The Crying Of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (6-Jun-1996) Paperback

It is extremely difficult to like this silly and fury signifying nothing. So why do so many people say they like it? My guess is that they think that either they are in on the joke or the joke is on them. Pretentious, mean spirited, nihilistic nonsense.

This book makes me think of Warhol's famous painting of soup cans. While it may be cute and clever to be sharing a private joke with your readers by naming characters things like Fallopian or Kotecks, and you may be intelligent and a technically capable writer, this does not mean the story, plot, or characters are involving or worth reading about. Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against modernity or abstract art or literature. I do however feel that a writer has to do more than just be clever to write a great book. While I actively seek out a wide variety of world literature with a very offbeat slant, the deciding factor always comes down to whether the plot and characters are moving and involving. This is what makes literature the closest thing I have to the sacred in life. I feel like I have been befrauded when someone like Pynchon dresses up some otherwise poorly drawn soup-can characters in funny names and thinks that that is a substitute for good writing. It makes me understand how Christians must feel seeing a cross in a box of urine passed off as art.

The Emporor is NOT wearing new clothes, he is just a naked deluded fool walking through town.

I believe you would find that the readers of this novel would fall into one of these groups: those who really sincerely love it; those who want to love it, who think they should love it, who maybe even pretend they love it, but who really don't; those who don't love it even a little bit, who want to throw it across the room when, or if, they finish it.

Those who love it would certainly include those English professors and graduate students who love analyzing books and teasing out hidden meanings and clever puns and metaphorical references. These folks don't read a novel for its plot or characterization and generally dislike books with a clearly discernible message or emotional content. This book, then, is perfect for them. Usually their favorite book is Joyce's Ulysses.

The second group, those who want to love it, are those graduate students and others with intellectual pretensions who can see the cleverness involved in the writing, who get some of the references and word plays and can understand some others when they are pointed out, who maybe think if they were just smarter they would like the book more. These folks, however, in their heart-of-hearts would really like a novel to make more sense and to have characters who seem real, even if exaggerated.

Those who don't love this novel might laugh at some of the satirical comedy, including the names of the characters, and might catch glimpses of the supposed metaphorical meanings, but they would find this book to be pretentious and empty. These folks don't like to think that there are no answers, that none of life makes sense, that people cannot connect and communicate. All of that may be privately suspected, but they hope it's not so.

I fall somewhere between the last two groups, although I tend to veer toward the last in my old age. I did not throw the book across the room; I could appreciate it on one level; but I did not love it, or even like it, at all.

The plot is pretty superfluous, but here it is: Oedipa Mass is named as executrix of the will of a past lover and starts finding clues about a centuries-long (possible) conspiracy involving Trystero, an alternate postal service. Three possibilities occur to her: she is hallucinating and going mad, her dead lover arranged the whole series of clues as a practical joke, or the secret conspiracy actually exists. Do we find out the answer....NO.

Privately, I even wonder if the whole novel was a practical joke by Pynchon, satirizing post-modern writing. Surely not.

Anyway, I do not recommend this novel to the average reader.

Despite Thomas Pynchon’s reputation for abstruse prose, The Crying of Lot 49 is a very readable novel. Not only is it short (under 200 pages) but the story is linear and easily followed. Also, the plot remains gripping and suspenseful for most of the book’s length, driven by the drama surrounding an intriguing mystery, the apparent continued existence in the present-day United States of a mysterious underground postal service that has its roots in the Middle Ages in Europe. As part of the plot, Pynchon presents a deftly executed play-within-a-play scene that prompts the central character, Oedipa Maas, to embark on an extended mission of literary sleuthing.

Oedipa is a satisfying and engaging central character, a 30-ish woman in an unfulfilling marriage who finds herself inexplicably the executor of the will of a former flame, a multi-millionaire with vast and complex holdings. That assignment leads her to discover the possible present-day existence of Trystero, the mysterious medieval postal service. She slowly becomes obsessed with the search and one is left to wonder whether the whole thing is a delusion (she does rather implausibly start seeing signs of it everywhere) or an incredibly elaborate scheme meant to drive her nuts (somewhat in the vein of what is foisted on the Nicholas Urfe in John Fowles’ The Magus, published only a few months before The Crying of Lot 49).

The second of Pynchon’s novels, The Crying of Lot 49 (the title is explained in the final pages) is very much like his first, V, which also involved an extended and obsessive quest involving an arcane historical mystery, though at much greater length. Unfortunately, just as with V, Pynchon more or less drops the ball at the end of Lot 49 by failing to deliver any sort of satisfying conclusion. In V, the mystery more or less peters out into, at best, an Is That All? kind of head scratcher. In Lot 49, he deploys one of those cutesy dramatic full stops that cuts off the story just before the revelation, leaving the reader to make his or her own guesses. That can be effective, but here’s it’s just irritating.

That said, I have to say I enjoyed reading The Crying of Lot 49 for most of its length and if you are interested in delving into this celebrated modern American author, this would be the place to start.

After 152 pages of following the often frenetic forays of Oedipa Maas across the vast reaches of California and never-never land, her mental condition functioning at various levels of success, readers discover a picture of a daft world at a haphazard time;

Oedipa is first encountered returning from a Tupperware party (“whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue”) as an incurious suburban housewife with no particular interests indicated save for remnants of her marriage to an self-absorbed former used car salesman-disc jockey known as “Mucho” Maas, not particularly interested when one of his wife’s ex-lovers makes her executrix of his fortune, a good part of which may or may not reside in a postage stamp collection. As a careful reader may discover, the book is apparently not exactly about results, but the search for answers that ask more questions, perhaps for whatever truths are uncovered about the mysteries of life if we are willing to follow some unusual, perhaps arcane paths and ask significant questions along the way. Oedipa herself becomes mildly curious at first at the request, but as the adventure continues, is galvanized by her quest to uncover mysteries which seem to be connected to forces larger than herself, to open new realms on Life Avenue about which she had previously known very little. Lots of generalities here, but the book is loaded with specifics, many of which at first glance appear unconnected; stay the game.

The novel is set in 1960’s California, during a decade characterized by great social upheaval, the year possibly as specific as 1964, as there are references to a good deal of pop culture of the period, specifically to the Beatles, i.e. the song sung by Sick Dick and The Volkswagens entitled “I Want To Kiss Your Feet.” References are made to rock stars with outré hair, and those familiar with Beatle mythology know that one of the Fab Four’s chosen “private names” was the “Para Noias,” referenced specifically by Pynchon in this book as the rock group The Paranoids (specifically described as having Beatles haircuts), who later in the book, sing a rude song about Humbert Humbert, the obsessed lover of nymphet Lolita---Nabokov’s novel (published in 1955, followed the 1962 Kubrick film) both works concerning decadent European culture obsessed with American innocence, an old theme dressed up in polka dots and swim suits.

Specificially, the stage is set when Oedipa sets off on her quest with “no idea she was moving toward anything new,” soon arriving in San Narciso (a reference perhaps less religious in inference and more mythical, i.e. California navel-gazing).

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop…and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected astonishing clairity as the circuit card had.…there were to both patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate…she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant.

Perhaps it is this “instant” that alerts her to an unconsious quest, a need in her life for meaning in the maze (as opposed to the culture of Tupperware parties) and when she is inadvertently dragged into a nightspot The Scope, Oedipa becomes passionately curious about a message on the latrine wall beckoning her to W.A.S.T.E., the neatly engineered lettering enhanced at the bottom with a penciled symbol of a muted horn. The muted horn is key.

One third of the novel gone, Oedipa and the reader have a quest in play, uncovering a crowded field of often seemingly unrelated material concerning an early European postal system, Thurn and Taxis, and an alternate, ultimately underground message delivery service, Trystero, developed in reaction to the control of one’s personal mail by crushing government intrusion from T&T.

Into the lunacy a batch of bizarre characters continue to slip into the quest, monikers like Arnold Snarb (a particular favorite) Macho Maas, Genghis Cohen, Inigo Barfstable, and even, God help us, Manny Di Presso. I wondered how many of these related in some way to the architecture of the plot, and how many just popped into the author’s mind as he wrote the book (which Pynchon recently commented he barely remembers).

I was also fascinated with Pynchon's drift into a vast collection of timely references, some of which sent me packing to Wikipedia and from there to related further sights and sources I, who taught art history as part of Humanties, had never heard of Remedios Varo—and what a pity, as her vibrant, lushly surreal and offbeat work is totally distinctive and a fitting enthusiasm for The New World of Oedipa. If a curious reader searches You Tube, a commercial for "Zachary All Suits " can even be found—I guarantee it! How far off the usual novel’s path is a Zachary All Suit? Such arcane references pepper the plot and demand knowledge or research from the committed reader, also more sharply defining Oedipa’s new world, including one hallucinatory night in the back alleys of San Francisco, searching for the muted horn wherever it might appear—in Chinatown, on the Great Highway, in Golden Gate Park. Some us have perhaps spent hallucinatory nights in the back alleys of San Francisco, but let’s not go into that…

Pynchon’s wide-ranging intellectual reach encompasses much that is mathematical and scientific, as when tossing references to lissajous figures, eschatology, or particularly the material having to do with Maxwell’s Demon---even some research into the latter, while providing a wee bit of light, was complex beyond the scope of a simple novel:

Maxwell's Demon is a metaphor that appears in The Crying of Lot 49 explicitly, but also pervades all of Pynchon's work. "Imagine a box filled with particles of gas moving at different speeds. Partition the box and place a trap door on the partition. Maxwell's Demon stands guard at the door, letting particles of certain speed go through while slower particles stay behind. Eventually the particles are sorted out into high speed, high temperature ones and low speed, low temperature ones. The entropy in the box has decreased without any work on the part of the Demon except for the mental work of sorting. Magically, the Demon defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics by allowing less disorder with no expenditure of energy."

Should the reader spend the time digging into the nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the information gleaned could easily be applied to a a significant portion of the novel, but each of us picks and chooses battles, and this work is rife with more opportunities that this reader (with a limited scientific education) can comfortably handle. Pynchon also spends considerable page on a Jacobean revenge tragedy… do I really want to investigate the lengthy section on The Courier’s Tragedy so it all falls into place as the rest of the novel does upon a second reading?

In Oedipus Rex, the main character is challenged to discover his parentage—and in discovering the mastery upends his life, commits patricide and self-blinds himself with the knowledge; it is difficult to think that Pynchon’s main character is given a name absolutely redolent of the classic play for no reason. While not searching for her parentage, Oedipa plunges into a deep mystery for some kind of meaning in a chaotic world, the world of the 1960’s when so much of the nation was in chaos, with multiple assassinations, a culture in freefall with an unexpected youthful rebellion, conventional endings turning tradition on it’s ear, music and literature reflecting such chaos: Rolling Stones, anyone? Even the so-called solutions to be ameliorated by Maxwell’s Demon cannot solve cultural dilemmas, simply because the machine cannot be operated.

The reader isn’t even sure of the title until the last page of the novel, and even then, the results of Oedipa's quest could be as open-ended as her afternoon Tupperware parties were not. Who is the Cryying of Lot 49? And will that knowledge, will Oedipa’s search be completed—or just beginning. The solved mystery becomes a starting point for The Crying of Lot 49, a title turning upon itself.

Once one hops on the Pynchon track of clues and references and funny names (some trailing meanings, some, one thinks, just for fun) this becomes a detective novel where the mystery remains, and perhaps will always remain, unsolved. The reader does not learn who killed Mr. Plum in the Library with a Cleaver; Life is not so neat and tidy, but perhaps, says Pynchon, the pursuit of mystery and the inexplicable is the meaning of life…and isn’t that the beautiful answer that always seeks a more beautiful question?

Oedipa Maas is made executor of the late Pierce Inverarity's estate , which seems to be involved in every business and affairs of San Narcisco. As she gets drawn into things, she meets a bizarre set of people, many concerned with avoiding using the US mail. A muted horn symbol appears everywhere and then there is Inverarity's stamp collection.....
A bizarre comedy that reads like a modern day Alice in Wonderland as an allegory of the absurd-which is basically the life we lead. Full of characters with Dickensian style names (I'd love to meet someone with Falopian as their surname !) and takes you into the underworld where conspiracy theories flourish ; how much is real or imagined in todays world. It's the humour characters and the turns of plot that keep you well on board , though it just lacks a certain something that would make it a true great.

This book was absolutely insufferable. The plot was convoluted, the characters were unlikable, and the prose was simultaneously confusing and boring. I didn't finish it. I suppose if you like post modernist crap?

After 152 pages of following the often frenetic forays of Oedipa Maas across the vast reaches of California and never-never land, her mental condition functioning at various levels of success, readers discover a picture of a daft world at a haphazard time;

Oedipa is first encountered returning from a Tupperware party (“whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue”) as an incurious suburban housewife with no particular interests indicated save for remnants of her marriage to an self-absorbed former used car salesman-disc jockey known as “Mucho” Maas, not particularly interested when one of his wife’s ex-lovers makes her executrix of his fortune, a good part of which may or may not reside in a postage stamp collection. As a careful reader may discover, the book is apparently not exactly about results, but the search for answers that ask more questions, perhaps for whatever truths are uncovered about the mysteries of life if we are willing to follow some unusual, perhaps arcane paths and ask significant questions along the way. Oedipa herself becomes mildly curious at first at the request, but as the adventure continues, is galvanized by her quest to uncover mysteries which seem to be connected to forces larger than herself, to open new realms on Life Avenue about which she had previously known very little. Lots of generalities here, but the book is loaded with specifics, many of which at first glance appear unconnected; stay the game.

The novel is set in 1960’s California, during a decade characterized by great social upheaval, the year possibly as specific as 1964, as there are references to a good deal of pop culture of the period, specifically to the Beatles, i.e. the song sung by Sick Dick and The Volkswagens entitled “I Want To Kiss Your Feet.” References are made to rock stars with outré hair, and those familiar with Beatle mythology know that one of the Fab Four’s chosen “private names” was the “Para Noias,” referenced specifically by Pynchon in this book as the rock group The Paranoids (specifically described as having Beatles haircuts), who later in the book, sing a rude song about Humbert Humbert, the obsessed lover of nymphet Lolita---Nabokov’s novel (published in 1955, followed the 1962 Kubrick film) both works concerning decadent European culture obsessed with American innocence, an old theme dressed up in polka dots and swim suits.

Specificially, the stage is set when Oedipa sets off on her quest with “no idea she was moving toward anything new,” soon arriving in San Narciso (a reference perhaps less religious in inference and more mythical, i.e. California navel-gazing).

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop…and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected astonishing clairity as the circuit card had.…there were to both patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate…she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant.

Perhaps it is this “instant” that alerts her to an unconsious quest, a need in her life for meaning in the maze (as opposed to the culture of Tupperware parties) and when she is inadvertently dragged into a nightspot The Scope, Oedipa becomes passionately curious about a message on the latrine wall beckoning her to W.A.S.T.E., the neatly engineered lettering enhanced at the bottom with a penciled symbol of a muted horn. The muted horn is key.

One third of the novel gone, Oedipa and the reader have a quest in play, uncovering a crowded field of often seemingly unrelated material concerning an early European postal system, Thurn and Taxis, and an alternate, ultimately underground message delivery service, Trystero, developed in reaction to the control of one’s personal mail by crushing government intrusion from T&T.

Into the lunacy a batch of bizarre characters continue to slip into the quest, monikers like Arnold Snarb (a particular favorite) Macho Maas, Genghis Cohen, Inigo Barfstable, and even, God help us, Manny Di Presso. I wondered how many of these related in some way to the architecture of the plot, and how many just popped into the author’s mind as he wrote the book (which Pynchon recently commented he barely remembers).

I was also fascinated with Pynchon's drift into a vast collection of timely references, some of which sent me packing to Wikipedia and from there to related further sights and sources I, who taught art history as part of Humanties, had never heard of Remedios Varo—and what a pity, as her vibrant, lushly surreal and offbeat work is totally distinctive and a fitting enthusiasm for The New World of Oedipa. If a curious reader searches You Tube, a commercial for "Zachary All Suits " can even be found—I guarantee it! How far off the usual novel’s path is a Zachary All Suit? Such arcane references pepper the plot and demand knowledge or research from the committed reader, also more sharply defining Oedipa’s new world, including one hallucinatory night in the back alleys of San Francisco, searching for the muted horn wherever it might appear—in Chinatown, on the Great Highway, in Golden Gate Park. Some us have perhaps spent hallucinatory nights in the back alleys of San Francisco, but let’s not go into that…

Pynchon’s wide-ranging intellectual reach encompasses much that is mathematical and scientific, as when tossing references to lissajous figures, eschatology, or particularly the material having to do with Maxwell’s Demon---even some research into the latter, while providing a wee bit of light, was complex beyond the scope of a simple novel:

Maxwell's Demon is a metaphor that appears in The Crying of Lot 49 explicitly, but also pervades all of Pynchon's work. "Imagine a box filled with particles of gas moving at different speeds. Partition the box and place a trap door on the partition. Maxwell's Demon stands guard at the door, letting particles of certain speed go through while slower particles stay behind. Eventually the particles are sorted out into high speed, high temperature ones and low speed, low temperature ones. The entropy in the box has decreased without any work on the part of the Demon except for the mental work of sorting. Magically, the Demon defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics by allowing less disorder with no expenditure of energy."

Should the reader spend the time digging into the nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the information gleaned could easily be applied to a a significant portion of the novel, but each of us picks and chooses battles, and this work is rife with more opportunities that this reader (with a limited scientific education) can comfortably handle. Pynchon also spends considerable page on a Jacobean revenge tragedy… do I really want to investigate the lengthy section on The Courier’s Tragedy so it all falls into place as the rest of the novel does upon a second reading?

In Oedipus Rex, the main character is challenged to discover his parentage—and in discovering the mastery upends his life, commits patricide and self-blinds himself with the knowledge; it is difficult to think that Pynchon’s main character is given a name absolutely redolent of the classic play for no reason. While not searching for her parentage, Oedipa plunges into a deep mystery for some kind of meaning in a chaotic world, the world of the 1960’s when so much of the nation was in chaos, with multiple assassinations, a culture in freefall with an unexpected youthful rebellion, conventional endings turning tradition on it’s ear, music and literature reflecting such chaos: Rolling Stones, anyone? Even the so-called solutions to be ameliorated by Maxwell’s Demon cannot solve cultural dilemmas, simply because the machine cannot be operated.

The reader isn’t even sure of the title until the last page of the novel, and even then, the results of Oedipa's quest could be as open-ended as her afternoon Tupperware parties were not. Who is the Cryying of Lot 49? And will that knowledge, will Oedipa’s search be completed—or just beginning. The solved mystery becomes a starting point for The Crying of Lot 49, a title turning upon itself.

Once one hops on the Pynchon track of clues and references and funny names (some trailing meanings, some, one thinks, just for fun) this becomes a detective novel where the mystery remains, and perhaps will always remain, unsolved. The reader does not learn who killed Mr. Plum in the Library with a Cleaver; Life is not so neat and tidy, but perhaps, says Pynchon, the pursuit of mystery and the inexplicable is the meaning of life…and isn’t that the beautiful answer that always seeks a more beautiful question?

Oedipa Maas is made executor of the late Pierce Inverarity's estate , which seems to be involved in every business and affairs of San Narcisco. As she gets drawn into things, she meets a bizarre set of people, many concerned with avoiding using the US mail. A muted horn symbol appears everywhere and then there is Inverarity's stamp collection.....
A bizarre comedy that reads like a modern day Alice in Wonderland as an allegory of the absurd-which is basically the life we lead. Full of characters with Dickensian style names (I'd love to meet someone with Falopian as their surname !) and takes you into the underworld where conspiracy theories flourish ; how much is real or imagined in todays world. It's the humour characters and the turns of plot that keep you well on board , though it just lacks a certain something that would make it a true great.

This book was absolutely insufferable. The plot was convoluted, the characters were unlikable, and the prose was simultaneously confusing and boring. I didn't finish it. I suppose if you like post modernist crap?

The author has said that he wished he has learned his lessons in writing this book. One can hardly disagree. The author writes COL49 as if he were a spastic genius in the fifth grade. Albeit it hasn't aged well, but the prose is so mucked up by encyclopedic entries as to make one very frustrated by all the times one must google things, such as 'sub rosa', for instance.

Thank God it's short, it's a putrefying, annoying, irritating novel. Even what the author comes up with that makes sense is forfeit in the face of a plot that never comes together and the utter randomness of events. If you like conspiracy theories, or wandering, I'd say this may very well be your novel. You could hardly go wrong, since you'll get lost in all the chaoticness of a mid-60s woman's head told through a prepubescent consciousness who would eventually write Gravity's Rainbow.

As you may be able to tell, I was frustrated a tad by the book. Not because I didn't understand it, but because it's such an abstruse example of a Heller/Burroughs fan who got too much into the brandy but didn't comprehend its subtler flavors. One can see why Pynchon is simply ashamed of the book years later (oh to see it on every book stand, yech!).

However the hotel room part, and the Tristero play part are at least interesting as short stories. I would read the book just for that, and then put it down midway, because none of the rest of it goes anywhere.

if you're not fully cognizant of its pregnancy then you're probably not going to enjoy The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon is going to spend the rest of CoL dissecting, attacking and critiquing the subtext. Note: this says nothing about your abilities as a reader or a person. It says more about CoL 49 than anything. I'd agree with many of the other reviewers that state CoL 49 didn't age well. I'd say that for casual readers under certain ages it's going to be a slog and pretty unfulfilling. I'd even go further and say that for most casual readers, CoL 49's mood will totally escape them. Now, what that's a reflection of is open to debate, but I say it's a flaw of the writer to a certain extent--not as a whole. But, for those out there that can apply the contextual relevance of the times against the backdrop of the blossoming atomic age with all it's promise, horrors, alienation and divisions then CoL 49 is most certainly worth a read. View this work with the kaleidoscopic necessity similar to that of Dr. Strangelove and you'll quickly decode much of what Pynchon is doing. At one point during my reading of CoL 49 I was thinking to myself that Pynchon has certainly devised a neat little literary cul-de-sac in which many will get trapped. Later, that's just about stated exactly. To say Pynchon writes with a wink and a nod to his target reader as he treats other sadistically is putting it lightly. Navel-gazers beware, you're marked men in Pynchon's crosshairs.

Relax, read and enjoy! If it ain't your cup o'tea, so be it. There's better Pynchon to be had.

The Crying of Lot 49 in which Oedipa Maas becomes the executor of her former boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity’s will is more of an “experience” than a traditional story. The postmodern “intellectual” novelette chronicling Oedipa’s peregrination through the middle 1960’s Southern California is filled with mysterious allusions enticing the reader to contemplate conspiracy theories. The paranoia of the sixties that questions government mind and culture control is an obvious theme of the novel. Oedipa attempts to discover if there is any reason to discover a secret escape through the Trystero in order to avoid the government’s social engineering of culture. The Trystero controls WASTE a secret mail service that has been avoiding government control since the Middle Ages.
The book was written at the height of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assignation of JF Kennedy, Beatlemania, free love and Martin Luther King. Although there was so much to say at the time, many young Americans were reading “The Book of the Dead” travelling “the bridge inward” and dropping LSD 25 (Pynchon 31, 61). The Crying of Lot 49 is figurative rather than “real”. It like the paintings of the surrealist Remdios Varos is a surrealistic escape. The reader first realizes he will enter the world of magic realism when Oedipa recollects her waking to a slamming door in a Mazatlán hotel and “it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby…” (Pynchon 10). The reader must be able to as Timothy Leary preached, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
Another theme of the book is Umberto Eco’s communication as a cultural phenomenon. The progressive sedation of the baby boomers to care more about their own self-centered freedom than that of society as a whole results in the book’s sequel begging ending. Oedipa, the curious protagonist is still searching, but doubts whether there is any point. Maybe the Trystero is just an invention of Oedipa’s mind (?).
The counter culture represented by the pot smoking Paranoids just copies the Brit bands hair and even accent. They enjoy stealing a boat and attempting to give it to the man but they have no creative or motivational depth. The Paranoids are merely parasites relying on others for their personal satisfaction. They spy on Oedipa and Metzinger having sex and offer nothing. They are not non conformists they are on the other hand sheep.
Kismet, the town Oedipa lives in, literally means a static repetitive circuit. The Tupperware parties symbolizing the monotonous life of a Northern Californian housewife do not hold the curious Oedipa. Oedipa is a woman, just a Californian housewife. She is the allegorical “Everywoman” and “Nowoman”.There are times when the book seems fraught with hidden meaning inviting the reader to spend hours of discovery and exploration. At other times the book deliberately mocks analysis giving false clues to literal-mimded readers who insist on trying to “solve” books like equations. The heroine Oedipa is a surrealistic image. She is the woman in the Varos painting, Invocacion.
In this painting the female child who represents Oedipa Maas actually holds the Tristero post horn and is ready to blow into it making sound. Furthermore, she holds Eve’s apple containing the knowledge of good and evil, but the long thin shadowy sinister men are more interested in each other than her. Just like Oedipa, even though she has a message, no man is interested or acknowledges her. Oedipa the only female character in the book has something to show or discuss but is ignored. The men in the book, to name a few, Much Mass the husband who uses LSD 25, the scientist, who explains the demon perpetual motion machine, the “Trystero” playwright, the Inverarity engineer office worker, the sailor and the lawyer(s) ignore her intellect.

What does a reader encounter in a Thomas Pynchon novel? Well, there's an offering of mock, but real-sounding, science and history; an assortment of cartoonish characters who, nonetheless, face moving existential questions and emotional issues; wonderful flights of the intellect that are both larky and profound; amazing writing featuring both strange associations and great insight; and a playful voice examining a troubled world of serendipitous connections. In the fast-moving THE CRYING OF LOT 49, a reader encounters all of these Pynchonesque elements, this time used by the Pynch to tell the story of young Oedipa Mass as she tries to determine whether Tristero, an alternate mail system appealing to society's outcasts and Ayn Rand-thinking engineers, is a rich man's hoax or a real service with deadly methods.

In TCoL49, Pynchon moves Oedipa through what is basically a fascinating and highly imaginative mystery set in California in the 1960s. This mystery concludes brilliantly in the novel's final chapter, where the crying of lot 49 (they're a selection of stamps at an auction) occurs. But along the way, there are many highpoints, which for me include: a performance of "The Courier's Tragedy", a hilarious parody of a Jacobean revenge play; the amusing Hollywood-like conjecture of the academic Emory Bortz; Oedipa's wandering and disturbing encounters with the muted horn; and the elusive metaphor of Maxwell's Demon, a perpetual motion machine that operates, in theory, like a philosophical system developed by the Scurvhamites, who have historical connection to Tristero.

This is actually my second reading of TCoL49 and my second time through my paperback edition, which has a March 1972 printing date ($.95). Since my copy has yellowed pages and a dry spine, I thought: Why not download a copy to my Kindle? That way, I can have a fresh copy but preserve space on my crowded bookshelves. But nope: TCoL49 is not available on Kindle. Harper (or whoever), please fix.

TCoL49 is a truly enjoyable book with a voice that is funny and still completely fresh. Highly recommended.

... did Pynchon deliberately leave out the line, or more precisely, the line segment that connects the circle with the triangle? Taken together, the three geometric elements (or is it four, to lapse into a Pynchonian mindset, or is that progress into...) form a muted horn, and is the symbol for Tristero, the alternate mail system that has been in competition, for centuries, with the establishment systems of Thurn and Taxis, of the Holy Roman Empire, through Wells Fargo, and the U. S. Postal system.

This is Thomas Pynchon's second novel, written in 1966. It is a thin work, perhaps a "pot-boiler" to keep him going, written between his first, and my favorite work, "V," in 1963, and his magnum opus, "Gravity's Rainbow," written in 1973. I've read them all, each not that long after publication, and decided it is time to re-visit them. Not even 150 pages, it is immensely rich, in the Pynchon style, combining obscure historical events, unlikely chance happenings, fragments of scientific history/theories, sexual romps, puns and song lyrics, always the more than a hint of "the orbiting ecstasy of true paranoia," the fear of the other, the teasing of conspiracy theories, and a character in quest of the truth(s). It is his most "accessible work," and therefore recommended to the first-time Pynchon reader.

The central character is Oedipa Maas, who had once been a mistress of the immensely rich Pierce Inverarity, and now has been named as executor of his estate. In the process, she repeatedly encounters signs and clues to the Tristero Empire. But is it all an elaborate hoax, she wonders, towards the end of the book? Pynchon is brilliant, and weaves actual historical events, and his complete fabrications, seamlessly. Where does the reality end, and the fantasy begin? For example, he includes the real events of submarines trying to circumvent the steel curtain dropped in the Dardanelles during World War I with the fictional account of a fight between Confederate boats and the Russian navy during the American Civil War, which gave rise to the Peter Pinguid Society, a spoof on the John Birch Society. He weaves "Maxwell's Demon" into his novel, like perhaps no one else has; the hypothetical intellectual construction of James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who formulated the laws of Thermodynamics. Caprice and whimsy are a constant in a Pynchon novel, a Plank's constant if you will, consider: "If miracles were....intrusions into this world from another, a kiss of cosmic pool balls..." Later he draws parallels between the DT's of an alcoholic, and the dt's of calculus. He postulates that the entire French revolution may have been caused by the Tristero, so that it could issue the Proclamation of the 9th Frimaire, An III, ratifying the end of the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly in France and the Lowlands.

Amidst such caprice, he embeds some wonderful zingers. Concerning a possible postal misprint from the US government, Maas's lawyer, Metzger says: "So they make misprints...let them. As long as they're careful about not pressing the wrong button, you know?" Or on the true need for the Tristero: "...onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system..."
The second time around, and the years of accumulated knowledge, plus Google, make Pynchon even more enjoyable, though the speculation of how much you "get" the author is still probably no higher than an 80%. Most readers seem to either love or hate him; I understand the demurs of the later, but I am clearly in the former.

Meanwhile, Maas hopes for one more clue as she awaits the crying of lot 49; although not Pynchon's best, it still deserves the full 5-stars.

It's California, 1965, and Oedipa Maas, 28, a practical but restless woman married to a small-town DJ, discovers she has been made executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a rich industrialist and her one-time lover. Confused but curious, she travels to San Narciso to carry out her duties. She soon begins to suspect she has stumbled upon a conspiracy - a vast, perhaps global-historical conspiracy that involves Inverarity, his lawyers, the employees of the Yoyodyne Corporation, and maybe even her husband and therapist. Haunted by a sense of impending revelation, Oedipa tries to penetrate the enigma, descending into an underworld of broken, lonely souls, cynical playwrights and mysterious booksellers; a shadowy "alternate America" where coincidences accumulate suspiciously and the postal system takes on a sinister cast. Is it coincidence or conspiracy? Or a giant hoax orchestrated by Inverarity for his posthumous amusement? As the mystery deepens, Oedipa edges perilously close to paranoia... Pynchon's slim volume has the density of a planet. This is the kind of book you will read several times in your life, and still won't exhaust its possibilities. On the most basic level, it can be read as an intellectual thriller. The narrative is consistent, the plot moves along rapidly, and the point of view remains stable. But a reading confined to this surface level does it little justice. Even forty years after publication it's still considered open to interpretation: some critics feel it is ultimately meaningless and impossible to interpret, while others have found it cohesive, and even ethically motivated. (One essay I've read even takes a "scientific" approach to the plot, finding secret meaning in the novel's probing of entropy, thermodynamics and information theory.) All, however, agree that this is a vital work and a postmodern classic. The book's description of signs that appear everywhere suggests two opposite poles that are equally terrifying: everything happens according to some grand system or conspiracy from which we are tantalizingly excluded, or everything happens out of pure chance. That's the semiotic nightmare Oedipa falls into, and it's the one we live in, too. If you like novels that challenge and stimulate your intellect rather than merely entertain, then this one's for you. Dan Brown fans need not apply.

I've never read Pynchon before, but his style, those winding, iridescent sentences seem like an important reference point for a lot of American authors who come after him, people like Don Delillo, Donald Barthelme, David Foster-Wallace, Johnathan Franzen, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson etc. He's able to synthesize obscurant historical references, pop culture, conspiratorial paranoia and drug use into this funky, swirling melange. It would almost be a kind of metaphysics, if it wasn't so kooky and consistently playful. Reading this, it feels like someone peeling off the surface of postwar American life, showing you this messy, bizarre, occasionally terrifying blend of forces that might have it in for you, or might just be yanking your chain. Or maybe both.

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...

Written in the middle 1960's about Californians, this book entails a open-relationship couple, a husband who takes LSD prescribed by his wife's psychiatrist (who is institutionalized for his incurable paranoia), a wife whose first extra-marital affair evolves to her flop's departing for Vegas with a 15-year old groupie, and numerous deaths by people who have some affiliation with Tristero.

And, between the beginning to the end, we know little about Tristero, just as little as protagonist Oedipa Maas, whose search for anything related to Tristero is the topic of this book.

The jokes are belied in not-too-hard-to-decipher names of characters (Mike Fallopian, Mucho Maas, Stanley Koteks, Mike Di Presso . . .), places or things (Tristero, San Narcisso, Fangoso Lagoons) and companies (Yoyodyne, the Scope, radio station KCUF . . .).

The writing is not as obvious. Oedipa runs about attempting to decipher clues in her friend's will - something characterized as hieroglyphics in this novel on numerous occasions. The hieroglyphical messages appear to be more within the text - the reader is required to unveil or decipher the clues Pynchon delivers to the reader as the events in this book are laden with symbolism.

This book can be read on many levels. But, its true meaning was to be read at the level which would be best characterized as that of a university English class. You can ignore the symbols, but that would defray from the jewels delivered throughout this novel. Read it slowly. Read it thoroughly. And, if it occasionally hops over your head, reread that passage. The details are worthy of your concentrated attention.

After several readings, I can say without hesitation that Lot 49 is my favorite book. Like most, I had a very difficult time with it at first, but I assure anyone that it IS a worthwhile read. Maybe even the most important American book of the late 20th century. We should all be aware of the kinds of plots "they" are hatching against "us" as we enter a new age, and Lot 49 is nothing if not an excellent spur to reflection on the topic.
Which is not to say that that's all it is. Pynchon's shortest, most straightforward novel is also a brilliant and devestating critique of the contemporary intellectual landscape (or lack thereof). It has seemingly infinite layers of meaning, and one can find a commentary on or critique of just about any aspect of this modern life in its pages. No offense to anyone, but if all you see in Lot 49 is a conspiracy story or a pretentious literary jumble, you should look again harder.
On a purely technical level, Pynchon's writing is intricate and beautiful, and he has a brilliant eye for those things that we tend to pass over blindly in our hurried lives.
To those who hated Lot 49, that's perfectly alright, but please make sure your disdain isn't merely due to a want of close reading. I think a complete understanding of the novel is probably impossible, but it CAN be understood. You'll be a richer person for trying, I promise.
J. Kerry Grant's companion is an excellent distillation of the enormous body of critical interpretation surrounding Lot 49, and it can offer a perfect handle on the book. It helped me enormously. If you're afraid it'll give away all the "amswers" and obliterate your own reading of the novel, don't be. If there's a lesson to be learned from Lot 49 (and there are many) it's that there are no right answers anyway. You have nothing to lose by reading either the novel or the companion. I couldn't recommend either highly enough.
Please, feel free to email me, whether or not you agree. I'd love to hear from anyone with an opinion.

...and perhaps the best single book written on the 1960's. While i will agree with other readers that this isn't Pynchon's best book it is still a great read and takes you places that you will want to re-visit periodically. Although ostensibly revolving around the heroine Oedipa Maas' attempts to probate the will of a former lover, The Crying of Lot 49 sweeps us up and down the west coast of a U.S. that is visibly coming apart at the seams. From a San Francisco where folks are "lookin' for a Good Time" to a southern California that is caught in a hollow booming suburbia and rising defense industry (Pynchon enthusiasts will immediately recognize Yoyodyne, an organization that also manages to drift into film in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai)we get a rare glimpse back into a time when just about anything seemed not only possible but likely. The Tristero network can be looked at as an odd but wonderful foreshadow of the Internet, and all too much else that at the time seemed Pynchon's fantasy has now come to pass. Unlike some other reviewers I regularly laughed myself sick -although at times it is a sick laughter. Conspiracy enthusiasts will be delighted to find that not only are They out to Get them, but They have been around much longer than you thought. Did it happen? was the whole thing a practical joke? read it & see. In the meantime, We STILL Await Silent Tristero's Empire.

I hated this book at the halfway point. Really. Wanted to launch it across the room. But a bit later things get oddly and uniquely interesting, and I got caught up. There are a few points (in particular Oedipa's journey thru san francisco) where it really is as if you are reading a different book from the one you started. This isn't necessarily a good thing, but here is it somehow works (mostly).

The book is in some ways an unwieldy mess, and I think you have to not get too hung up on every detail, allusion, pun and riddle. Does help to keep a dictionary and search engine handy, though. It's a novel that sort of teaches you along the way how to read it and what to pay attention to. This means you are likely to be confused for a while, possibly annoyed, but almost certainly surprised and possibly enlightened by the end.

I have only dabbled in reading a little "postmodern" literature, simply because I think most of it is over my head, and although I didn't get everything there was meant to get (not by a long shot), I feel as though I gained access to an interesting story about how ridiculous (or not) many conspiracy theories can be.
There are sooooooooo many questions I have, and sooooooo many references I didn't even know where really fact, but in that way, I kind of understand Oedipa's thoughts and feelings throughout the novel. I think that if I were more knowledgable, I wouldn't have been able to read this the way I did. And like all the puns in Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" I don't think it's as important to know everything that the author puts forth, I just think if you get the initial joke, it's enough. Maybe I'm wrong, but I read this for the story and not for the history lesson.
It took me a bit to get used to Pynchon's writing style, but after a few pages, I liked getting lost in the non-punctuated tangents he went off in in his sentences. The laughs were genuine, and the story almost surreal, as if the heat of San Narciso gets into the brain. I enjoyed this book, and feel as though several rereads will help to bring more into the light.

Whether a fact is discovered because it is unsettling, out of place, or merely noticed at random, that fact, when investigated, can sometimes reveal a whole alternative reality. Such was the experience of Oedipa Maas when she found, among obscene bathroom graffiti, a symbol of a muted bugle accompanied with a question, "Interested in some sophisticated fun?" This begins a bizarre, hallucination-like, Da-Vince-Code-resembling quest to understand this symbol, and the motives of a past lover, whom now she is assigned as co-executor of his will. This quest will reach back through the textual disputes of a Jacobean revenge play, to the renaissance ages in the low lands of Europe, to San Francisco and back again to a mythical suburb of Los Angeles, called San Narciso. Connecting these places and eras is an underground postal service created as an attempt to usurp one of Europe's ancient thrones by controlling its means of communication. Maas herself will ponder this conspiracy, finding it "so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke" Yet she also entertains the possibility that she is "fantasying some such plot, in which case [she is] a nut...out of [her] skull." What explains such an outrageous plot?

This novel shoots off metaphors in every direction, (or is it all one big metaphor?) and a great deal of the mental energy one spends with it will certainly lay in trying to answer the question "So what does it all mean?" Surely Pynchon did not sit down merely to write a nice story about an ancient underground postal service that now caters to San Francisco's social misfits and outcasts. So what DOES it all mean? Paradoxically, the themes of disconnectedness and entrapment play heavily. In the first chapter, Oedipa reflects:

"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..... If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"

Pynchon suggests that this tower is particularly modern, and he even hints that it is particularly American. By the end of the novel, she has an idea of the tower, it is "a great digital computer, the zeros and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless." Her anxiety is an experience of vertigo before the virtual noise and bottomless web of modernity. It is that noise that cuts her off from her husband, and from meaning in general. What should be one line of communication, one postal service, has split into two: an official, government sponsored (and imposed) line and an underground line. We can certainly sense political dimension to Oedipda's predicament, but it is not only political. It reaches through all of experience, it is the foundation of San Narciso and is her tower. She despairs that a nation could "allow" such a town as San Narsico. Pierce Inverarity, Oedipda's former love, owned San Narciso, and the legacy that he passes to Oedipa, "was America."

With some thought, some piecing together of his clues, we can come closer to an understanding of this novel, but we can never be quite sure. There are layers of parallel stories (Oedipa, the Couriers tragedy, the Gallipoli film), where people are on a hunt to piece together a cohesive narrative, that may or may not exist. Even as the novel conludes, the extent and nature of this postal service, the Truth, is not revealed. Who is the secret man who bids on Lot 49? Is our pursuit just another layer to the novel's game? Have we involved ourselves in yet another indecipherable web, that web that is called "The Crying of Lot 49"? Is it a metaphor for modernity or a layer of modernity?

Yet, all of this remains a purely intellectual enterprise. Shouldn't the novel (or, The Novel) involve joy as well at the mind? Unless one takes pleasure in a literary rubix cube, I would not call this a satisfying book. Once you delve into the puzzle of this novel, one is rewarded with the stock themes of post-modernism: disconnectedness, entrapment, endless webs of white noise, meaninglessness, anxiety, reflections on The Word, the metaphor, and their respective levels of inadequacy. At some point it has to be interesting for its own sake. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of a novel in in the reading. Call me sentimental, call me a philistine, but pass me the Dickens!

Decades before THE X-FILES made paranoia about conspiracies standard fare for popular culture, there was Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (it is not a coincident that man X-FILES websites also feature forums discussing Pynchon's books). The notion that there might be a "World inside the world" (in Don Delillo's memorable phrase) had never before truly been explored in either high or popular culture, in pulp or serious fiction, in movies or TV. Or almost. THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in both novel and film had presented a haunting image of a government conspiracy, and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS was the great fifties classic of justified paranoia, but no work before had ever envisioned conspiracy on such a grand, international, and all pervasive scale. What is even more distrubing about this book is that the conspiracy it presents is hidden in plain sight. The protagonist of the novel, Oedipa Maas, is utterly unaware of the existence of the Tristero, yet as the book gains force she realizes that its marks can be found in every corner of society.

This short novel is the perfect introduction to Thomas Pynchon. Although I thoroughly enjoy his work, I will be the first to admit that he is not for everyone. His writings contain too many obscure references (sometimes of an academic nature; frequently not), his style can at times be dense, his narrative style not always very transparent. I personally find that he repays the effort, but because I had to struggle through the several pages in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW or V. that are less than obvious in their import I can understand what it is like for those who find most of his pages tough going. THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is, however, not merely his most accessible work (largely because of its short length) but arguably his finest book. I would absolutely recommend that anyone considering exploring Pynchon begin with this.

What is remarkable is how much content is contained in the novel's less than two hundred pages of text. It is one of those books in which almost nothing seems to happen, and yet seems stuffed to the brim. If one sums up the action of the novel, it seems extraordinarily slim: a woman goes to help as executor of the estate of a former lover of hers, inadvertently discovers an international conspiracy to provide an alternate mail delivery system that seems to function anarchistically to undermine the establish order, and attempts to learn all she can of the identity and existence of the mysterious Tristero. Most of the book consists in the pondering of clues. None of it labors over answers. It is also not a book that delves deeply into character analysis. Apart from Oedipa, there is not a single character that could, in E. M. Forster's famous parlance, be described as a "round" character. The novel is populated by what he would describe as "flat" characters (not necessarily a criticism, since as Forster points out all of Dickens's characters are flat). The book doesn't even seem to want to tell a story. What it wants to do is evoke a mood of disassociation, of dislocation. It wants to leave us with a sense of the unreality of our most ingrained assumptions. And it does this brilliantly.

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is a pivotal modern work of literature for another reason: it was one of the first serious works of literature that seems to be on easy terms with popular culture. Indeed, though I have no evidence for this, I would imagine that one of its major influences may have been THE TWILIGHT ZONE. It could be cited as a direct or indirect influence on a number of subsequent cultural products, including the aforementioned THE X-FILES. But the main reason to read this remarkable short work is that it is one of the finest short novels written in the past half century in English.

People seem to be responding to other comments, so I have some. I am near ending the book, so far it is interesting, unfortunatley, much of the symbolism has gone over my head. I understand the basic ideas, perhaps I am over thinking the novel, but after reading these other reviews which have been inflated with big words and little content, I am not certain that I am on the same plane of intellect as some of my fellow readers. What I will say, trying to get though the intellectual snottiness exhibited here by readers who dare not insult Pynchon ( a human- flawed as his writing certainly is, too), is that this book is interesting on a surface level even if all of the symbolism is ignored, just follow the thoughts the writing gives about the world, as you read it, you must be aware, but you must follow your own instinctual ideas concerning content. That is where this book is a grand success- it is interesting enough to keep attention focused, well written to allow thought, deep to allow much interpretation. Don't be dissuaded by other reviews; get what you can from the book...there is so much to get, all will be rewarded. For example,I found a theme present in the book to deal with the projecting of worlds and perceptions of worlds ( the tower comparison and the theatre director's speech , as well as Pierce's influence from his own projection). Before I go, a final comment: Though Pynchon's writing is spectacular (such as near page 100 where he describes all those she sees with the mute horn sign), reading Grisham does not mark a degenerating society, rather intellectual ecstasy, found from sniffing too many musty volumes another intellectual ( working in a system that is fed by Grisham readers) told one to read, marks a social degeneration that is based on a reluctance to admit equality, freedom of ideas, and the notion that reading of any type is good... some may not be fortunate enough to only enjoy high literature, but I never heard any Grisham reader claiming to be reading Fitzgerald, they know what they enjoy, and they know its place.

...although that's still not very accessible. But this book is worth the trouble of grappling with the author's obscure allusions, open-ended questions, and maddening mixture of the deadly serious and the utterly nonsensical. Still, compared to his massive tomes GRAVITY'S RAINBOW and V., for instance, the general outline of CRYING OF LOT 49 is relatively comprehensible. Oedipa Maas, a confused child of the sixties, stumbles upon what may or may not be a centuries-old conpiracy as a result of being named "executrix" of her wealthy, eccentric former lover's estate. The sinister, fascinating glimpses of the "tristero" that increasingly obsess her may be genuine insights into a real but previously hidden reality, an indication of her descent into paranioa and madness, or a colossal practical joke. She has no way of determining which, and neither do we. On some levels this is frustrating, but Pynchon's hilarious, eccentric, beautiful prose and the original, fascinating plotline keep your interest, and certainly satisfied me, at least. His irreverant takes on the superficiality of both the counterculture and suburban America, the banality of bad Jacobean revenge melodramas, and the illogic of scientists, historians, and almost everyone else continue to delight me on rereadings. It may not be as great an achievement as his longer masterworks, but I would rather read this more enjoyable and accessible (although still profound and troubling) little book anyday.

Do exist!!!

For anyone who needs help navigating them, this is a good place to start! Or end! I'm not sure which. But it's one of the two and it probably depends on your particular situation.

And Mucho Maas? Hilarious description of mundane struggles! I spit my coffee out all over myself . . . (you may notice from my other reviews that spitting my drink all over myself is basically how I measure whether something is hilarious or not. No spill = only amusing at best!)

Here's a hint of that brilliance: "Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, or their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at . . ."

Unlike some other readers/critiques that I've read elsewhere, I don't get the sense from this book that life's meaning is lacking. Oedipa is not engaged in a futile game (whether put on by herself or her ex-lover Inverarity).

Instead it's more like the Ultimate Shades of Grey: meaning lies in the neglected middle. So if you're too caught up in a set perspective / B&W thinking / or mental heuristics - then you'll never find it. Her search looks confusing because it is confusing. That's the thing about the neglected grey areas, sometimes what you're seeing has significance and is relevant to your search other times it probably is just random stuff.

Kinda reminded me of an old alchemy drawing I saw once, where a bunch little people were standing on various high points of a maze looking for the way out of it. The text with that pic indicated that most of them will not make it out.

A former resident of California myself, I've seen the hieroglyphic streets. They exist! This book and my own experience with them reminds me of the Egyptian practice of putting hieroglyphs in the tombs of the dead so they can navigate the afterlife successfully.

Is that what Pynchon is doing for us? How about you read it and decide for yourself?

It IS hard to read in parts, and I would call it a mind-bender or mind-blender, but definitely recommend! Just maybe not all in one sitting . . .

~ - ~ - ~
I'm pretending you know nothing about this book or the author for the sake of this review.
~ - ~ - ~
.....Firstly, Thomas Pyncheon is clearly a genius, and is a very powerful writer.
Too bad it is almost always nearly impossible to figure out what the heck he is saying, or even worse, what the characters in his novels are doing.
(And what continent are they on now?).
He can make a metaphor that sends shivers down my spine about the "dt" in an equation describing a rocket's trajectory. (But I still don't know what the heck happened to Katjie!)- These complaints refer to "Gravity's Rainbow" and "V".
~ - ~ - ~
.....Luckily for us, "The Crying of Lot 49" is the exception, and a great book.
The surface story is clear, and relatively easy to follow. Oedipa Maas finds herself appointed executrix of the estate of a wealthy former lover, in Southern California.
After a series of bizarre coincidences, and meetings with what must be some of the most eccentric characters on earth, she begins to discern a series of "clues". These signs may be pointing to the existence of a vast conspiracy sweeping the city, state, and or Nation.
Alternatively, they may be the manifestations of her own mental breakdown into paranoia. Or possibly an elaborate joke left behind by the deceased.
~ - ~ - ~
...... The beauty of this book is in how we are drawn into the web along with Oedipa, seeing the connections, pondering their meaning.... until we are certainly feeling as paranoid as she.
I found this book very readable and entertaining, unlike other Pyncheon novels like "Gravity's Rainbow" which is exhausting to try to read.
~ - ~ - ~
..... If you've heard of Pyncheon, or just want a sample of a great 20th century writer, this is definitely the book I'd recommend. It is entertaining and satisfying, as well as thought provoking.
You could listen to educated readers debate the merits of different works by Pyncheon. I suggest you not waste your time. Instead, take a look at this book.

The first chapter of this novel is quite good -- brings out some interesting characters with some very funky names (Oedipa? Mucho? A shrink named Dr. Hilarius?) with keen senses of humor. It ends strongly, with the image of Oedipa imagining herself as Rapunzel and that image just running away and picking up steam, doing its own stuff, quite alive as the chapter closes out.

Unfortunately, the rest of the five chapters don't come near the intensity of the first chapter. And when Pynchon goes headlong into the Jacobean play ("The Courier's Tragedy"), he comes out all alone, his readers left behind on the other side, dead cold and wondering just what the heck happened to this novel.

When all is said and done, this book just doesn't quite jibe, doesn't quite work. That's not to say that it's a total failure -- in spots, Pynchon's incredible language is still there, like an oasis in the middle of a desert, not to mention some moments of genuine hilarity (like when Oedipa puts on layer after layer of clothing before playing strip poker and the aerosol can zipping around the room like a busted balloon). But for me, these parts just weren't enough. To have to wade through the rest of the gobbledygook just wasn't worth it.

There are four possibilities in The Crying of Lot 49: you have found the truth, you are imagining the truth, someone has created a huge conspiracy to trick you into thinking you've found the truth, or you believe that the conspiracy is the truth when it is not, and in fact you have gone crazy.
Finish The Crying of Lot 49 and see that Tristero may have been Jesus. To believe in something, enough for that belief to have any power at all, is to also put yourself at risk of accidentally creating an illusion of power that didn't exist in the first place. A problem indeed. Anything you want, you will get, even if it's not real. For example, I don't even know if that analogy (Tristero/Jesus) was intentional. But if I believe it is, I'll be able to write an essay about it. I'm not being universalist here, just trying to continue where Oedipa left off. I'm an un-universalist, if you need to know.
I don't know if I can find a connection between the potsmasters of Tristero and the disciples of Christ, but the beauty of analogy (the fifth possibility) leaks out between the two Books and falls through this review.
Personally, I don't think this was that postmodern. It may have that title, but in many ways it can exist purely on a plot-driven level, and most postmodern novels can't. Thomas Pynchon himself is not present, but talks only through the characters and events of the story the way all those normal non-postmodernists do.
And, by the way, Thurn and Taxis reminded me of my choice of banking institutions: Wells Fargo, whom I dislike. Those black marauders that charge me outrageous fees and ridiculous charges, who own the night and sabotage my loved ones!

This is the first book I wilfully read twice. The first time I dream-read through the entire thing totally lost in all the names of strange people and corporations and pacts and deals, knowing only that it had something to do with mail and history, knowing only that there was a new twist, a new bit of learned information almost EVERY SINGLE PAGE, so much information crammed into one small book that I thought my head would explode. It wasn't an enjoyable read.

But then I read it again (God knows why, because so many people liked it and maybe I missed something?) And the second time, I loved it. In the short space of 150+ pages, Pynchon weaves in an ellaborate plot (that never gets resolved, if you haven't heard from the other reviews already) and poignant characters within the frame of a novel very beautifully written and a lot more lyrical the second time around. Yes, people have accused him of being overwrought, but that is exactly what I love about his prose in this book. I read Gravity's Rainbow and enjoyed the hyper-hallucinatory-reality of that book as well, but in some ways, I think that some of his best prose are in this little book. They're dense but not digressive. They're very consice and he skillfully manages to convey just the right discription of a sunset combined with just the right metaphor for an emotion to evoke a mood with both an eerie somnolent glow, like sitting on the safe-side of mountains whose opposite side is a hellish destination, but you spend your entire time trying to get to there, finding that it's impossible as you gaze at the red horizon. That's how this book feels. It's like coming so close to the truth but finding that it's too deep or too far.

This book, along with V, are exellent 1960's Pynchon works, and for those who haven't read him and have only heard about him, yes, while his works DO have typical 'Pynchonian' tags or quirks to them, ultimately, each of his works are incredibly different. Gravity's Rainbow was excellent, but it possessed a very different kind of magic that you will find herin, or in V, or even in his short stories (Slow Learner). I know that some people have a problem with his work, and I don't think it's because those people want answers spoonfed to them, but because they may feel that Pynchon himself didn't know what he was writing about and perhaps that was the case. But if anything, that only adds to the mystic quality for me. He made something with so many layers to it, that he could sit back and allow the reader to gaze upon it, think of it what they will, connect with particular characters or find hidden gems that the author may not have even intended. In the end, this book hangs on the psyche like a howl in the wind, a mourning of a time lost, a time that no one remembers and may not have even existed.

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.
Clearly, despite "Lot 49"s brevity, there is a lot at stake, and in its own way this fact makes the book appealing. Lacking the heft of Pynchon's tomes (notably V. and Gravity's Rainbow) "Lot 49" is pure, distilled Pynchon. This means that if you read "Lot 49" you don't exactly get the Pynchon experience, but you also don't have to wade through miles and miles of intricate, yet beautiful, prose to see what Pynchon is trying to say. As such, think of "Lot 49" as an introduction. If you like what you see, then acquire another Pynchon book and read on. If you don't like it, then perhaps Pynchon isn't your flavor.

Pynchon lets the threads dandle in this oblique satire of suburban sprawl, conspiracy theories, and sixties hipness. Oedipa Maas, wife of Mucho, sleuths her way to uncertainty. She's cold on the trail of a shadowy organization called the Tristero that competes for the postal trade and uses a muted trumpet as its symbol. Who knew that Miles Davis was part of a worldwide mail delivery feud? A cat with no shortage of curiosity, Oedipa fumbles into some memorable, slightly perverse encounters. She flees the clutches of a randy esoteric, witnesses the breakdown of her psychiatrist, and meets The Paranoids, faux mop tops who write songs about frugging. The more Oedipa learns about the Tristero the less she knows; further, she cannot dismiss the possibility that she's the victim of an elaborate practical joke.
In one overly long stretch of this short post-modernist novel Pynchon indulges in some sanguinary Jacobean drama. More satisfying is his description of southern California: several decades before Orange County morphs into a diorama of the body snatched, Pynchon anticipates the dislocating effect of exit ramps, strip malls, and those fathomless planned communities that are everywhere and nowhere. The search for order and meaning, the novel implies, ultimately leads to frustration, to some realization that the universe is chaotic, even random. Pynchon is all head, no heart. His other novels are maddeningly inaccessible, which of course makes them a kind of template for the current crop of young wise-acre American writers who favor clever gimmicks and shun human feeling.

I first ran across this short novel in college, when a close friend was assigned to read it. I picked it up in her dorm room and read the first few chapters, and when I told her I was enjoying its eccentricities, she looked at me strangely (and a little painfully) and said that we must have very different literary tastes.

It wasn't until I finally sat down to finish it that I understood what she meant. The novel slowly devolves from a humorous, slapdash account of a suburban housewife forced to face her past into a hallucinatory exploration of paranoia and conspiracy theories.

Pynchon does an excellent job of blurring the lines between the characters' realities, actions, and beliefs. He gradually introduces so much confusion to the tale that by the end, I wandered, terrified, through the prose as Oedipa so wandered the streets of San Francisco, desperately hunting for answers.

By the end, I had NO idea what the book was about and was relieved to finally close it. Thank God it was short, or I'd really be pissed. Like Oedipa's questions about the shadowy nature of Trystero, my questions about what actually happens in this book will never be answered.

For a complete discussion, visit my book review site, Melody & Words!

Thomas Pynchon's novel of postal conspiracies, the dawn of the counter-culture, and the relaxed social norms of 1960's Southern California is considered classic enough to make Time Magazine's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. This is opposed to the year 1966, when an unnamed critic from this same magazine, in reference to this same book, lamented, "What is the meaning of the gibberish literature that is currently being published as fast as it can be gibbered?" I mention these things for two reasons: Mainly because I found the snarky commentary by Time's unknown reviewer to be funnier than anything I read in 'The Crying of Lot 49', but also because I suspect that the opinion on this book still ranges between classic and gibberish.

Despite its intricate wordplay and oddball narrative - characteristics that certainly have their charms - there are several reasons why I didn't connect with 'Lot 49'. The primary one is that Mr. Pynchon's writing comes across as very self-satisfied. I could probably study 'Lot 49' for a long time, and find something new years from now, but I just couldn't muster much interest in the clues he left during my first reading. I found myself racing to the end of this short book, on past the standard post-modern ambiguous ending, and glad to move on to something else.

Oedipa Maas, housewife, is asked to serve as executrix for the estate of her former lover, the mutli-millionaire Pierce Inverarity. As she delves deeper into the labyrinth of Pierce's holdings, she discovers (maybe) a strange conspiracy concerning an ages old postal feud, one that, once noticed, seems to stretch into every facet of life. Aside from some rather dated commentary on the lifestyles of the mid-sixties, the book's main thrust appears to be not so much the mystery that Oedipa uncovers, but the existential effect it has on her.

I feel like much of 'The Crying of Lot 49' is cleverness for cleverness' sake (like the names Oedipa Maas and Pierce Inverarity, for example). In this way it reminds me of David Foster Wallace's fiction - original, skillful, but ultimately unsatisfying. (I suppose I should say that Wallace reminds me of Pynchon, since Pynchon came first - but I was already familiar with DFW). Actually, I've come to realize that I feel this way about most post-modern lit, and certainly about 'Lot 49' - that it lacks substance (my disclaimer here is that I often feel like these books would have held a lot more appeal for me when I was a younger man). It's as if the author, highly educated and incredible facile as a writer is at a loss for something pertinent to say, and, in order to avoid churning out a morality play, instead turns to self-absorbed tales of highly educated and incredibly facile characters who are at a loss for something pertinent in their lives. This sort of writing would naturally appeal to highly educated, incredibly facile people - especially those who feel they're still missing something from life. But while they may identify with the situation, I don't think they'll find any balm for their misery except company.

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

This probably isn't a book I would have picked up to read on my own. I'd heard of the author before and had considered picking up his head-trippy "Gravity's Rainbow" at some point, but I didn't feel the need to look deeper into his work. But I got a used Kindle for Christmas that came with a lot of books already installed on it, including the aforementioned "Rainbow" and a second novel by the author, "The Crying of Lot 49." And I figured that so long as I had access to the book, why not give it a look? Pynchon is known for writing surreal and confusing novels, but I figured it would be interesting, if nothing else.

In the end, I feel mixed in feeling. On the one hand, "The Crying of Lot 49" certainly made me think, if only to try to unravel the convoluted twists and turns of the plot. But I finished the book feeling thoroughly baffled and unsatisfied, and feel the book was a classic case of style over substance.

"The Crying of Lot 49" follows Oedipa Maas, a California native who finds herself the unwilling executor of the estate of a former lover, a billionaire with an eccentric sense of humor. As she travels to another town to oversee his final affairs, she finds herself uncovering cryptic clues that point to an ancient conspiracy involving an ongoing feud between two mail companies, Trystero and Thurn und Taxis. Distracted from her original reason for leaving home, she has an affair with a sleazy lawyer, travels a fictional Southern-California city with a beatnik boy band, investigates a little-known Edwardian play that might have hinted at an age-old conspiracy, is taken hostage by her ex-Nazi psychiatrist, and is taunted by a mysterious symbol of a muted post horn and the underground postal company it represents. And as she's sucked further into an underworld she never thought existed, she has to decide for herself whether Trystero is real, an elaborate hoax by her dead lover, or a product of her own oncoming insanity.

Maybe there's some sort of social/political commentary or underlying symbolism in this book that goes straight over my head... but I found myself struggling to understand what was going on. Pynchon leaps from topic to topic and from scene to scene without making much of an effort to focus on any of them. A detailed description of Mucho, Oedipa's husband, in the beginning of the novel makes the reader think he's going to play a big part in the story, but he only gets one more scene before being swept aside and forgotten. Various other fascinating topics -- the bones of WWII soldier casualties being used to make charcoal cigarette filters, a boy trying to negotiate a truce between humans and dolphins, a lawyer on the run from his own client, a group of children who hold secret and strange meetings/playtimes at night and nap during the day -- are brought up once, perhaps twice, and then tossed to the side. Any of these ideas could have made an excellent story on their own, or at least a fascinating side plot, but Pynchon seems content to use them merely to showcase how weird humanity is, without bothering to flesh them out any.

The characters themselves are fairly flat, usually consisting of little more than a weird name (Oedipa Maas, Dr. Hilarius, Genghis Cohen, Mike Fallopian, etc.), an occupation, and maybe a bizarre quirk if they're lucky. Oedipa herself is fairly uninteresting, so devoid of personality that it's hard to sympathize with her even as her world falls apart around her. The most interesting character was Dr. Hilarius, and sadly he only gets a couple of scenes.

Also, very little in this book is cleared up by the end. The great mystery of the book (does Trystero exist, or is it a hoax/delusion?) is never solved, and even the title isn't explained until practically the last line of the book. The book comes to an abrupt end just as Oedipa is making some headway in her investigation, as if the author couldn't think of a good ending and just shipped off his manuscript once he finished the page he was on. If you're expecting a novel with a neat conclusion, you'll find this maddening.

I admit to enjoying this trippy ride while it lasted, and it treated me to some fun mental imagery as I read -- I particularly enjoyed Oedipa's all-night wandering journey through the city, and her encounters with the weirdness there. But I'm guessing that Pynchon's work, and probably post-modernism in general, isn't for me. This feels less like an actual story and more like a rambling, random stream of consciousness with a mere thread of a plot worked in to string it together. If you like a surreal social commentary, even one as dated as this one (it was published in the '60s, and it rather obviously shows), you might enjoy this, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone expecting an actual story and/or conclusion

The Crying of Lot 49 must have seemed incredibly witty when it first appeared in the mid-60's. This satire, which follows the twists and turns of Oedipa Maas' adventures in being the executor of a dead friend's will is a satire on Southern California culture in the mid-60's.

The back of this book compared it to Joyce's Ulysses; while I won't doom Lot 49 with such unfortunate company, it, like Ulysses, is probably more admired by critics than actually enjoyed by readers. The prose is intentionally dense, and the characters and events, which are set just before the rise of the hippie culture in the late 60s, seem almost quaint in comparison to what the 1960s are remembered for forty years later.

While the first 30 pages are easily the toughest to get through, the story starts to move along after that following an intereting, if not particularly compelling, conspiracy angle. To Pynchon's credit, I didn't feel that the book was artificially lengthened in order to give the story heft--at 150 pages, Lot 49 is surprisingly brief for a critical darling.

Lot 49 reads like a poor-man's Joseph Heller, and it hasn't aged well. But, underneath it all you can pick up some interesting commentary about California just before flower power.

Because her husband is chasing after young girls and because her psychiatrist is tripping on LSD, Oedipa ends up turning to strangers for help in finding the "Tristero." She does not know what the "Tristero" is, or even if it exists, but since it is connected to her ex-boyfirend, Pierce, and since she feels trapped in her normal life she decides to search all over California for evidence of the "Tristero."
As Oedipa tries to make sense of all the evidence she has she ends up growing more isolated and paranoid. She wonders if it is some grand scheme against her set up by Pierce. She feels more evidence should lead to the truth, whereas the book shows it only makes her increasingly confused. The book leads to the point where Oedipa has two choices: continue looking for the truth of the "Tristero" or give up and go insane.
The novel is on the short side being only 152 pages, and some could probably be omitted. Many scenes are there to confuse the reader just as Oedipa becomes increasingly confused. There are different scenes that repeat the same point 4 or 5 times (e.g. more information leads to confusion, there are only 2 choices with no gray area). The novel ends with Oedipa still in her search for the "Tristero." If you like a novel with complete closure, and if you like to know what happened to all the characters, then this is not the novel for you.
I gave this novel 3 stars because there were enjoyable scenes, and I do agree with some of the points and ideas Pynchon brings up in this satire. However, I am not fond of the repetitiveness and lack of closure.

...and inspired a LOT of graffiti in my college days- muted post horns, garbage cans, D.E.A.T.H. yep, if you were at Vassar in the 80's, that was me. There's not much to NOT like about this book, and if you don't like something you'll be past it and on to the next thing in a jiffy. I haven't read it for 20 years, but I just dug up an old signed copy and felt like adding my two cents.

You'll like it. Perhaps not right away, but eventually you'll find it's become stuck to you.

c.

ps I'm kidding about the signed copy... gotcha!

One problem with social satire, even at its most perceptive and subversive, is that it becomes dated almost immediately if the author focuses on current trends and cultural references. This novel by the otherwise masterful Pynchon might still be useful for fans of his experiments with language and his unconventional plot constructions. But for the rest of us, this book's badly outdated references, overwrought prose, incongruous conspiracies, and sheer mid-60s detached irony are tiresome and increasingly pointless. It was surely the fashion of the time, in satirical writing, to construct a shell of a plotline that is then used to explore eccentric characters and their shallow connections to the impersonal anomie of modern life. Fair enough, but the hipsters and literati of 1966 were probably the only parties likely to be wowed by this book's self-obsessed puns and inside-joke allegories. But even if you can stomach the dated references, this novel's laborious dialogue and shallow character interactions all swamp a thin plotline that goes nowhere except for the unenlightening self-knowledge gained by the already very thinly-constructed lead character. This novel is probably still a worthy masterpiece for those readers who find it rewarding to conquer a novel that makes reading a work of labor. But for those looking for enlightenment, or even just a rewarding or fun challenge, you'd surely prefer something more timeless and less self-obsessed. [~doomsdayer520~]