Some books loom very large, and The Crying of Lot 49 is one of them. On and off for the last few months, I've been feeling that it was about time for a re-read (looks like the last time was a full decade ago) - another in a long line of returns since that first discovery about halfway through uni - and then when Trang likened my current life situation to that of Oedipa Maas, I felt like I hardly had any further choice in the matter.
Over time, I've come to think of Lot 49 as the key that can unlock all of Pynchon's other novels - it's by far his most concise, as well as being the one in which his major themes and animating concerns are most explicit and clearly visible - and the combination of that personal frame with my familiarity with the novel caused me to be surprised by its difficulty, particularly through the first couple of chapters as I re-learned how to read its idiomatic prose. But it was a pleasurable difficulty, as it always has been with Pynchon and I - the complexities of syntax and meaning matched by the rewards of working through their circuitous layers.
And once I'd found my stride again, that old familiar tumble down the rabbit hole was well and truly on, and I was reminded of just how much it can seem to be the key not only to Pynchon's considerable canon, nor even only to the very large and rich stream of literature flowing from those sources, but indeed to the world at large, legible - or otherwise - in just the same way as Pierce's will and its ultimate inheritance. And of how it - The Crying of Lot 49 - really is one of the very few (countable on the fingers of one hand) books that to me seem like they actually capture in a meaningful sense an essential truth about the underlying nature of the world itself. It really is that profound, and that great.
[Edit 3/9: I meant to mention - somehow I never specifically registered before this reading that it starts with a letter (although of course I knew it in a plot sense), doubly meaningful in terms of things purloined and W.A.S.T.E.]
Over time, I've come to think of Lot 49 as the key that can unlock all of Pynchon's other novels - it's by far his most concise, as well as being the one in which his major themes and animating concerns are most explicit and clearly visible - and the combination of that personal frame with my familiarity with the novel caused me to be surprised by its difficulty, particularly through the first couple of chapters as I re-learned how to read its idiomatic prose. But it was a pleasurable difficulty, as it always has been with Pynchon and I - the complexities of syntax and meaning matched by the rewards of working through their circuitous layers.
And once I'd found my stride again, that old familiar tumble down the rabbit hole was well and truly on, and I was reminded of just how much it can seem to be the key not only to Pynchon's considerable canon, nor even only to the very large and rich stream of literature flowing from those sources, but indeed to the world at large, legible - or otherwise - in just the same way as Pierce's will and its ultimate inheritance. And of how it - The Crying of Lot 49 - really is one of the very few (countable on the fingers of one hand) books that to me seem like they actually capture in a meaningful sense an essential truth about the underlying nature of the world itself. It really is that profound, and that great.
[Edit 3/9: I meant to mention - somehow I never specifically registered before this reading that it starts with a letter (although of course I knew it in a plot sense), doubly meaningful in terms of things purloined and W.A.S.T.E.]
