Product Description

A witty, chaotic and brilliant novel from the incomparable Thomas Pynchon

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6747 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Synopsis
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, "The Crying of Lot 49" opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting "The Crying of Lot 49". This is one of Pynchon's shortest novels and one of his best.

About the Author
Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 on Long Island and educated at Cornell. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Customer Reviews

Mind-Altering Achievement
Yay... I've read a book without dr who in it... quite an achievement :-)

In most circumstances I'd be left with a feeling of "yes... and...?" if a tale finished like this one did... but strangely enough I don't... it is closed... even though it is totally left unfinished... very weird you get this build up of intensity and pace throughout as the plot twists and mysteries deepen... and then towards the end it kind of slows down, almost like thought processes as you realise you might not actually want to resolve things...

It's an unusal journey for a character... and as I say is pretty much left unresolved... there are still loads of questions about Oedipa and what happens next... but that's right... there should be no resoltuion...

I looked stuff up on Wikipedia - Tristero, Thurn & Taxis... the latter was real... which has made me slightly curious about how much else is factual... books like that are always intriguing... ones that mix fact and fiction into a big mush and you can no longer see where ones ends and the other begins...

I've never been much for conspiracy theories... always figure people are to busy or too stupid to actually conspire... but this is at least plausible... in a surreal sort of way... and as I've mentioned has helped open my eyes to coincidence, or synchronicities - I mean I had always noticed the big ones... just maybe not taken in the actual number of them... or really noticed the little ones... like coming home after reading about the SS Salesman and Tristero to find my partner watching "The Doctor" and on screen are guys in SS looking uniform and others blacked up, all in black and looking all spooky and scary... I wouldn't have really noticed before...

The way that each character that we meet is on their own journey... many peripheral characters in novels serve to advance the plot, and I suppose each journey does do that... but strangely some people get a better conclusion that Oedipa... a more resolved conclusion as opposed to a better one... I don't think walking out to sea, or losing your mind to paranoia or LSD is a "better" conclusion, just more conclusive... Obviously not all... but some...

I did find I had to go back and read some bits over, but i think that's more to do with the distracting nature of trying to read on the bus, rather than any criticism of the author... Some bits made me laugh out loud and made everybody on the bus look at me... Hmmm... paranoia... :-)

A great introduction to Thomas Pynchon
Some people will find Thomas Pynchons's style almost inpenetrable(it's been described by critics as turgid and overwritten before) - so rather than getting stuck straight into V or Gravity's Rainbow (500 pages +) those who wish to read Thomas Pynchon may like to try this first at a little over 100 pages.

Although there are many comic scenes in the book the overall effect is starkly melancholy, as the main character, Oedipa Maas, prompted by the contents of an ex-lover's estate of which she is unexpectedly made executrix, obsessively pursues a secret postal service with medieval roots in Europe, which appears to exert a malign yet unclear effect on society...or does it? The book never answers this, as it ends just as Oedipa may be about to find an answer.

Instead the reader is left with a bleak sense of Oedipa's growing paranoia, neurosis and unhealthy fixation with the apparent secret society, in a likely metaphor for conspiracy theorists and cults everywhere. It's a funny book, but the madness of obsession and paranoia are well conveyed in the subtext of the plot, and might leave you feeling creeped.......

Teetering on the unreadable
I'm a bit confused: most of the reviews here are for "Gravity's Rainbow" rather than "The Crying of Lot 49". My review is about the latter. It is the first Pynchon novel I've read and I didn't like it one bit. At just 127 pages long, it was a particularly painful read.

Perhaps some people find Pynchon's wild wordplay and erudite meanderings poignant and satisfying - but I found his approach to be snobbishly self-indulgent and, dare I say it, achingly dull.

I agree that the author is clearly a very intelligent and well-read man, brimming with subversive ideas about identity, psychology, semantics and history. The trouble is that he likes to employ near-insane language to convey the simplest of messages. And to flesh out these simplest of messages, he makes use of the most obscure subject matter imaginable. Witness, for example, 10 pages of meticulously described stage action from a long-forgotten Jacobean tragedy play (not to mention the stale history surrounding it, which drives much of this novel). Or endless paragraphs devoted to the 17th century European heritage of a secret underground US postal service. Or a group of Confederate sailors dispatched in 1863 to thwart the incoming attacks of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. These nebulously mundane facts do not tell a story...they weigh this slim piece of writing down and prevent it from solidifying.

It is impossible to care about any of the characters - be it Oedipa, Inverarity, Metzger or any of the other 30-odd characters that waltz in and out of the narrative - because they are so deliberately unreal and ultimately disposable.

The only saving grace is the sometimes dazzling descriptions of Americana, which I really wish Pynchon had focused on more rather than letting his pen fly around in wild forays of well-written nonsense. The language is white-hot, but the story supporting it is lukewarm at best: leaving an uninspiring novel by an author who I doubt I will tackle again.