Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Postmodern
Page: 178
Have you ever dosed off at the wheel? You know what panicky feeling when you wake up off the road? The whole world around you is shaking and you're heading right into a tree, but you can't help trying to remember what was that dream that you were having? I stayed bathing into this feeling for the near-200 pages that lasted The Crying Of Lot 49. It's not a bad thing in itself that a novel inspires such strong feelings, but whenever a novel is too dense and locks me out, I can't help but to feel dumb. And I hate to feel dumb, like many of you, I suspect. My introduction to Pynchon has officially missed the highway.
The thing with The Crying Of Lot 49 is that it's trying to pile of a mountain of things in such a small space. The first sentence only is a paragraph long and expresses four or five different ideas and refers to things that will happen later in the novel. As I expected, there's a tremendous difference between what is said and what is meant. The story is pretty compelling in an over-the-top, slapstick way, but doesn't make a lot of sense if you don't dig under. It's about Oedipia Maas (what a great name!) who becomes the testament executor of her ex-boyfriend and happens (I'm still not even sure how) to stumble upon a two hundred years old conflict in between to mail distribution companies Thurn Und Taxis (who actually existed) and Trystero, who appear to be extinct, but actually form an underground society. If you're a casual reader that just loves to fly away in a good story, your road stops here. And it's not very good.
If you're interested in a bit of literary muscle work, the fun begins. With Pynchon, you have to always second guess everything. That's as close to an "intellectual sport" as you will experience. There are actually two school of thoughts about The Crying Of Lot 49 (since Pynchon is somewhat of a mysterious character, it was never fully discussed). Those who though it was postmodern and those who thought it made fun of postmodern. I find myself in the latter category. I think some of the mysteries Pynchon tried to create are actually unsolvable. It's that whole "empty signifier" rhetoric. It can mean a thousand things so really, it means nothing to a fully objective reader (I think I'm as close as it gets). My favorite is being "The Courier Tragedy", the stage play created around Trystero's demise. As it clearly makes fun of metafiction, it's easy to try and put meaning on it as I'm not sure it goes beyond comedy.
I finished "The Crying..." with the deep, unsatisfying feeling that I have been duped. I wanted to read it again, but at the same time I'm angry at myself and at the writer for running into a brick wall so hard. I'm going to put it down for a little while and think it over. Maybe listen to an audiobook and get a different perspective.
SCORE: None. And this novel makes me reconsider the pertinence of scoring my reviews. If it's what Pynchon brought me, that's already a lot.
