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Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn Aug 10, 2001 (191 of 201 found this helpful)
Conspiracy buffs, look no further than "The Crying of Lot 49" -- a book that indulges in paranoia so much, you almost expect to see your own name mentioned somewhere in the text. There is an incredible amount of narrative inventiveness on every page, employing a wild concoction of dry humor, non sequiturs, bizarre characters with puns for names, and an endless barrage of references to a wide variety of pop culture, science, and technology. This is the first novel I've read that has introduced the concept of entropy as a narrative device.
The protagonist is a woman named Oedipa Maas who, when the novel begins, learns that her former boyfriend, the wealthy Pierce Inverarity, has died and designated her to be the executor of his enormous estate. Inverarity's assets include vast stretches of property, a significant stamp collection, and many shares in an aerospace corporation called Yoyodyne. As Oedipa goes through her late boyfriend's will, aided by a lawyer named Metzger who works for Inverarity's law firm, she learns about a series of secret societies and strange groups of people involved in a sort of renegade postal system called Tristero. She starts seeing ubiquitous cryptic diagrams of a simple horn, a symbol with a seemingly infinite number of meanings. Every clue she uncovers about Tristero and the horn leads haphazardly to another, like a brainstorm, or a free association of ideas.
This is a novel that demands analysis but defies explanation. My initial interpretation was that it's an anarchistic satire of the military-industrial-government complex, but it's deeper than that. Like Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire," it establishes a very complicated relationship between the author and the reader, where Pynchon seems to be tricking the reader in the same way that Oedipa is unsure if she is witnessing a worldwide conspiracy or if she is merely the victim of an elaborate prank. By presenting Oedipa's investigation to be either circular, aimless, or inconsequential, the novel seems to satirize the efforts of people who try to find order in the universe. Pynchon uses the concept of entropy to illustrate that the more effort (physical and mental) we put into controlling the universe, the more random it becomes.
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Best Book I've Read Since "The Courier's Tragedy" May 16, 2000 (49 of 52 found this helpful)
For no particular reason, I've avoided reading Pynchon novels but finally decided to take the plunge with this book. I was not disappointed.
I thought it was great. Really great, actually. His writing style strikes me as very similar to a number of his contemporaries (Robert Stone, DeLillo, etc.). The central riddle of the book and the mixing of obscure historical fact and fiction reminded me strongly of authors like Borges.
With regard to some of the negative reviews below I would say the following:
1. I consider myself a pretty typical reader and I did not find this to be a particularly challenging book to read, although Pynchon's style (punctuation-sparse and prone to occasional lapses into heavy factual detail) takes some getting used to.
2. This is not a "neat" story in the conventional sense. There isn't a tidy conclusion to the story and there isn't a "typical" character development arc. But so what? I don't think either of those things are a necessary requirement to good fiction.
The deliberately silly-sounding character names should be the first clue that Pynchon does not intend this to be a conventional work of fiction. It isn't. But that doesn't mean it's not a great book.
The book is clever, well-written, and confounding with its plot twists and turns. That's what made it a fascinating read and that's also what makes it the kind of book that I think I could read over and over again and not get bored. I think I'll always find something new that I didn't see before.
Isn't that what makes a book enjoyable to read in the first place?
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Tidy little work Nov 26, 2000 (61 of 66 found this helpful)
Okay it's not his best novel (that'd be Gravity's Rainbow) and it's not his worst novel (that'd be Vineland, which is still darn good, actually) but it is his shortest novel, so if you could say one definite thing about it, that might be it. The length is actually a good thing because is an easy book to hook people on Pynchon by giving them something short and say "Hey look he's great!". Because this is classic Pynchon, as good as anything he's ever done, a great big step forward from V. In these one hundred and eighty pages he manages to cram more prose and ideas and paranoia (because it wouldn't be a Pynchon book otherwise) than most authors can do in twice the space. Simply put, it's a fun book, and for all the trappings of "post-modernism" you can easily enjoy this book without camping out in your local library near the reference section if you just take everything on faith and read it. The story concerns Ms Oedipa Maas, who is executing the will of her late boyfriend and stumbles upon (she thinks) a conspiracy involving either the US Postal System, the Mob and just about everything else, a conspiracy that might stretch back hundreds of years. Or it might not. Pynchon proceeds then to play with Ms. Maas and the reader for the rest of the novel, throwing out obscure fact after obscure fact, toying with her perception of things (are things just happening randonly or is there a guiding force behind them?) and basically having a crackling good time doing so. His prose still consists of long winding sentences with a bit too much detail (it's a postmodern trademark to describe every single item on a desk at least once during the story) at times but the jokes are still funny thirty years later, the story is still good and frankly if you look past the fact that the story doesn't have a neat and pat ending then you'll probably enjoy this very much. Some folks find Pynchon too silly at times, but I think taking anything too seriously is bad and especially literature, where there's so much potential for humor. This is a good example of how you can write a serious, timeless piece of literature and still have the ability to make folks outloud. Remember, Joyce liked fart jokes. Keep that in mind.
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W.A.S.T.E no time, read this book.. Nov 14, 2000 (17 of 17 found this helpful)
If you've always heard the term postmodern and wondered what it meant this book is for you. But, let me warn you, this book is definately not for everyone, the plot is unique to say the least, and the characters are not what you will find in most novels, but then again, neither is the intellectual stimulation. In little over 100 pages, Thomas Pynchon has written an accessibly managable introduction to postmodern literature. Although this book is rather dense, and is filled with obscure facts and information from seemingly every conceivable specialty of knowledge, it is an enjoyable way to aquaint oneself with one of the most misunderstood genres of modern literature. Just be sure to keep a dictionary, encyclopedia and sourcebook to anarchism handy. The plot revolves around the exciting and often bizarre experiences and wanderings of Oedipa Maas, as she embarks upon a surrealistic journey into the unfamiliar techno-industrial pop culture wasteland of San Narcisco and surrounding counties, after being named executor of an ex-lovers will. In her madcap adventures she uncovers a bizzaire world where everything that she has ever learned crumbles in the face of absurdity and falls into question. It is a world where nazi doctors, secret societies, papal misdeeds, anarchist dreamers, narcicistic ex-child stars, and deranged outcasts all come out of the shadows to invade the "typical" suburban landscape of an average American housewife. This book is concerned with uncovering the realities, or lack thereof, that most people would want to stay hidden, or at the least forgotton. It is about questioning the assumptions that we all hold dear, even if it means coming to terms with a world that is without meaning, without order, and most of all without a coherent design. This is a novel with many questions to be answered, so if you welcome intellectual challenge and desire obscure knowledge this book will certainly not dissappoint. And if you don't quite understand it read it again...
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At the Center of the Whirlwind Feb 2, 2003 (24 of 26 found this helpful)
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
It says something about Thomas Pynchon that "The Crying of Lot 49", by all reports a straightforward book, is, by Pynchonian standards, an oddity. For a writer who has built a reputation on constructing labyrinthine tomes that endlessly branch off for pages and pages until the reader wearily abandons any attempt at deciphering a plot, "Lot 49" is, well, linear. By far the most accessible of Pynchon's works "The Crying of Lot 49" is also probably his most concentrated. So short that it is often referred to as novella, "Lot 49" manages to get at Pynchon's BIG IDEAS and even contain some of his delightfully controlled chaos.
It is the story of Oedipa Maas, summoned to California's San Narcisco to fulfill a duty to left her by some shady inheritance, namely to oversee the execution of a rather large estate left by the newly deceased Pierce Inverarity. Immediately Oedipa finds herself overwhelmed by the size and complexity of Inverarity's estate, and hopelessly imagines that she will never get Inverarity's affairs straightneed out. No sooner does she lose hope than Oedipa meets an odd man who seems to have some ideas to help her. As the two look into the estate, coincidence after coincidence piles up until Oedipa finds herself enmeshed in what may or may not be a global conspiracy where almost every person, place and thing she meets up with can, given enough time, be plausibly fit.
The central question to this story, does the conspiracy exist or is Oedipa making it all up, is a metaphor which Pynchon pursues over many divergent paths, each leading to a different idea. On one level, Oedipa's quest is a microcosm of each of our own lives: using the available information she (an we) creates a story about the way things really are and continually tests and refines it. That Oedipa finds substantial clues in the oddest and most coincidental places is part of the mystery: is it really that life is so capricious that random encounters can have profound impacts, or is life much more banal, leaving Oedipa to simply imagine connections amidst a sea of information?
On another level, Pynchon uses Opedipa's quest to get at the concept of entropy. Pynchon likes to apply terms and ideas from the realm of physics to psychological and sociological phenomena, and his invocation of entropy may be the most famous instance of this. Just as in a closed system individual particles will tend toward greater disorder so in Pynchon's universe do the people and information in our society tend toward entropy. Fighting against this decay is Oedipa, who tries to create some order out of the randomness that she encounters. Again we are met with a similar question, do Oedipa's actions counter entropy and point toward some transcendent truth or is she simply fighting an impossible battle and unable to create order in the world?
Once you've accepted that these questions are valid there's nothing to do but follow Pynchon's ideas to their inevitable conclusion: in "Lot 49" there is no truth other than that which we create. In a sense, all of the characters are like Oedipa; although they aren't questing to ferret out a conspiracy, they are attempting to fit everything they come across into some kind of rational framework. And so do we. Cause and effect only exists insofar as we pick out one certain moment to be the cause and once certain moment to be the effect (even though we could have picked out any two points on the chain of causation), things only become important once we say they are. Each of us is at the center of our own self-ordered universe.
But how do we know that the universe is really ours? Every day we are bombarded by thousands of stimuli outside of our control, each of which seeks to order our life for us. Does Oedipa see the conspiracy as she wants to or as the system wants her to? It is here, where Pynchon examines the limits of freedom in modern life that he makes his most substantial points.
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