V. (Perennial Classics)

When it was published, V. won something called the William Faulkner Prize for First Novels. At the time Faulkner was at the pinnacle of his reputation, if not his writing career. He'd recently won the Nobel Prize. Faulkner has always been known as a relatively difficult read because of his fragmented plots. He often gives a few chapters of a story and then suddenly he seems to begin another story. Only later do you realize the stories are weaved together. I think Pynchon's receiving this award says something of the book V: in terms of plot, V is Faulknerian to an extreme, and to a fault, in my opinion. Someone has said in these collected reviews that V is a theme in search of a story. That is true. Pynchon does not deliver a story, which is one very important measure of the genre, i.e. the novel.

I think the book is also short on character development. Though there are many memorable characters (Profane seems to be most people's favorite), none is central to the story. Neither Profane nor Stencil carry the action of the story. Other lesser characters take up so much of the book that there is no center. The centrifugal nature of the storytelling flings everything and everyone to the fringes. Things happen to the characters, but the characters seem to have very little influence on what happens. That depiction of fragmentation is another theme at work, I would say: i.e. Pynchon's philosophical hobbyhorse that states existence and events are entropic, and humanity is simply another bit of flotsam buffeted by it all. This is a bonafide theme of modern and postmodern literature, but still I'm left wanting more of a story, more of central character to study.

If you're a Pynchon fan already, then you will probably enjoy this book.
If you're not or if you've never read him, you're better off starting with another book.
Personally, for me this was the most difficult Pynchon novel to get through.
If you like the vagueness and dark conspiracy side of Pynchon's style, then you may enjoy this even more than Gravity's Rainbow. If you're expecting the humor of Vineland or Mason and Dixon, you may be disappointed.

All of Pynchon's books are hard to read because of his twisted syntax, and this is no different.
The story is about uninteresting, uninvolving people.
The story seems to exhibit a fair amount of misogyny, since there is a climatic scene where the herione is shown to have undergone a number of horrible body modifications due to her greed and promiscuity. Futhermore, she is shown to be attacked, robbed, and fatally wounded by a group of street urchins while the hero looks on without acting to come to her aid. I found this to be very sickening.
The rest of the book is very smug and arrogant too, in my opinion. I've put a lot of effort into trying to read Pynchon over the years, and I feel it has been entirely wasted. I am very bitter about this, I freely admit.

A brilliant first novel which spurred me forth into the literary world at the age of 18. Also, a cunning satire of the world of
intellectual, preserved, prominent disdain versus the world of the street-smart loser. Very clever. Also the first to glorify and explicate the inanimate woman.
What those-who-are would prefer women to exist as. With an ivory hairclip
and a star sapphire in the navel. Ornamentation and device.
But this novel is still a precis of postmodernism, a bible
for the other kids who wanna know what's up.
And immensely accessible, unlike some of Pynchon's other novels.
So read it and see if you view the world in the same way.
You won't.

I don't understand most of the criticisms of this novel. In V. I found engaging writing, characters I was interested in (even if not personally attached to), and an intricate but palpable narrative. Despite what some of the negative reviews will have you think, V. is not overly erudite or confusing; in fact at times I thought the figurative details were almost too obvious and heavy-handed. It requires no more thought to analyze than any other quality work of literary merit.

And despite my copy being about 550 pages, the novel didn't drag or lose wind at all. This is the shortest long book I've ever read--I enjoyed every page of it.

This "Perennial Classic" edition of V. is uncorrected and unauthorized. To quote an entire article on Pynchon.net:
"When V. appeared in bookstores in March of 1963, Thomas Pynchon had already become displeased with the published text. It was not the first time he had found himself unhappy about the content of his novel. He had begun editing it less than two months after he had submitted the typescript to Lippincott in the summer of 1961, reworking the original ending by polishing "the dialogue which was pretty wretched and insert[ing] a new yarn whose only justification is that I like it."1 That early rewriting was carried out before Corlies (Cork) Smith, Pynchon's editor at Lippincott, offered any suggestions for the text's improvement, suggestions that he had promised were forthcoming in an August 2 letter to Pynchon, the first piece of correspondence Smith sent the young author after the typescript of V. had been accepted. Pynchon, mostly without anyone's urging, would go on to revise the book, reorganizing and cutting the text during the spring of 1962 and then cutting more, "the equivalent of twelve pages of published text,"2 in the fall, while the galleys were in the proofing stage. Pynchon's editorial work was still not complete. Although his review of the Advanced Reading Copy did not raise any alarms, as it is essentially "identical to the first edition,"3 oversights during the editing and proofing processes later left him regretting his own imperfections. "About the time the first batch came off the presses,"4 Pynchon found a number of errors -- beyond the typos, the presence of which he discounted as excusable, although not without remarking that "they make gibberish out of otherwise respectable sentences" -- and felt obliged to tweak the novel one last time.5

Not everything with which he found fault was unequivocally wrong. An overly critical eye was in part the source, perhaps the foremost source, of his discontent, the earliest available evidence of which are comments he made in a March 9 letter to Faith Sale, a college friend who worked at Lippincott and took on some of the editorial responsibilities for V. after Smith left that publisher for a job with Viking.6 The last mistake to which Pynchon, who was apparently responding to a remark Sale had made about errata in an earlier letter, draws Sale's attention involves his having "Esther snea[k] out with Rachel's raincoat on," because "Rachel is a size 3 at biggest (though I never do say how big E. is -- but it's still sloppy)." Pynchon then writes, "And on and on like that," suggesting that there are many similar problems that he would like to have cleared up.7 Rachel, however, is not likely to be a size three, as she is, despite her small stature, described as "voluptuous" (22) when she is first introduced.8 Her raincoat would seem, if anything, too short on Esther -- assuming Esther is what would have been regarded as an averaged height woman in the mid-twentieth century. Rachel's high heels, after all, lift her to 5'1" (216),9 meaning the raincoat could be for a woman taller than Rachel's 4'10" (34) and would be, at most, a few inches higher up Esther's leg than it was meant to be and not necessarily an ill fit at all.10

The problem Pynchon had with putting Esther in Rachel's coat seems to be that he had never considered the possibility that Rachel's size might prevent Esther from properly fitting into it and became self-conscious about failing to make the details of the novel cohere. His fear that such was the case does go beyond his penchant for finding fault with his work.11 The mistakes that "no writer with even half an idea of what he's doing would have made" concerned such issues as having Profane, Angel, and Geronimo at a bar until "Last Call" (149) and then proceeding, on the next page, to have them search the city until midnight; having Sidney arrive in Valletta in the winter but then writing "it's June" on the same page;12 writing "two pages on . . . it's been 7 months since armistice," that is, in June, though it soon becomes winter again; and using Arabic gebel to mean desert when "it means mountain."

Pynchon, of course, wanted to correct the text, but because he had not seen the errors until after the first printing and Lippincott wasn't going to pulp a print run for editorial reasons, putting back the publication date yet again,13 the best he could hope for was that future printings and editions, that is, the British edition, the Bantam paperback, and, if he knew about it as early as March 1963, the Modern Library edition, the rights for which had been secured by the end of the summer of 1963,14 could be fixed. Correcting the British edition was not a problem. The British publisher Jonathan Cape had printed its own Advanced Reading Copy, and perhaps even galleys, and Pynchon had sent a letter discussing corrections for it, almost certainly pointing out the newly discovered problems, to Candida Donadio on March 4.15 He also informed Lippincott, telling Stewart (Sandy) "Richardson about them all because Bantam bought it for paperback and the goofs ought to be cleared up before then."16 The Lippincott hardcover, Pynchon must have hoped, would be the only edition that had not been cleaned up, and he even harbored the illusion that hardback reprints could be fixed as well, explaining to Sale at the end of June, "all I could do was write Richardson . . . and ask him to edit it [the mistake] out of any other printings there might be."17

Lippincott never made the corrections for the three hardcover reprints, the last of which was issued in June 1963,18 but the 1964 Bantam paperback was published in a corrected state, meaning either Richardson passed on the corrections or Pynchon informed Bantam of his post-publication edits as he had done with Jonathan Cape, whose edition also lacks the obvious errata found in the first American edition. Those with the edition of V. published by Lippincott find "'the city is only the desert -- gebel -- in disguise.' Gebel, Gebrail. Why should he not call himself by the desert's name? Why not?" (83),19 whereas those in possession of a British or a Bantam edition, read at the same point in the novel, "the city is only the desert in disguise" (Cape, 83). On the following page of the Lippincott text, a sentence begins "But Gebrail/Gebel, the desert's angel, had . . ." while the corrected version reads, "But the desert's angel had . . ." (Cape, 84; Bantam, 72).20 "They stayed to near Last Call," (149) in the Lippincott edition becomes "They stayed till 9:30 or 10" (Bantam, 135) -- although the Jonathan Cape/Vintage edition contains a typo so that 9:30 is printed with a dot between 9 and 3 instead of a colon (149) -- and in the first line of the next paragraph of the Cape and Bantam editions, "around midnight" (Lippincott, 149) has been removed. In the Epilogue, "[T]hough it was June" (456), as well as "After seven months" (458), is left out of the British and Bantam editions.

The most obvious problems, then, had been solved on both sides of the Atlantic by the spring of 1964, but the fact that the novel put out by Lippincott needed to be corrected was soon forgotten. The Modern Library V. (1966) was published in the original form, apparently having been printed using the film that was used to print the first edition or film produced from a copy of that edition. That does not mean corrections could not have been made. The Cape edition also seems to have been produced from a Lippincott copy, for besides using the same font and design as was used in the U.S. edition, the production staff at Cape did its best to align the British edition's pages to those in the American one, adding an extra line after the roman numeral v above the fifth section of Chapter 3 on page 81 so that page 85 and those that follow it in the chapter match the Lippincott edition, despite the changes made to pages 83 and 84, the latter of which begins and ends with the same words in both editions. However the various editions of V. were produced, of those that were printed from 1963 to 1966, only the British one and the Bantam mass market paperback contain Pynchon's final revisions, while the Lippincott and Modern Library texts contain the errors that contributed to Pynchon's condemning V. as "the worst novel in decades"21 and referring to it as "that wretched novel of mine."22

The issue, in any case, should have been settled, indeed had been settled in Britain and in the United States for about twenty years -- between 1967 and 1986 -- while the corrected Bantam edition was the only U.S. text being reproduced, but the problem resurfaced when Bantam lost the rights to reprint its edition and Lippincott's fiction catalogue was taken over by Harper and Row in the mid-1980s. The text of the first Perennial reprint -- which also seems to have been produced using the original Lippincott edition, even though the chapter titles are centered rather than flushed to the left -- followed the original American text to the letter and the later reprints continue to do so, with the exception of the introduction of new typos after two resettings, one in 1999 and the other in 2005. Meanwhile, the text that continues to be printed in Britain follows the Cape edition. Consequently, since 1986, the two versions of V. that were issued between 1963 and 1966 have been available to readers, and as in 1963, the corrected, near definitive edition,23 has only been the British one, a Vintage paperback in its present manifestation, while those in the U.S who have been relying on the Perennial imprints, or the newly released Penguin e-book, have been reading an unauthorized text."

Brilliant writer, amazing complexity, symbolism galore. Call me crazy, isn't readability supposed to enter in here somewhere. Its just not an enjoyable read. Having read other great 20th century writers like Mahfouz, Kawabata, Marquez, Saramago, Hesse(to name a few), I find this book unreadable and fragmented. I get that Pynchon is brilliant but in my opinion his brilliance is gained at the sacrifice of simple good story telling. Can't there be a marriage of the two? Maybe it captures the essence of 20 th century apathy, but I found myself not caring a lick what happened to any of the characters or the plot. Ultimately causing me to set the book aside.

Yes, there are "V"'s galore throughout V. - here a V, there a V, everywhere a V-V - but Y-Y?
Thomas Pynchon must secretly hate pseudo-intellectuals, and writes books like V. to draw them out and taunt them - much as a mean little kid at the zoo teases the monkeys.
V. is a theme in search of a plot. It would make a fine symbolist painting or poem, but it is a lousy novel. It is the literary equivalent of Seinfeld: a bunch of wacky loser characters do nothing and go nowhere. Sometimes amusing, yes. Occasionally diverting. Definitely not without some humor. But nothing happens. No, no - NOTHING happens. Five hundred some pages of this, no one needs. Life is too short. Spare yourself.
Since I haven't seen this particular "V" pointed out by the V-spotters who have nothing better to do with their lives, it is worth noting that the title page "V" is composed of 41 v's, which by occult redaction equals 4+1=5 (or Roman numeral "V"). If this sort of thing impresses you, then by all means read V., because it's all you're going to find in it by way of stimulation. Don't say you weren't warned.

A novel comprised of "micro-fiction"! (Try it! You can read any chapter -- and any "sub-chapter" -- as a "story" on its own!)

Someone actually published "V. in Love" in an anthology (or some such) ... not sure why this hasn't occurred to more people!

It's like a "puzzle box" ... all "fitted together"!

(And: hilarious, brilliant, scary, exhilarating, heart-breaking, thrilling, etc., etc. -- everything you don't need ME to tell you about!)

I give this book four stars because it challenges the reader and is psychedelic as hell. I deduct two stars for persistent and annoying typographical errors that occur very often.

Examples:
Page 340, Second Paragraph: "I write this during a night raid, down in the abandoned sewer. It is raining outside. The only fight is from phosphorus flares above the city, a few candles in here, bombs, Elena is beside me, holding the child who sleeps drooling against her shoulder."

Page 341 Third Paragraph: "First mention oaf Elena Xemxi comes from Fausto I, shortly after Maratt's marriage."

The first example is obvious that "The only fight" should be "The only light". The second is also glaringly stupid, "oaf" should be "of".

I hope the oaf who proofread this novel is fired forsooth!

Ridiculously convoluted tale held together by the most tenuous coincidences. As for the "message" of the book: you tell me. Hard going and ultimately unrewarding. Well done Mr Pynchon you've got away with it again! Did I hear anyone mention The Emperor's New Clothes???

Yeah, yeah there are plenty of poor souls seeking to put down a work so well done just because it was actually above them. If I had any criticism of this book, it would be that there wasn't enough of it. I wanted to know more of Vheissu and of Mondaugan and the many players who, put together, made V. into flesh. Gravity's Rainbow was more than I needed, but V. made me hungrier. Maybe that's the beauty of the book...

The hype around this classic can put you off the whole thing. The best way to read the novel is just to let it flow, and stop analyzing so deeply. Lots of projection attaches itself to Pynchon's work. And the over-analytical zeal hurts. Read it, and have fun with it, and appreciate that its the passion of the search that matters.

"Gravity's Rainbow..." TP can't escape that novel, as all wannabe intellectuals read up on that and Ulyseuss (or Wake, take yur pick). This novel resonates more than those- it seems to literally map the twentieth century experience, covering the futility of modern war, the futility of religion and the absolute absurdity of existence. "V." is Nihilism's manifesto.

There is obviously a basic misconception that presumes that readers either love this book - or they don't understand it. The technically most advanced musician can make the shallowest music. It's true that Pynchon's choice of words is excellent, that there are allusions & symbols galore. But it's a very self-sufficient effort. If wrestling with some 24-years-old's kind of cleverness isn't your idea of fun, you should probably better skip "V". If on the other hand you just _love_ cross word puzzles, then you should give it a try. The most striking example for V's attractiveness given by some the store-reviewers is the Benny Profane - Beethoven connection: the name mirrors the first V notes in Van's V. Symphony. Dot-dot-dot dash .... Wait... just 4, not V. There must be a hidden meaning. Can't wait to find it. Can you?

Reading V I found myself thinking 'Who's Pynchon writing to?' Then I'd realize I'd been thinking about what's for dinner instead of being involved in the story.
The guy's certainly not writing to me.
Pages would pass when I'd discover a new character was introduced somewhere back in the chaos.
I guess this stuff is over my head.
I'm not being daft. I'd even give it another shot but if this is Pynchon's 'accessible' stuff, I'm in trouble.

On almost every page I encountered passages of beautiful, witty, amazingly written prose. But, after about 200 pages, I just couldn't care less about any of the characters, or what happened to them. I am a well-educated person and have read most of the classic "western canon". I appreciate many "modern" authors like Marquez, Roth, Walker Percy, Bellow, Updike, Joseph Heller, etc. But I find that my life is too short to persevere with Mr. Pynchon when I neither like or dislike the characters and couldn't care less what happens to them. Based on my experience with this book I have shied away from Delillo since they are always compared similarly. All you guys who believe Pynchon is a great 20th century author can have him.

Some of the reviews below suggest that if you don't appreciate this novel, it must be because you're some sort of overfed American philistine, and that you're so used to having your basest instincts titillated by popular culture that your sensors no longer can register the grand sublimity of this novel. One person goes so far as to state that if you don't appreciate V. then you should keep your opinion to yourself. (Which is oddly thought-policey, but whatever.) Most likely, fans of the novel imply, you didn't even get past the first seventy pages.

All of which implies that you either love V. or you're the symptom of some sort of populist plague. Well, I'm fairly literate--I have an English major that I took very seriously, and I also have a graduate degree. I read often and "seriously." And I read the whole thing (except the last twenty pages, which I skimmed because I didn't care about the story).

My educated opinion: This novel was a waste of time. The characters are poorly sketched and the narrative disjointed to the point of distraction. The novelist shows little ability to focus the reader and work with him. All our reference points have been broken or something. Whatever. And if you want an academic discourse, or a "genius" author whose famed reclusiveness is clearly reflected in an inability to envision his audience, then V. is probably deeply stimulating to you. But I want humanism and wisdom. Pynchon isn't selling that.

One person suggests that this novel will be most rewarding if you sit down with the novel, a pen and paper, and an encyclopedia. After reading, you are to quietly contemplate the novel for at least half an hour. And it is indeed quite possible that there are essential truths awaiting the reader who wishes to read V. in the Victorian Self Betterment Tradition. It strikes me that such people would be, at the least, better served by picking up Ulysses, which is of course funnier, wiser, and better-constructed. Or Paradise Lost, for example, an easier work that I studied several years ago, and which has yielded lifelong benefits.

Read the first twenty pages for yourself and then decide whether to buy it; it won't get any less plodding or obtuse. But don't buy the claim that if you think it's not working, it's because you're unwashed. Me, I'm off to read some Conrad and remind myself why I like novels. Perhaps some Richard Ford after that. I also tried Gravity's Rainbow, but I didn't get more than three hundred pages in, so I won't offer an opinion on that.

Up until recently, I always thought writers had a heads-up over entertainers of less desirable degrees and industries (Hollywood, music, etc.), primarily because they used their imaginations to create a whole world out of the printed word--nothing more, nothing less. And for the longest time I thought, "to be a writer would be a most challenging and rewarding position in this life." Well, I was first disproven of these fantastic illusions when I read DeLillo's "Americana," and they've now been further disproven with Thomas Pynchon's "V." When any book leaves you feeling vacuous and numb instead of excited and engaged, you know something must be seriously wrong. And, adhering to the criteria I established based solely on reading Mr. DeLillo's travesty, I struggled through 98 pages of "V." before it brought me to the edge, after which I jumped (into another book, "Lord of the Flies"). I also concluded not to trust any publishing house that labels any book printed AFTER 1900 as a "classic." "V." boasts a thick-as-pea-soup plot (if you want cohesion and disciplined writing, look elsewhere), line after line of pretentious dialogue/description ("This from gentle Hanne Echerze. Had the world gone mad with Fashoda?"), and characters with deliberately frustrating-to-pronounce names (that's not a measure of cleverness, Mr. Pynchon). Incorrect punctuation and 'deep' sentence fragments are also in abundance, which will give pseudo-intellectuals and masochists much to drool over. I actually read Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" before this and ejoyed it quite a bit--engaging, with a bit of playful ambiguity that kept me interested; but "V." is just a gluttinous display of indulgence and a lot of unwarranted hype.

Alright, so I have never read this book. I am actually just writing this hoping to knock off the review at the bottom that irritated me. I like Pynchon quite a bit, and would heavily recommend Vineland. I am sure that this is a good book, just haven't gotten around to it yet. Per the complaints that annoyed me when I came here to see how much the book cost, if you have an intellect and attention span that can only handle Stephen King, John Grisham, Dean Koonts, so on and so forth, don't read this. Yes this is arranged differently than novels you will find in a grocery store. It is harder to read and takes more effort than books with half naked people on the cover or books for people who have the attention span of small children. For the record I like Stephen King, but if this material is above your reading ability or mental capacity at least have the decency to admit your shortcommings and don't blame the book. Blame the public education system that failed you or your own laziness. Either way, go back to your playstation and leave Pynchon alone. If you can't muster up an even slightly interesting criticism, just own up to your fifth grade reading level and keep quiet. There are simply far too many people in this culture that seem to believe that everything should be at a level of effortless ease that a child could grasp. It is nice to know there are still grown ups who can appreciate material that challenges as well as entertains. Not sure if this book does that, but hopefully I accomplished the goal of not having to view the painfully ignorant review of a mind who probably "reads" Stephen King by watching the movie.

Although I enjoyed some parts of this book, in the end, I felt robbed.

I read patiently expecting a breakthrough of some sort, but it never came.

I waited for everything to make sense in the end, but it never did.

Please help.

Okay, imagine that you write a bunch of completely disjoint, rambling junk that seems to have no real connection to anything else in your story, and stretch it out and go on and on and on for hundreds of pages, and people call you a genius!!! What the heck is wrong with the world? This book was less fun than getting a tattoo. I couldn't sustain it anymore after 75 pages, and I gave up. I still have absolutely no idea what was going on, who any of the characters were or what they were like. Must have been authored by a child.
If you want a pretty clear picture of this thing, I'll say this:
Imagine a senile old person accosting you on the street and running their mouth about absolutely nothing for awhile. You might be paying attention, but after they leave you won't have a clue what they were trying to tell you. This is Pyncheon in a nutshell, and the man should be avoided at all costs, and his entire literary genre, whatever the heck you call it, should be collected and burned, along with all of it's pretentious followers.

Small characters that stand for too-big ideas. Women are diminished into bestial beings that are vessels for sex. The plot putters out and the many tangents stop being interesting after one realizes their marginal connections are nonsensical.

This is a great book to read by the fireplace. After about thirty pages you can conveniently toss it IN the fireplace! This is the most boring, disorganized, pointless book I have ever read. I read it because it was recommended by Stephen King. If you want a good book, I would recommend looking elsewhere.