the entire thing. It doesn’t get better!

The title is a reference to auctioneers (their blather is called “crying”) and lot 49 is an auction for - something. I have no idea. Have I mentioned how little I knew was going on in this mess of a novel?

I’m glad I can say I’ve read a Thomas Pynchon novel but I know for sure now that I will never read another one again - he is most certainly not a writer for me. The Crying of Lot 49 was nothing more than an exercise in patience, like waiting for a bore to finish their tedious prattling before they stagger away. You would probably have an easier (and more entertaining) time reading fish entrails than Pynchon’s prose.

UPDATE: This author interprets the Beatles' famous song, "She Loves You," in a way I had never thought about. Whether it is a new interpretation or not, I don't know. But in summary, "she" is every woman who has ever lived, and "you" is all of us. And given further thoughts supplied by other goodread readers, I'm gonna add a star to my original two-star rating. "Change my mind, please," I always say! The ending might indeed be the perfect ending for this book after all, as my goodreads friend Tobias says in comments about my review. (Thanks Tobias)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Definitely style over substance. While unusual and sometimes comical, stumbled through it, and didn't understand the end: an auction of 'Lot 49" at which our heroine attends and perhaps is to find some key to the story during the auction? This book feels like a distant cousin to Umberto Eco's 'Foucaults Pendulum', as Pynchon throws in a lot of ancient worldwide conspiracies, as does Eco. And here, Pynchon renames P.D. Wodehouse's 'Bachelor Anonymous' as ' Inamorati Anonymous' in which people who are bout to fall in love reach out to another member for support. Pynchon pulls in Joyce's 'Ulysses' in an odd way, mentions Shakespeare, and talks about rock bands with I imagine fictional names. The dead appear as wine, as ink, and who knows what else, but the overally theme, I think, is that throughout history, people have been leaving marks, postage stamp mistakes, graffiti all over the world to tell some kind of story , perhaps a delivery system of mail outside of the goverment's control. And today, as we have the 'dark net' and 'bitcoin', it's odd that, in a way, Pynchon predicts both of these way back in 1965. At 150 pages, this is a fast read, but the ideas are extremely dense. I wonder if Pynchon goes into greater detail and resolves this one in another book. I'm definitely going to try another by this author, hoping for greater insight into this novel, or into the author's mind.

Objavu broja 49 sam nedavno pročitao po drugi put i moram priznati da mi se roman još više svideo nego nakon prvog čitanja - on je pravo remek-delo postmodernizma! Pri prvom čitanju jednostavno iskliznu neki elementi, teme ili već neke sitnice, ali drugo čitanje uvek bude poput male apokalipse - čitalac doživi neki vid otkrovenja...
Edipa koliko je čudna, učmala i na momente neženstvena živi u lažnoj sigurnosti nekog prividnog američkog sna. Ona na prvi pogled ima sve i ide po zabavama, ali ona je, ustvari, zatočena u kuli poput Rapunzel (koju vidi na jednom triptihu i kada prepozna sebe u toj sceni, počinje da plače). Iz te učmalosti u kojoj živi budi je preminuli bivši ljubavnik koji ju je imenovao izvršiteljem oporuke. Put na koji se upušta Edipa postaje potraga za identitetom, gde ona ponekad menja svoje ime, ali zasigurno menja samu sebe, na momente nestajući u ogledalu i gubeći se u svojoj glavi, pitajući se da li je to u šta se upustila stvarnost ili privid, simulacija ili čak halucinacija.
Cela priča o Tristeru, Turnu i Taksisu i poštanskom sistemu čini se kao da naglašava bizarnost u koju je zapala komunikacija. Mi prividno komuniciramo sa ljudima oko sebe, ali - da li to stvarno radimo? Da li ih stvarno slušamo ili slušamo samo sebe? Pinčon nam poručuje da je komunikacija u krizi i da se svet utapa u masovnost i osrednjost. Treba da slušamo Reč i da pratimo Simbole koji su tu ali ih mi od gomile prosečnosti i osrednjosti ne primećujemo.