Book Review: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
When I was told that this book was ‘necessary reading’ I figured it would be some kind of depression porn. The crying of lot 49? Sounds like some inner city tenement drama. Turns out, it’s more like Inherent Vice jr., a bendy, conspiracy-laden romp through 1960s Southern California, with a bewildered woman named Oedipa Maas leading the charge into an underground postal-delivery syndicate with Jacobean roots and anarchistic dangers.
There’s a learning curve to Pynchon’s style, but in this one at least, once you realize the whole thing is a joke its small number of pages flies by. There is a mystery to be put together, but it’s so murky that its indefinable boundaries themselves dissipate into its complex ether of coincidences, signs, symbols and history. In short, you experience what it is like to uncover the first puzzle piece of a massive jigsaw, except you don’t know where the rest of the jigsaw is, and after a while, if it even exists or whether someone just made a singular piece and left it for you to find. You know, as a troll.
I can’t even try to convince myself I understood half of what this book is ‘satirizing’. I wasn’t alive in the 60s and I have yet to visit California. But something stuck here. There’s a culture being skewered here and I’m pretty sure some of it still exists to experience the skewering. Many times I laughed and had no clue why. By the end, the complexity of the mystery becomes its own joke, absurdifies itself, even as it promises global, international importance. And craziest of all, I now want to read some Jacobean revenge plays.
7/10
The day was chill, napped for the first time in at least a year. Cooked up some salmon, you know what it is. Talked to the immigration office and got some major reassurance, so overall a solid day.
See you tomorrow,
Nick
Nick Denardi 