BOW: The Crying of Lot 49

Happy Sunday, readers! This morning I managed to wrap up Thomas Pynchon's dense 1965 satire, The Crying of Lot 49. For those of you who are familiar with Pynchon's prose, you can imagine the challenge of wading through one of his novels in less than seven days--even if it is only 152 pages! And for those of you who aren't familiar, let me take a minute to elaborate: good ol' Thomas Pynchon is known for cultural satire, for witty puns, for oddball and elaborate shifting storylines that can at times be difficult to follow...for a whole lot of awesome+crazy, basically.

I have to admit though, I think that being on such a tight timeline might have helped me out a little with TCL49--because even if on the Pynchon scale it is relatively straightforward, in reality, it's still a bear. It's kind of like James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man--certainly less formidable than Ulysses, but still not really what I'd characterize as beach reading. Anyway, because of my compact timeline, rather than getting bogged down in researching every possible allusion or puzzling over the narrative shifts, I kind of just went with it, enjoying TCL49's lyricism, humor, and rollicking pace. Now, I certainly want to read the novel again more leisurely (perhaps with an encyclopedia in one hand and J. Kerry Grant's companion in the other, which btdubs, is actually longer than the novel it explains, if that gives you any idea of what we're dealing with here), but what I may have missed out on this time in terms of punny references, I think I gained in maintaining a sense of narrative continuity.

In particular, I really got intrigued by the novel's exploration of communication's failures--both in the present and between generations. Of primary significance in the story is the symbol of a horn--at times muted (when representing a hypothetical counter-culture mail system, W.A.S.T.E.), and other times unmuted (when it symbolizes a historical courier service that dissolved alongside the Holy Roman Empire).

This horn, in both variations, haunts the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, as she tries to make sense of a potential worldwide mail conspiracy. Her attempt to understand whether the horns truly stand for something parallel a larger quest to discern whether the world is held together by any larger order--some kind of invisible and unifying mechanism--or if she is simply the butt of an epically huge practical joke.

While there is certainly a lot more to discuss in regards to TCL49, quite frankly I'm a little exhausted just scratching the surface! So I'm putting Pynchon down for now, switching gears and taking on something with a decidedly different flavor for the next BOW: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. While more of a memoir than a novel, I think we can overlook this slight derivation, since it is in fact a memoir revolving around novels! Can't wait to discuss with ya'll next week.

PS-I was doing a little pre-blogging research and came across a website dedicated to the notoriously reclusive Pynchon. Interestingly, it has a whole section dedicated to his novels' various book covers (including nine covers for TCL49 from around the world), which I thought was kind of cool.