This is the first book I've read by Pynchon. I felt...underwhelmed. I'm still going to go on and read Gravity's Rainbow to make sure I'm not missing something, but overall, I felt like this was similar to a Tom Robbin's novel - which I'm also mostly over after reading a few of his. Hopefully, I just missed a lot in this novel since I was reading it on my usual work commute (bus, subway, office, reverse). ( )

My first acquaintance with Pynchon's work. Strange. Original. Complex. Dreamlike. Schizophrenic. Did I mention strange? This is supposed to be Pynchon's most approachable work and often hailed as a great example of postmodern fiction. I don't disagree. But at the same time I know this is not a book for everyone. It is not, I think, a book one falls head over heels with. It is a book that challenges what you thought you knew about how books are supposed to be. Their coherence, their development, their structure, their denouement. There's meaning and further implications hidden beneath every sentence. There's almost too much meaning for an 80-page long novella. As if the author was anxious not to waste (w.a.s.t.e.) a single word. Every word must be suffused with an extra layer of complications, another set of meanings and ideas. Another popular culture reference that requires you to be armed with a particular kind of knowledge in order to deal with it. Jay Gould. Fu-Manchu. Perry Mason. The Shadow. Nabokov. Remedios Varo. Jack Lemmon. The Beatles. "I want to kiss your feet.", sing the imaginary Paranoids of the book. Ha. Ha. Ha. Sometimes it feels like the book purports to maintain a certain level of intelligence and knowledge amongst its intended readers. Like Pynchon is trying to somehow "weed out" the most impatient of readers, the ones not determined enough to push through his obstacles and get to the meaning, the core of the book. And for this reason he keeps making things more difficult. A Jacobean play within the book. Surreal situations. LSD. Paranoia. A conspiracy that may or may not exist. Song lyrics. An unreliable narrator. An even more unreliable shrink who's supposed to help the narrator. (Dr Hilarius, a psychopath of a shrink, if there ever was one. ) Take that, public. See if you can deal with that. And that. And that. Can you? Like the Escher paintings mentioned in the book, you either take it all in together, or not at all. It either makes sense, or it doesn't.

(kind of like this Deaf-Mute ball towards the end of the book:)

"Back in the hotel she found the lobby full of deaf-mute delegates in party hats, copied in crepe paper after the fur Chinese communist jobs made popular during the Korean conflict. They were every one of them drunk, and a few of the men grabbed her, thinking to bring her along to a party in the grand ballroom. She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm but was too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted horrible. They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow's head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner's lead, limp in the young mute's clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner. Jesus Arrabal would have called it an anarchist miracle. Oedipa, with no name for it, was only demoralized. She curtsied and fled." ( )

The Crying of Lot 49 is an interesting experiment in post modernism. While at times Pynchon's prose can seem quite pretentious the conspiracy theory works to keep the reader interested. Communication is key to the novel and the confusion of Oedipa seems mirrored by the many sub facets and the stream of conscious thought apparent in the writing that often leave the reader confused. An interesting ending although it is appropriate for post modern writing so much so that it perhaps becomes cliche. ( )

Strange, interesting, I don't really get it---to the point that I can't rate it.

maybe Pynchon's best, and not just because it's short, but because I love the absurdity of it and the conspiracy-theory-that-doesn't-really-mean-anything plot. typically amazing names and songs by Pynchon. ( )