Rating: 
Summary: 4 choices: real, imagined, conspiracy or insanity.
Review: There are four possibilities in The Crying of Lot 49: you have found the truth, you are imagining the truth, someone has created a huge conspiracy to trick you into thinking you've found the truth, or you believe that the conspiracy is the truth when it is not, and in fact you have gone crazy.Finish The Crying of Lot 49 and see that Tristero may have been Jesus. To believe in something, enough for that belief to have any power at all, is to also put yourself at risk of accidentally creating an illusion of power that didn't exist in the first place. A problem indeed. Anything you want, you will get, even if it's not real. For example, I don't even know if that analogy (Tristero/Jesus) was intentional. But if I believe it is, I'll be able to write an essay about it. I'm not being universalist here, just trying to continue where Oedipa left off. I'm an un-universalist, if you need to know. I don't know if I can find a connection between the potsmasters of Tristero and the disciples of Christ, but the beauty of analogy (the fifth possibility) leaks out between the two Books and falls through this review. Personally, I don't think this was that postmodern. It may have that title, but in many ways it can exist purely on a plot-driven level, and most postmodern novels can't. Thomas Pynchon himself is not present, but talks only through the characters and events of the story the way all those normal non-postmodernists do. And, by the way, Thurn and Taxis reminded me of my choice of banking institutions: Wells Fargo, whom I dislike. Those black marauders that charge me outrageous fees and ridiculous charges, who own the night and sabotage my loved ones!
Rating:
Summary: this book is great!
Review: This is a short, clever, easy-to-read book. Very clever! Maybe too clever! It's about a woman who maybe uncovers a really, really big conspiracy. Maybe. Or maybe she uncovered a small conspiracy. Or maybe she's just had a wee bit too much to drink. Who knows! W.A.S.T.E. rocks. Just ask Radiohead. Three thumbs up!
Rating:
Summary: Simply great, Pynchon at his best
Review: A reverse detective story, the theme being loss of language, this work is simply astounding. Highly effective and to the point without an excess of style (where his later works fail), this is the masterpiece by the post modern master. Dark humor runs rabit in this one more than any other text in 20th cent. american lit with the excepting of CATCH-22.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Clueless, but Cluefew
Review: I have only dabbled in reading a little "postmodern" literature, simply because I think most of it is over my head, and although I didn't get everything there was meant to get (not by a long shot), I feel as though I gained access to an interesting story about how ridiculous (or not) many conspiracy theories can be. There are sooooooooo many questions I have, and sooooooo many references I didn't even know where really fact, but in that way, I kind of understand Oedipa's thoughts and feelings throughout the novel. I think that if I were more knowledgable, I wouldn't have been able to read this the way I did. And like all the puns in Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" I don't think it's as important to know everything that the author puts forth, I just think if you get the initial joke, it's enough. Maybe I'm wrong, but I read this for the story and not for the history lesson. It took me a bit to get used to Pynchon's writing style, but after a few pages, I liked getting lost in the non-punctuated tangents he went off in in his sentences. The laughs were genuine, and the story almost surreal, as if the heat of San Narciso gets into the brain. I enjoyed this book, and feel as though several rereads will help to bring more into the light.
Rating: 
Summary: Whose Conspiracy is it?
Review: Whose Conspiracy is it? In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon seems to be trying to spoof the conspiracy-theory story, but I believe he fails to write a convincing story because there are no believable characters moving the plot. Ever since I started high school in 1952 I have been aware that individuals have descried and the media have described grand theories of covert conspiracies at all levels of our society. In my earliest recollections it was the "dirty pinko commies" who had infiltrated Hollywood, the Army, and all levels of the U.S. Government and "they" were determined to destroy our Judeo-Christian-military-industrial society. When I started college in the early sixties, the hot conspiracy was the work of the rabble rousers trying to subvert the status quo among the minorities and women. After the Kennedys and M. L. King were assassinated, wonderfully chilling, probing novels, TV documentaries, dramas, and fantastic movies promoting a vast array of conspiracy theories were produced. Modern America has been primed to expect a conspiracy in any place or at any time as a part of our partisan political process. We love a good conspiracy-theory story. As an engineer who lived in Southern California in the sixties and worked a few years for a small electronics company that made subassemblies that wound up on the moon, I could identify with the poor slobs who worked for Yoyodyne. As a stamp collector, the name "Thurn and Taxis" sounded very familiar. As an avid reader of the plays of the Seventeenth Century, I could identify most of the scenes in the Courier's Tragedy. As a fan of David Lodge, I smiled at the allusion to Morris Zapf. All of Pynchon's characters range from oddball to extreme stereotypes, and the plot unfolds driven by an extremely long series of tedious coincidences that drive Oedipa through an improbable quest that ends at an auction. What bothered me was that Pynchon has Oedipa jump to a conclusion that there is a conspiracy early in the plot and then she sets out on a liminal quest and builds a hermeneutic conspiracy theory which the author presents in as realistically detailed a fashion as Dreiser does in An American Tragedy. Granted Pynchon follows the postmodernist formula of introducing a wide ranging pastiche of clues, provided by widely different, mostly unreliable, repressed to paranoid characters, but they all reinforce in Oedipa's mind that there is a rational conspiracy that has existed for almost three hundred years, which has the effect of being a substitute religious experience and post office for the usual outcasts of society. There were many warm smiles along the way, but the relentless sledge hammering of the mindless, paranoid clues Oedipa follows wore me down. Satire needs a believable, naïve straight man, or woman, to carry the story line. Ode didn't do it for me. I rate the book two and a half stars.
Rating:
Summary: A Mini-classic!
Review: A more accessible Pynchon, though this novel lacks none of the metaphorical significance of his other novels, I chose to give it four stars instead of five simply because it was so short. It's not that I did not enjoy the novel, it is one of the funniest books I've ever read in fact, it's just that it does not seem as "epic" as his other works. Whereas "V." was an ordeal, I finished "The Crying of Lot 49" in a manner of days. It is definitely worth the price though, a hilarious satire on American culture, it almost could have been included in "V." because the basic plot of the two is similar: someone searching for information about someone close to them who died, their search revealing to them perhaps not quite what they were looking for, but revealing to the reader the major metaphorical themes of both books. If anything, "The Crying of Lot 49" is more focused than "V." but part of what made "V." so great were all the obscure characters and situations pre-dating the war that were incorporated in the quest, whereas in "The Crying of Lot 49" the whole of the action takes place in Southern California in the 1960's. On the whole a great novel, just not Pynchon's best.
Rating:
Summary: Welcome to the postmodern world...
Review: If you've always heard the term postmodern and wondered what it meant this book is for you. But, this book is definately not for everyone, the plot is unique to say the least, and the characters are not what you will find in most novels, but then again, neither is the intellectual stimulation. In only a little over 100 pages, Thomas Pynchon has written an accessibly managable intro. to postmodern literature. Although this book is rather dense, and is filled with obscure facts and information from seemingly every conceivable specialty of knowledge, it is a great introduction to one of the most misunderstood genres of modern literature. Just be sure to keep a dictionary and encyclopedia handy. The plot revolves around the exciting and often bizarre experiences and travels of Oedipa Maas, after she is named executor of an ex-lovers will. In her adventures she uncovers a surrealistic world where everything that she has ever learned seems to fall into question. It is a world where nazi doctors, secret societies, papal misdeeds, anarchist dreams, and deranged outcasts all come out of the shadows to invade the "typical" suburban landscape of an average American housewife. This book is about uncovering the realities, or lack thereof, that most people would want to stay hidden, or at the least forgotton. It is about questioning the assumptions that we all hold dear, even if it means coming to terms with a world that is without meaning, without order, and most of all without a coherent design. This is a book with many questions to be answered, so if you would like an envigorating intellectual challenge this book will not dissappoint.
Rating:
Summary: Best Book I've Read Since "The Courier's Tragedy"
Review: For no particular reason, I've avoided reading Pynchon novels but finally decided to take the plunge with this book. I was not disappointed. I thought it was great. Really great, actually. His writing style strikes me as very similar to a number of his contemporaries (Robert Stone, DeLillo, etc.). The central riddle of the book and the mixing of obscure historical fact and fiction reminded me strongly of authors like Borges. With regard to some of the negative reviews below I would say the following: 1. I consider myself a pretty typical reader and I did not find this to be a particularly challenging book to read, although Pynchon's style (punctuation-sparse and prone to occasional lapses into heavy factual detail) takes some getting used to. 2. This is not a "neat" story in the conventional sense. There isn't a tidy conclusion to the story and there isn't a "typical" character development arc. But so what? I don't think either of those things are a necessary requirement to good fiction. The deliberately silly-sounding character names should be the first clue that Pynchon does not intend this to be a conventional work of fiction. It isn't. But that doesn't mean it's not a great book. The book is clever, well-written, and confounding with its plot twists and turns. That's what made it a fascinating read and that's also what makes it the kind of book that I think I could read over and over again and not get bored. I think I'll always find something new that I didn't see before. Isn't that what makes a book enjoyable to read in the first place?
Rating:
Summary: A postmodern classic
Review: Well, if you're used to John Grisham or the Bronte sisters, you're probably not gonna like this book. But read it anyway just to see what the fuss is all about. This is a classic of postmodern disjointedness, brimming with Pynchonian playfulness, recurring themes, jokes-within-a-jokes, literary allusions, the poetry of mathematics, and everything else you could want in a nice quick under-200pg read. The text is pretty dense, but then again, see Gravity's Rainbow if you want to see something really dense. I suggest starting over every time you get really confused -- it certainly took me a few start-overs to truly appreciate this novel. Highly recommended if you like inventiveness, or novels that are more "writerly" than "readerly" -- that give the reader most of the burden of creating meaning.
Rating:
Summary: Paranoia, aimlessness, puns, useless triva -- YES!
Review: The above title isn't sarcastic, by the way. I love this book. It's full of what Pynchon does best, and it's short enough not to be a chore to read. P.S.(...)
| 
