Everything you need to know and how to say it, 15 Oct 2008
When this book was published, I was inspired to do a Master's degree studying it closely, and that was 1976. Here we are 32 years later and there is no book since published, or published before, written by one man, with the depth, range, accuracy, and pertinence to the human condition now and likely to be for the next 100 years. This book is not a novel in a coherent and completely satisfying manner, capable of being read in a matter of sitting down for a few hours at a time over a weekend, but neither is Ulysses, nor Brothers Karamazov. To approach this you must have a broad understanding and an expansive imagination, capable of responding to the world of Pynchon. I have read everything by Pynchon, before or since, and GR is his master work, no question. People will read this as long as they can read, and they will wonder, and be amazed in wonder. It is essential on the shelf of any person who reads well, even as a challenge for them at various moments in their life. To read it in a week, or read it without any break as is done at Princeton every year, is to alter the state of your mind irrevocably. Be prepared, because you will never think and feel and speak and write as you did before.

Ulysses or Not?, 28 Aug 2008
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Begob Sir, says the dear reader, God send you don't make them in the one book. (Mix and match)
He can and does write sublimely, but if there's anything challenging in Gravity's Rainbow Rainbow, its the challenge of a kid kicking the back of your seat through the whole of Parsifal.

Gave up after 500 pages, 12 Mar 2008
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far as I am concerned. Its not worth reading in my view. I took up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" afterwards and got more satisfaction of the opening page of that book than i did the 500 pages of this book. Be warned :-)

worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously, 15 Dec 2007
Most seem to agree that this is THE Pynchon book. Definitely not a quick,light read, but there IS a plot which picks up pace after a while. The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets - but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. For the first half, or even two thirds, of the book the focus shifts between different characters and locations who, at first, seem to have no connection but WWII, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, and it actually becomes quite gripping. For a finale, he brings all the characters together in a scene so hilarious and brilliant it's the only time I've ever felt like giving a book a round of applause. That scene is obviously his homage to James Joyce, being very reminiscent of the famous chapter in Ulysses where Joyce introduces a series of disparate characters going about their business, apparently unconnected, and then ties them all together by having a character take a coach trip through Dublin and encounter them all. Pynchon does it with a slapstick balloon chase.
Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner; most seem contrived and pointless,without any real reason to be, but Pynchon is a real original, inspired and authentic - also a bit awe-inspiring. Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD!

Awful!, 25 Sep 2007
Maybe it's just me, but have my fellow reviewers gone mad?! How can you describe a book as great and give it 4 stars, then advise people to skip the first 215 pages as they're incomprehensible? How can you decide that a book which took you 5 attempts to get through is the best you ever read? How can you love a story, when you don't even understand it?

A great book should suck you in and hold you there, you should love the characters, you should be desperate to find out what happens next, you should miss it when you've finished. Above all it should be enjoyable. Gravity's Rainbow is none of these things.

Imagine you watched a film that had been chopped up so that every single sentence was out of order. Would you enjoy it? - of course not. Even if you watched it 20 times and managed to figure out the basic storyline it still wouldn't be good, you've just managed to understand it a bit better.

Don't listen to all the other reviewers giving it 4 or 5 stars - they just want you to suffer as much as they did!

Everything you need to know and how to say it, 15 Oct 2008
When this book was published, I was inspired to do a Master's degree studying it closely, and that was 1976. Here we are 32 years later and there is no book since published, or published before, written by one man, with the depth, range, accuracy, and pertinence to the human condition now and likely to be for the next 100 years. This book is not a novel in a coherent and completely satisfying manner, capable of being read in a matter of sitting down for a few hours at a time over a weekend, but neither is Ulysses, nor Brothers Karamazov. To approach this you must have a broad understanding and an expansive imagination, capable of responding to the world of Pynchon. I have read everything by Pynchon, before or since, and GR is his master work, no question. People will read this as long as they can read, and they will wonder, and be amazed in wonder. It is essential on the shelf of any person who reads well, even as a challenge for them at various moments in their life. To read it in a week, or read it without any break as is done at Princeton every year, is to alter the state of your mind irrevocably. Be prepared, because you will never think and feel and speak and write as you did before.

Ulysses or Not?, 28 Aug 2008
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Begob Sir, says the dear reader, God send you don't make them in the one book. (Mix and match)
He can and does write sublimely, but if there's anything challenging in Gravity's Rainbow Rainbow, its the challenge of a kid kicking the back of your seat through the whole of Parsifal.

Gave up after 500 pages, 12 Mar 2008
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far as I am concerned. Its not worth reading in my view. I took up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" afterwards and got more satisfaction of the opening page of that book than i did the 500 pages of this book. Be warned :-)

worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously, 15 Dec 2007
Most seem to agree that this is THE Pynchon book. Definitely not a quick,light read, but there IS a plot which picks up pace after a while. The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets - but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. For the first half, or even two thirds, of the book the focus shifts between different characters and locations who, at first, seem to have no connection but WWII, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, and it actually becomes quite gripping. For a finale, he brings all the characters together in a scene so hilarious and brilliant it's the only time I've ever felt like giving a book a round of applause. That scene is obviously his homage to James Joyce, being very reminiscent of the famous chapter in Ulysses where Joyce introduces a series of disparate characters going about their business, apparently unconnected, and then ties them all together by having a character take a coach trip through Dublin and encounter them all. Pynchon does it with a slapstick balloon chase.
Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner; most seem contrived and pointless,without any real reason to be, but Pynchon is a real original, inspired and authentic - also a bit awe-inspiring. Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD!

Awful!, 25 Sep 2007
Maybe it's just me, but have my fellow reviewers gone mad?! How can you describe a book as great and give it 4 stars, then advise people to skip the first 215 pages as they're incomprehensible? How can you decide that a book which took you 5 attempts to get through is the best you ever read? How can you love a story, when you don't even understand it?

A great book should suck you in and hold you there, you should love the characters, you should be desperate to find out what happens next, you should miss it when you've finished. Above all it should be enjoyable. Gravity's Rainbow is none of these things.

Imagine you watched a film that had been chopped up so that every single sentence was out of order. Would you enjoy it? - of course not. Even if you watched it 20 times and managed to figure out the basic storyline it still wouldn't be good, you've just managed to understand it a bit better.

Don't listen to all the other reviewers giving it 4 or 5 stars - they just want you to suffer as much as they did!

Mind-Altering Achievement, 03 Jan 2008
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, 18 Oct 2007
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, 24 May 2007
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.

essential re-read, 24 Nov 2004
One of the funniest books I've ever read. Constistently amusing and quirky, this book takes you down avenues of thought so esoteric and profound, and still keeps you fixed in a concrete present that is a pure slice of America, like watermelon on a hot day. And I defy you not to fall head-over-heels for Oedipa Mass (what a name!?), the book's heroine, if thats the word?

hhmm..., 05 Sep 2003
This is one of the strangest yet most haunting novels I’ve ever read. It seems to stand apart from many other novels just by its seemingly obscure subject matter and the way in which it draws you into it. The novel is written in quite free flowing, dense text. This, whilst not making it indecipherable can be quite a challenge at times. It is by this method Pynchon draws the reader themselves into the story. The fact that Pynchon can create so much atmosphere in such a short novel is a testament to his craftsmanship.
The Novel (for me) was mainly about the notion of possibility. Nothing much is resolved in the story but so much is suggested. Is WASTE just an isolated cult in that part of California or is there a sector in every town in America? Oedipa goes through the novel with all these possibilities running through her mind. The more she finds out the more possibilities appear to her. It’s like staring at a dark wall and then suddenly realizing is crawling with ants. Her discoveries could change everything, even the ground beneath her feet or it could just be a joke set up by a dead guy with a sense of humour.
The crux of the novel is quite a frightening prospect. If such a massive network, like this can exist beneath Oedipa’s nose and she has never even considered the existence of it, what else could be there that Oedipa and all of us are not aware of?
Pychon draws the reader into this world which resembles an old fashioned X-Files tale. The detail of the historical information in the novel even makes the reader question whether WASTE exists in the real world. Thus putting us on a par with Oedipa and making the experience of the novel all the more vivid. WASTE could just be a small benign thing that is kept running by a few devoted anti-establishment types or maybe, just maybe...

This novel will certainly stay with me for a long time to come.

Everything you need to know and how to say it, 15 Oct 2008
When this book was published, I was inspired to do a Master's degree studying it closely, and that was 1976. Here we are 32 years later and there is no book since published, or published before, written by one man, with the depth, range, accuracy, and pertinence to the human condition now and likely to be for the next 100 years. This book is not a novel in a coherent and completely satisfying manner, capable of being read in a matter of sitting down for a few hours at a time over a weekend, but neither is Ulysses, nor Brothers Karamazov. To approach this you must have a broad understanding and an expansive imagination, capable of responding to the world of Pynchon. I have read everything by Pynchon, before or since, and GR is his master work, no question. People will read this as long as they can read, and they will wonder, and be amazed in wonder. It is essential on the shelf of any person who reads well, even as a challenge for them at various moments in their life. To read it in a week, or read it without any break as is done at Princeton every year, is to alter the state of your mind irrevocably. Be prepared, because you will never think and feel and speak and write as you did before.

Ulysses or Not?, 28 Aug 2008
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Begob Sir, says the dear reader, God send you don't make them in the one book. (Mix and match)
He can and does write sublimely, but if there's anything challenging in Gravity's Rainbow Rainbow, its the challenge of a kid kicking the back of your seat through the whole of Parsifal.

Gave up after 500 pages, 12 Mar 2008
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far as I am concerned. Its not worth reading in my view. I took up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" afterwards and got more satisfaction of the opening page of that book than i did the 500 pages of this book. Be warned :-)

worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously, 15 Dec 2007
Most seem to agree that this is THE Pynchon book. Definitely not a quick,light read, but there IS a plot which picks up pace after a while. The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets - but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. For the first half, or even two thirds, of the book the focus shifts between different characters and locations who, at first, seem to have no connection but WWII, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, and it actually becomes quite gripping. For a finale, he brings all the characters together in a scene so hilarious and brilliant it's the only time I've ever felt like giving a book a round of applause. That scene is obviously his homage to James Joyce, being very reminiscent of the famous chapter in Ulysses where Joyce introduces a series of disparate characters going about their business, apparently unconnected, and then ties them all together by having a character take a coach trip through Dublin and encounter them all. Pynchon does it with a slapstick balloon chase.
Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner; most seem contrived and pointless,without any real reason to be, but Pynchon is a real original, inspired and authentic - also a bit awe-inspiring. Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD!

Awful!, 25 Sep 2007
Maybe it's just me, but have my fellow reviewers gone mad?! How can you describe a book as great and give it 4 stars, then advise people to skip the first 215 pages as they're incomprehensible? How can you decide that a book which took you 5 attempts to get through is the best you ever read? How can you love a story, when you don't even understand it?

A great book should suck you in and hold you there, you should love the characters, you should be desperate to find out what happens next, you should miss it when you've finished. Above all it should be enjoyable. Gravity's Rainbow is none of these things.

Imagine you watched a film that had been chopped up so that every single sentence was out of order. Would you enjoy it? - of course not. Even if you watched it 20 times and managed to figure out the basic storyline it still wouldn't be good, you've just managed to understand it a bit better.

Don't listen to all the other reviewers giving it 4 or 5 stars - they just want you to suffer as much as they did!

Mind-Altering Achievement, 03 Jan 2008
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, 18 Oct 2007
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, 24 May 2007
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.

essential re-read, 24 Nov 2004
One of the funniest books I've ever read. Constistently amusing and quirky, this book takes you down avenues of thought so esoteric and profound, and still keeps you fixed in a concrete present that is a pure slice of America, like watermelon on a hot day. And I defy you not to fall head-over-heels for Oedipa Mass (what a name!?), the book's heroine, if thats the word?

hhmm..., 05 Sep 2003
This is one of the strangest yet most haunting novels I’ve ever read. It seems to stand apart from many other novels just by its seemingly obscure subject matter and the way in which it draws you into it. The novel is written in quite free flowing, dense text. This, whilst not making it indecipherable can be quite a challenge at times. It is by this method Pynchon draws the reader themselves into the story. The fact that Pynchon can create so much atmosphere in such a short novel is a testament to his craftsmanship.
The Novel (for me) was mainly about the notion of possibility. Nothing much is resolved in the story but so much is suggested. Is WASTE just an isolated cult in that part of California or is there a sector in every town in America? Oedipa goes through the novel with all these possibilities running through her mind. The more she finds out the more possibilities appear to her. It’s like staring at a dark wall and then suddenly realizing is crawling with ants. Her discoveries could change everything, even the ground beneath her feet or it could just be a joke set up by a dead guy with a sense of humour.
The crux of the novel is quite a frightening prospect. If such a massive network, like this can exist beneath Oedipa’s nose and she has never even considered the existence of it, what else could be there that Oedipa and all of us are not aware of?
Pychon draws the reader into this world which resembles an old fashioned X-Files tale. The detail of the historical information in the novel even makes the reader question whether WASTE exists in the real world. Thus putting us on a par with Oedipa and making the experience of the novel all the more vivid. WASTE could just be a small benign thing that is kept running by a few devoted anti-establishment types or maybe, just maybe...

This novel will certainly stay with me for a long time to come.

Thomas Pynchon is a show-off, 07 Oct 2008
~Thomas Pynchon is a show-off. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that; he knows phrases in scores of languages - which hints that he can get by in them all - and is familiar with the names and theories of oodles of mathematicians and philosophers. He isn't bad on explorers and composers, though it's possible that he has invented some and hidden them, and his geography implies that he has spent more time in exotic locations than is humanly possible. But most impressively, he can hold together a plot for more than 1,200 pages, so complex that the interactions between the characters and the locations forms a web that will remain unravelled by mere mortals. To some extent, with Pynchon, it was always thus, though his first book, The Crying of Lot 49 only runs to 138 pages, and Gravity's Rainbow, almost 900, makes the machinations of Against The Day seem a walk in the park. His characters have wonderful names, there are good jokes, though they are thinly spread, and some great set pieces. Sometimes hilarious, always inventive, there's a lot to praise, but exactly what it all adds up to is far from clear. And there are his usual ploys: not introducing major characters until at least page 150, and then not flagging them as such, and again and again passages that deal with some threat that is just out of reach, and all his characters talk in exactly the same way, often forming mysterious half-formed dialogues which are probably more realistic than most attempts to write down conversations, but as eavesdroppers we rarely get the whole sense of what is being said.
But the problem is that it doesn't make sense for Pynchon to be a show-off because he is a complete recluse - and how difficult must this be in this day and age? According to the blurb in Lot 49 he was born in 1937, attended Cornell University and was 'rumoured to be living in California and Mexico'. There is one very old photo and that is it. Perhaps all will be revealed at a later date, but what would be the point? and isn't there are danger that he might leave it too late?
Against the Day is - more accessible than Gravity's Rainbow, more wide-ranging than Mason & Dixon...... I could go on and compare to all his books, but this would just show you that I have read them all, and who is showing off now? But I can't escape the conclusion that although it is a very impressive body of work you could spend your whole life reading and re-reading in a continuous cycle, I, for one, would be little the wiser about anything that I could pass on. But, as with his other books, I don't feel that the time (three months)I spent reading Against The Day was a complete waste.

against the day, 05 Aug 2008
being the first to review a masterpiece that does not need reviewing.

my first pynchon read, but not the last.

kudos

Fine prose, but ...., 13 May 2008
I bought this on the basis of a review comparing it with a toaster, as they were the same weight and size ! It's not as straightforward to compare them unfortunately. What's good about it? Some superb prose, as good as Ruskin at his best. Interesting concepts in maths and physics explored in a literary manner. What's bad? Hugely bloated and in desperate need of editing, it rambles, and towards the end you feel he's had a Dickensian moment and the re-occurrence of characters in unacccounted places and situations is just too much to bear. The whole book rambles, and whilst you can live with that if the end result is a unity, however in this case unfortunately it isn't. It is a book that gets close to being excellent but in aiming at an ambitious target has missed and become poor. Certainly not worth the effort in reading such a large tome.

against the day, 16 Apr 2008
I sat down to read this in my Christmas holidays, having reading everything by Pynchon since my Varsity days.
A wonderful book, big and bizarre, but it could have used some severe editing.
Perhaps Pynchon is too big a name for the editor's "red pen" to do a proper job?

.....and then some!, 31 Oct 2007
Sure it's all that most reviewers have claimed; its also Indiana Jones meets the giants of modern physics in the company of conspiracy theory and a cast of anarchists, cowboys, uber-capitalists and everyday folks just trying to get by. Like Vineland set in a later era, Pynchon shows that he knows where the bones are buried and how they got there, how America came to be the monster we know/love/hate today. Stylistically a world away from the studied urbanity of DeLillo, this novel is also a smorgasbord of American social history in the early years of the 20th century. Pynchon here (and elsewhere), offers us the post modern novel constructed in the Grand Baroque style in which he excels, in which he has no equal. The scholarship underpinning this book is awesome, but above all, reading this book is, as Miles Davis remarked in another context, about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on.

Everything you need to know and how to say it, 15 Oct 2008
When this book was published, I was inspired to do a Master's degree studying it closely, and that was 1976. Here we are 32 years later and there is no book since published, or published before, written by one man, with the depth, range, accuracy, and pertinence to the human condition now and likely to be for the next 100 years. This book is not a novel in a coherent and completely satisfying manner, capable of being read in a matter of sitting down for a few hours at a time over a weekend, but neither is Ulysses, nor Brothers Karamazov. To approach this you must have a broad understanding and an expansive imagination, capable of responding to the world of Pynchon. I have read everything by Pynchon, before or since, and GR is his master work, no question. People will read this as long as they can read, and they will wonder, and be amazed in wonder. It is essential on the shelf of any person who reads well, even as a challenge for them at various moments in their life. To read it in a week, or read it without any break as is done at Princeton every year, is to alter the state of your mind irrevocably. Be prepared, because you will never think and feel and speak and write as you did before.

Ulysses or Not?, 28 Aug 2008
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Begob Sir, says the dear reader, God send you don't make them in the one book. (Mix and match)
He can and does write sublimely, but if there's anything challenging in Gravity's Rainbow Rainbow, its the challenge of a kid kicking the back of your seat through the whole of Parsifal.

Gave up after 500 pages, 12 Mar 2008
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far as I am concerned. Its not worth reading in my view. I took up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" afterwards and got more satisfaction of the opening page of that book than i did the 500 pages of this book. Be warned :-)

worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously, 15 Dec 2007
Most seem to agree that this is THE Pynchon book. Definitely not a quick,light read, but there IS a plot which picks up pace after a while. The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets - but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. For the first half, or even two thirds, of the book the focus shifts between different characters and locations who, at first, seem to have no connection but WWII, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, and it actually becomes quite gripping. For a finale, he brings all the characters together in a scene so hilarious and brilliant it's the only time I've ever felt like giving a book a round of applause. That scene is obviously his homage to James Joyce, being very reminiscent of the famous chapter in Ulysses where Joyce introduces a series of disparate characters going about their business, apparently unconnected, and then ties them all together by having a character take a coach trip through Dublin and encounter them all. Pynchon does it with a slapstick balloon chase.
Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner; most seem contrived and pointless,without any real reason to be, but Pynchon is a real original, inspired and authentic - also a bit awe-inspiring. Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD!

Awful!, 25 Sep 2007
Maybe it's just me, but have my fellow reviewers gone mad?! How can you describe a book as great and give it 4 stars, then advise people to skip the first 215 pages as they're incomprehensible? How can you decide that a book which took you 5 attempts to get through is the best you ever read? How can you love a story, when you don't even understand it?

A great book should suck you in and hold you there, you should love the characters, you should be desperate to find out what happens next, you should miss it when you've finished. Above all it should be enjoyable. Gravity's Rainbow is none of these things.

Imagine you watched a film that had been chopped up so that every single sentence was out of order. Would you enjoy it? - of course not. Even if you watched it 20 times and managed to figure out the basic storyline it still wouldn't be good, you've just managed to understand it a bit better.

Don't listen to all the other reviewers giving it 4 or 5 stars - they just want you to suffer as much as they did!

Mind-Altering Achievement, 03 Jan 2008
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, 18 Oct 2007
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, 24 May 2007
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.

essential re-read, 24 Nov 2004
One of the funniest books I've ever read. Constistently amusing and quirky, this book takes you down avenues of thought so esoteric and profound, and still keeps you fixed in a concrete present that is a pure slice of America, like watermelon on a hot day. And I defy you not to fall head-over-heels for Oedipa Mass (what a name!?), the book's heroine, if thats the word?

hhmm..., 05 Sep 2003
This is one of the strangest yet most haunting novels I’ve ever read. It seems to stand apart from many other novels just by its seemingly obscure subject matter and the way in which it draws you into it. The novel is written in quite free flowing, dense text. This, whilst not making it indecipherable can be quite a challenge at times. It is by this method Pynchon draws the reader themselves into the story. The fact that Pynchon can create so much atmosphere in such a short novel is a testament to his craftsmanship.
The Novel (for me) was mainly about the notion of possibility. Nothing much is resolved in the story but so much is suggested. Is WASTE just an isolated cult in that part of California or is there a sector in every town in America? Oedipa goes through the novel with all these possibilities running through her mind. The more she finds out the more possibilities appear to her. It’s like staring at a dark wall and then suddenly realizing is crawling with ants. Her discoveries could change everything, even the ground beneath her feet or it could just be a joke set up by a dead guy with a sense of humour.
The crux of the novel is quite a frightening prospect. If such a massive network, like this can exist beneath Oedipa’s nose and she has never even considered the existence of it, what else could be there that Oedipa and all of us are not aware of?
Pychon draws the reader into this world which resembles an old fashioned X-Files tale. The detail of the historical information in the novel even makes the reader question whether WASTE exists in the real world. Thus putting us on a par with Oedipa and making the experience of the novel all the more vivid. WASTE could just be a small benign thing that is kept running by a few devoted anti-establishment types or maybe, just maybe...

This novel will certainly stay with me for a long time to come.

Thomas Pynchon is a show-off, 07 Oct 2008
~Thomas Pynchon is a show-off. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that; he knows phrases in scores of languages - which hints that he can get by in them all - and is familiar with the names and theories of oodles of mathematicians and philosophers. He isn't bad on explorers and composers, though it's possible that he has invented some and hidden them, and his geography implies that he has spent more time in exotic locations than is humanly possible. But most impressively, he can hold together a plot for more than 1,200 pages, so complex that the interactions between the characters and the locations forms a web that will remain unravelled by mere mortals. To some extent, with Pynchon, it was always thus, though his first book, The Crying of Lot 49 only runs to 138 pages, and Gravity's Rainbow, almost 900, makes the machinations of Against The Day seem a walk in the park. His characters have wonderful names, there are good jokes, though they are thinly spread, and some great set pieces. Sometimes hilarious, always inventive, there's a lot to praise, but exactly what it all adds up to is far from clear. And there are his usual ploys: not introducing major characters until at least page 150, and then not flagging them as such, and again and again passages that deal with some threat that is just out of reach, and all his characters talk in exactly the same way, often forming mysterious half-formed dialogues which are probably more realistic than most attempts to write down conversations, but as eavesdroppers we rarely get the whole sense of what is being said.
But the problem is that it doesn't make sense for Pynchon to be a show-off because he is a complete recluse - and how difficult must this be in this day and age? According to the blurb in Lot 49 he was born in 1937, attended Cornell University and was 'rumoured to be living in California and Mexico'. There is one very old photo and that is it. Perhaps all will be revealed at a later date, but what would be the point? and isn't there are danger that he might leave it too late?
Against the Day is - more accessible than Gravity's Rainbow, more wide-ranging than Mason & Dixon...... I could go on and compare to all his books, but this would just show you that I have read them all, and who is showing off now? But I can't escape the conclusion that although it is a very impressive body of work you could spend your whole life reading and re-reading in a continuous cycle, I, for one, would be little the wiser about anything that I could pass on. But, as with his other books, I don't feel that the time (three months)I spent reading Against The Day was a complete waste.

against the day, 05 Aug 2008
being the first to review a masterpiece that does not need reviewing.

my first pynchon read, but not the last.

kudos

Fine prose, but ...., 13 May 2008
I bought this on the basis of a review comparing it with a toaster, as they were the same weight and size ! It's not as straightforward to compare them unfortunately. What's good about it? Some superb prose, as good as Ruskin at his best. Interesting concepts in maths and physics explored in a literary manner. What's bad? Hugely bloated and in desperate need of editing, it rambles, and towards the end you feel he's had a Dickensian moment and the re-occurrence of characters in unacccounted places and situations is just too much to bear. The whole book rambles, and whilst you can live with that if the end result is a unity, however in this case unfortunately it isn't. It is a book that gets close to being excellent but in aiming at an ambitious target has missed and become poor. Certainly not worth the effort in reading such a large tome.

against the day, 16 Apr 2008
I sat down to read this in my Christmas holidays, having reading everything by Pynchon since my Varsity days.
A wonderful book, big and bizarre, but it could have used some severe editing.
Perhaps Pynchon is too big a name for the editor's "red pen" to do a proper job?

.....and then some!, 31 Oct 2007
Sure it's all that most reviewers have claimed; its also Indiana Jones meets the giants of modern physics in the company of conspiracy theory and a cast of anarchists, cowboys, uber-capitalists and everyday folks just trying to get by. Like Vineland set in a later era, Pynchon shows that he knows where the bones are buried and how they got there, how America came to be the monster we know/love/hate today. Stylistically a world away from the studied urbanity of DeLillo, this novel is also a smorgasbord of American social history in the early years of the 20th century. Pynchon here (and elsewhere), offers us the post modern novel constructed in the Grand Baroque style in which he excels, in which he has no equal. The scholarship underpinning this book is awesome, but above all, reading this book is, as Miles Davis remarked in another context, about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on.

FORTY FOUR YEARS AGO, 20 Jul 2007
I've returned to V to so I can give a copy to an American friend who has never heard of Pynchon. Forty four years ago, I was introduced to Thomas Pynchon's V by a fellow Sandhurst cadet. I read it rapidly, becoming and even remaining, hugely exhilarated by its sweep and epic scale. V should be compulsory reading for all sixth form English Literature, History and Geography students. Don't delay, read it now!

Please someone make it stop, 25 Jun 2007
From the first paragraph you know the type of person who will like this book. They've read Finnegan's Wake, they wear berets, they drive an electric eco-car. Above all they will profess their love of Language, and enjoy an author's "playfullness" with Words. This is fine if you do not want to read a novel; if you want to read a book on linguistics go ahead and buy one but do not try to convince anyone that this book counts as a novel. It is more of an apparent attempt by the author to cure writer's block: disjointed sentences, a lack of punctuation, changes in writing styles; a bit like listening to a scratched record. Of contemporary jazz. I am not disputing that Pynchon can write but rather that he overwrites, Herman Melville and Philip Roth are both guilty of this, the problem is more that he doesn't know how to write something that anyone would want to read (apart from the self-thought literati described above) and the narrative is ruined by the presence of "hilariously" named characters (Profane, Bongo-Shaftsbury). If you haven't already started this book (and you are being forced to read it)skip chapters 1,3&4 as they don't contain anything meaningful plot points (not that there is much plot). If you have already finished it I'm pretty sure you won't be picking it up again.

One of the best novels we have, 08 Nov 2006
I can't add much to what's already been said about Pynchon. He is one of my three or four favorite living writers all of whom have something in common and all of whom, I guess, are about the same age == MICHAEL MOORCOCK (whose War Amongst the Angels books are no more 'sci fi' than Pynchon's), DON DELILLO (who is maybe the best of them overall) and J.G.BALLARD (whose latest books aren't 'sci fi' either). There is something about these writers' sensibility, their grasp on modern times, that makes them constantly rereadable. I couldn't tell you who was the best, but I could suggest you try reading them one after the other. If you do, you will wind up knowing more about our present day than when you started. If you're unfamiliar with these writers, I'd suggest you start with this one, then try Players by DeLillo, The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard and Blood and The War Amongst the Angels by Moorcock. I don't think there's ever been a better time to be reading novels. V will prove it.



Good, maybe a classic!!, 24 Feb 2004
If you look carefully on Amazon, you’ll find more books ABOUT the writings of Thomas Pynchon than you will BY Thomas Pynchon. He seems to be the writer of choice for critics, literary analysts and scholars alike. That aside, you cannot question the depth of this man’s writing talent, and V is a great example.

I think that many people who read this book will find it a chore, and eventually wont “get” the story. It twists and turns and at times goes off on tangents that dare to keep the readers attention. Sure, it’s hard going at times, but worth every word. The character development is unconventional, but thorough. The art of the scenes and the situations (and the whole sick crew!) is immaculate. As the story draws to a close the pieces fit together beautifully and create 20th century literary classic.

A companion to this book (as with all of TP books) is available, but treat the book as a separate item, and don’t taint it with over analysis.

Twisty and turny but thoroughly fulfilly read., 24 Feb 2004
If you look carefully on Amazon, you’ll find more books ABOUT the writings of Thomas Pynchon than you will BY Thomas Pynchon. He seems to be the writer of choice for critics, literary analysts and scholars alike. That aside, you cannot question the depth of this man’s writing talent, and V is a great example.

I think that many people who read this book will find it a chore, and eventually wont “get” the story. It twists and turns and at times goes off on tangents that dare to keep the readers attention. Sure, it’s hard going at times, but worth every word. The character development is unconventional, but thorough. The art of the scenes and the situations (and the whole sick crew!) is immaculate. As the story draws to a close the pieces fit together beautifully and create 20th century literary classic.

A companion to this book (as with all of TP books) is available, but treat the book as a separate item, and don’t taint it with over analysis.

Everything you need to know and how to say it, 15 Oct 2008
When this book was published, I was inspired to do a Master's degree studying it closely, and that was 1976. Here we are 32 years later and there is no book since published, or published before, written by one man, with the depth, range, accuracy, and pertinence to the human condition now and likely to be for the next 100 years. This book is not a novel in a coherent and completely satisfying manner, capable of being read in a matter of sitting down for a few hours at a time over a weekend, but neither is Ulysses, nor Brothers Karamazov. To approach this you must have a broad understanding and an expansive imagination, capable of responding to the world of Pynchon. I have read everything by Pynchon, before or since, and GR is his master work, no question. People will read this as long as they can read, and they will wonder, and be amazed in wonder. It is essential on the shelf of any person who reads well, even as a challenge for them at various moments in their life. To read it in a week, or read it without any break as is done at Princeton every year, is to alter the state of your mind irrevocably. Be prepared, because you will never think and feel and speak and write as you did before.

Ulysses or Not?, 28 Aug 2008
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Begob Sir, says the dear reader, God send you don't make them in the one book. (Mix and match)
He can and does write sublimely, but if there's anything challenging in Gravity's Rainbow Rainbow, its the challenge of a kid kicking the back of your seat through the whole of Parsifal.

Gave up after 500 pages, 12 Mar 2008
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far as I am concerned. Its not worth reading in my view. I took up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" afterwards and got more satisfaction of the opening page of that book than i did the 500 pages of this book. Be warned :-)

worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously, 15 Dec 2007
Most seem to agree that this is THE Pynchon book. Definitely not a quick,light read, but there IS a plot which picks up pace after a while. The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets - but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. For the first half, or even two thirds, of the book the focus shifts between different characters and locations who, at first, seem to have no connection but WWII, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, and it actually becomes quite gripping. For a finale, he brings all the characters together in a scene so hilarious and brilliant it's the only time I've ever felt like giving a book a round of applause. That scene is obviously his homage to James Joyce, being very reminiscent of the famous chapter in Ulysses where Joyce introduces a series of disparate characters going about their business, apparently unconnected, and then ties them all together by having a character take a coach trip through Dublin and encounter them all. Pynchon does it with a slapstick balloon chase.
Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner; most seem contrived and pointless,without any real reason to be, but Pynchon is a real original, inspired and authentic - also a bit awe-inspiring. Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD!

Awful!, 25 Sep 2007
Maybe it's just me, but have my fellow reviewers gone mad?! How can you describe a book as great and give it 4 stars, then advise people to skip the first 215 pages as they're incomprehensible? How can you decide that a book which took you 5 attempts to get through is the best you ever read? How can you love a story, when you don't even understand it?

A great book should suck you in and hold you there, you should love the characters, you should be desperate to find out what happens next, you should miss it when you've finished. Above all it should be enjoyable. Gravity's Rainbow is none of these things.

Imagine you watched a film that had been chopped up so that every single sentence was out of order. Would you enjoy it? - of course not. Even if you watched it 20 times and managed to figure out the basic storyline it still wouldn't be good, you've just managed to understand it a bit better.

Don't listen to all the other reviewers giving it 4 or 5 stars - they just want you to suffer as much as they did!

Mind-Altering Achievement, 03 Jan 2008
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, 18 Oct 2007
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, 24 May 2007
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.

essential re-read, 24 Nov 2004
One of the funniest books I've ever read. Constistently amusing and quirky, this book takes you down avenues of thought so esoteric and profound, and still keeps you fixed in a concrete present that is a pure slice of America, like watermelon on a hot day. And I defy you not to fall head-over-heels for Oedipa Mass (what a name!?), the book's heroine, if thats the word?

hhmm..., 05 Sep 2003
This is one of the strangest yet most haunting novels I’ve ever read. It seems to stand apart from many other novels just by its seemingly obscure subject matter and the way in which it draws you into it. The novel is written in quite free flowing, dense text. This, whilst not making it indecipherable can be quite a challenge at times. It is by this method Pynchon draws the reader themselves into the story. The fact that Pynchon can create so much atmosphere in such a short novel is a testament to his craftsmanship.
The Novel (for me) was mainly about the notion of possibility. Nothing much is resolved in the story but so much is suggested. Is WASTE just an isolated cult in that part of California or is there a sector in every town in America? Oedipa goes through the novel with all these possibilities running through her mind. The more she finds out the more possibilities appear to her. It’s like staring at a dark wall and then suddenly realizing is crawling with ants. Her discoveries could change everything, even the ground beneath her feet or it could just be a joke set up by a dead guy with a sense of humour.
The crux of the novel is quite a frightening prospect. If such a massive network, like this can exist beneath Oedipa’s nose and she has never even considered the existence of it, what else could be there that Oedipa and all of us are not aware of?
Pychon draws the reader into this world which resembles an old fashioned X-Files tale. The detail of the historical information in the novel even makes the reader question whether WASTE exists in the real world. Thus putting us on a par with Oedipa and making the experience of the novel all the more vivid. WASTE could just be a small benign thing that is kept running by a few devoted anti-establishment types or maybe, just maybe...

This novel will certainly stay with me for a long time to come.

Thomas Pynchon is a show-off, 07 Oct 2008
~Thomas Pynchon is a show-off. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that; he knows phrases in scores of languages - which hints that he can get by in them all - and is familiar with the names and theories of oodles of mathematicians and philosophers. He isn't bad on explorers and composers, though it's possible that he has invented some and hidden them, and his geography implies that he has spent more time in exotic locations than is humanly possible. But most impressively, he can hold together a plot for more than 1,200 pages, so complex that the interactions between the characters and the locations forms a web that will remain unravelled by mere mortals. To some extent, with Pynchon, it was always thus, though his first book, The Crying of Lot 49 only runs to 138 pages, and Gravity's Rainbow, almost 900, makes the machinations of Against The Day seem a walk in the park. His characters have wonderful names, there are good jokes, though they are thinly spread, and some great set pieces. Sometimes hilarious, always inventive, there's a lot to praise, but exactly what it all adds up to is far from clear. And there are his usual ploys: not introducing major characters until at least page 150, and then not flagging them as such, and again and again passages that deal with some threat that is just out of reach, and all his characters talk in exactly the same way, often forming mysterious half-formed dialogues which are probably more realistic than most attempts to write down conversations, but as eavesdroppers we rarely get the whole sense of what is being said.
But the problem is that it doesn't make sense for Pynchon to be a show-off because he is a complete recluse - and how difficult must this be in this day and age? According to the blurb in Lot 49 he was born in 1937, attended Cornell University and was 'rumoured to be living in California and Mexico'. There is one very old photo and that is it. Perhaps all will be revealed at a later date, but what would be the point? and isn't there are danger that he might leave it too late?
Against the Day is - more accessible than Gravity's Rainbow, more wide-ranging than Mason & Dixon...... I could go on and compare to all his books, but this would just show you that I have read them all, and who is showing off now? But I can't escape the conclusion that although it is a very impressive body of work you could spend your whole life reading and re-reading in a continuous cycle, I, for one, would be little the wiser about anything that I could pass on. But, as with his other books, I don't feel that the time (three months)I spent reading Against The Day was a complete waste.

against the day, 05 Aug 2008
being the first to review a masterpiece that does not need reviewing.

my first pynchon read, but not the last.

kudos

Fine prose, but ...., 13 May 2008
I bought this on the basis of a review comparing it with a toaster, as they were the same weight and size ! It's not as straightforward to compare them unfortunately. What's good about it? Some superb prose, as good as Ruskin at his best. Interesting concepts in maths and physics explored in a literary manner. What's bad? Hugely bloated and in desperate need of editing, it rambles, and towards the end you feel he's had a Dickensian moment and the re-occurrence of characters in unacccounted places and situations is just too much to bear. The whole book rambles, and whilst you can live with that if the end result is a unity, however in this case unfortunately it isn't. It is a book that gets close to being excellent but in aiming at an ambitious target has missed and become poor. Certainly not worth the effort in reading such a large tome.

against the day, 16 Apr 2008
I sat down to read this in my Christmas holidays, having reading everything by Pynchon since my Varsity days.
A wonderful book, big and bizarre, but it could have used some severe editing.
Perhaps Pynchon is too big a name for the editor's "red pen" to do a proper job?

.....and then some!, 31 Oct 2007
Sure it's all that most reviewers have claimed; its also Indiana Jones meets the giants of modern physics in the company of conspiracy theory and a cast of anarchists, cowboys, uber-capitalists and everyday folks just trying to get by. Like Vineland set in a later era, Pynchon shows that he knows where the bones are buried and how they got there, how America came to be the monster we know/love/hate today. Stylistically a world away from the studied urbanity of DeLillo, this novel is also a smorgasbord of American social history in the early years of the 20th century. Pynchon here (and elsewhere), offers us the post modern novel constructed in the Grand Baroque style in which he excels, in which he has no equal. The scholarship underpinning this book is awesome, but above all, reading this book is, as Miles Davis remarked in another context, about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on.

FORTY FOUR YEARS AGO, 20 Jul 2007
I've returned to V to so I can give a copy to an American friend who has never heard of Pynchon. Forty four years ago, I was introduced to Thomas Pynchon's V by a fellow Sandhurst cadet. I read it rapidly, becoming and even remaining, hugely exhilarated by its sweep and epic scale. V should be compulsory reading for all sixth form English Literature, History and Geography students. Don't delay, read it now!

Please someone make it stop, 25 Jun 2007
From the first paragraph you know the type of person who will like this book. They've read Finnegan's Wake, they wear berets, they drive an electric eco-car. Above all they will profess their love of Language, and enjoy an author's "playfullness" with Words. This is fine if you do not want to read a novel; if you want to read a book on linguistics go ahead and buy one but do not try to convince anyone that this book counts as a novel. It is more of an apparent attempt by the author to cure writer's block: disjointed sentences, a lack of punctuation, changes in writing styles; a bit like listening to a scratched record. Of contemporary jazz. I am not disputing that Pynchon can write but rather that he overwrites, Herman Melville and Philip Roth are both guilty of this, the problem is more that he doesn't know how to write something that anyone would want to read (apart from the self-thought literati described above) and the narrative is ruined by the presence of "hilariously" named characters (Profane, Bongo-Shaftsbury). If you haven't already started this book (and you are being forced to read it)skip chapters 1,3&4 as they don't contain anything meaningful plot points (not that there is much plot). If you have already finished it I'm pretty sure you won't be picking it up again.

One of the best novels we have, 08 Nov 2006
I can't add much to what's already been said about Pynchon. He is one of my three or four favorite living writers all of whom have something in common and all of whom, I guess, are about the same age == MICHAEL MOORCOCK (whose War Amongst the Angels books are no more 'sci fi' than Pynchon's), DON DELILLO (who is maybe the best of them overall) and J.G.BALLARD (whose latest books aren't 'sci fi' either). There is something about these writers' sensibility, their grasp on modern times, that makes them constantly rereadable. I couldn't tell you who was the best, but I could suggest you try reading them one after the other. If you do, you will wind up knowing more about our present day than when you started. If you're unfamiliar with these writers, I'd suggest you start with this one, then try Players by DeLillo, The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard and Blood and The War Amongst the Angels by Moorcock. I don't think there's ever been a better time to be reading novels. V will prove it.



Good, maybe a classic!!, 24 Feb 2004
If you look carefully on Amazon, you’ll find more books ABOUT the writings of Thomas Pynchon than you will BY Thomas Pynchon. He seems to be the writer of choice for critics, literary analysts and scholars alike. That aside, you cannot question the depth of this man’s writing talent, and V is a great example.

I think that many people who read this book will find it a chore, and eventually wont “get” the story. It twists and turns and at times goes off on tangents that dare to keep the readers attention. Sure, it’s hard going at times, but worth every word. The character development is unconventional, but thorough. The art of the scenes and the situations (and the whole sick crew!) is immaculate. As the story draws to a close the pieces fit together beautifully and create 20th century literary classic.

A companion to this book (as with all of TP books) is available, but treat the book as a separate item, and don’t taint it with over analysis.

Twisty and turny but thoroughly fulfilly read., 24 Feb 2004
If you look carefully on Amazon, you’ll find more books ABOUT the writings of Thomas Pynchon than you will BY Thomas Pynchon. He seems to be the writer of choice for critics, literary analysts and scholars alike. That aside, you cannot question the depth of this man’s writing talent, and V is a great example.

I think that many people who read this book will find it a chore, and eventually wont “get” the story. It twists and turns and at times goes off on tangents that dare to keep the readers attention. Sure, it’s hard going at times, but worth every word. The character development is unconventional, but thorough. The art of the scenes and the situations (and the whole sick crew!) is immaculate. As the story draws to a close the pieces fit together beautifully and create 20th century literary classic.

A companion to this book (as with all of TP books) is available, but treat the book as a separate item, and don’t taint it with over analysis.

American Magic, 09 May 2008
Thomas Pynchon, in his introduction to this novel, talks of a story grounded on Magic (with a capital M) from a time before the internet appeared in our lives. In my view, it's the kind of mysticism which was sought by the Beats (one of them, Gary Snyder, is even thanked in the novel); a form of American Magic Realism as seen through a hashish haze, to the sound of rock & roll.

Like Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (the epitome of Magic Realism), giant characters come and go in the life of Daniel, a boy destined to learn all the outlaw skills in America and steal a perfectly round diamond, kept by the governemnt, for mysterious organisation AMO ("I Love" in Spanish). These giant characters are sketched very quickly, but so perfectly, by Jim Dodge as to make you wish they'd stick around a bit longer - or even win novels of their own. The novel is at its best when their dialogue spits one great line after another to a bemused Daniel (and reader).

Although the story plods a little towards the end, the appearance of a Tarantinoesque killer, and the diary entries of a mad girl with an imaginary daughter, liven things up. There's so much to chew in this novel, and so much to enjoy.

P.S. Make sure to only Read Pynchon's introduction after finishing the book, unless you enjoy spoilers.

stone in love with you..., 06 Feb 2008
I loved this book - plain simple and honest. One of the best bookS i have ever read. wildly transporting and full of the most interesting characters i have come across in any field of fiction. Reminded me a little of Even Cowgirls get the Blues - but far better writin and far more fun.

I can only say read it and go on a journey you will never forget. Lyrical - poetic - racy and full of invention.

I want a wildman/magician/pokerplayer, 03 Feb 2008
A fast paced, adventure, thrill seeking novel, full of intrigue, mystery and a world we'd all love to be part of. Downside, if any,towards the end it becomes apparent that this book delves past reality and the surreal, and straight into the imaginary. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but i'm a simple lady who likes to think that men like this exist.

Fantastic Find, 13 Oct 2007
I picked this book up in a closing down sale for £1 based on the reviews on the back cover and i was not to be disappointed. It is a complex tale which is told with great skill and moves at a fast pace, i think i read it within a week. a fantastic read and my advice is if you're thinking of buying it go ahead and do so as you will not regret it.

.... magical, 29 May 2006
This is by far the most thought provoking, enjoyable and moving book i have read for some time. The characters are inspiring and original. I loved the plot and was fascinated by the magical element.

I was totally captivated by Daniel and his experiences from boy to man, some include learning trades as a professional lock picker, master of disguise, and the ability to vanish.

I was so moved by this book i remember it in detail and how i felt when reading it. For anyone who wants a bit of adventure.

Everything you need to know and how to say it, 15 Oct 2008
When this book was published, I was inspired to do a Master's degree studying it closely, and that was 1976. Here we are 32 years later and there is no book since published, or published before, written by one man, with the depth, range, accuracy, and pertinence to the human condition now and likely to be for the next 100 years. This book is not a novel in a coherent and completely satisfying manner, capable of being read in a matter of sitting down for a few hours at a time over a weekend, but neither is Ulysses, nor Brothers Karamazov. To approach this you must have a broad understanding and an expansive imagination, capable of responding to the world of Pynchon. I have read everything by Pynchon, before or since, and GR is his master work, no question. People will read this as long as they can read, and they will wonder, and be amazed in wonder. It is essential on the shelf of any person who reads well, even as a challenge for them at various moments in their life. To read it in a week, or read it without any break as is done at Princeton every year, is to alter the state of your mind irrevocably. Be prepared, because you will never think and feel and speak and write as you did before.

Ulysses or Not?, 28 Aug 2008
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Begob Sir, says the dear reader, God send you don't make them in the one book. (Mix and match)
He can and does write sublimely, but if there's anything challenging in Gravity's Rainbow Rainbow, its the challenge of a kid kicking the back of your seat through the whole of Parsifal.

Gave up after 500 pages, 12 Mar 2008
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far as I am concerned. Its not worth reading in my view. I took up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" afterwards and got more satisfaction of the opening page of that book than i did the 500 pages of this book. Be warned :-)

worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously, 15 Dec 2007
Most seem to agree that this is THE Pynchon book. Definitely not a quick,light read, but there IS a plot which picks up pace after a while. The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets - but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. For the first half, or even two thirds, of the book the focus shifts between different characters and locations who, at first, seem to have no connection but WWII, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, and it actually becomes quite gripping. For a finale, he brings all the characters together in a scene so hilarious and brilliant it's the only time I've ever felt like giving a book a round of applause. That scene is obviously his homage to James Joyce, being very reminiscent of the famous chapter in Ulysses where Joyce introduces a series of disparate characters going about their business, apparently unconnected, and then ties them all together by having a character take a coach trip through Dublin and encounter them all. Pynchon does it with a slapstick balloon chase.
Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner; most seem contrived and pointless,without any real reason to be, but Pynchon is a real original, inspired and authentic - also a bit awe-inspiring. Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD!

Awful!, 25 Sep 2007
Maybe it's just me, but have my fellow reviewers gone mad?! How can you describe a book as great and give it 4 stars, then advise people to skip the first 215 pages as they're incomprehensible? How can you decide that a book which took you 5 attempts to get through is the best you ever read? How can you love a story, when you don't even understand it?

A great book should suck you in and hold you there, you should love the characters, you should be desperate to find out what happens next, you should miss it when you've finished. Above all it should be enjoyable. Gravity's Rainbow is none of these things.

Imagine you watched a film that had been chopped up so that every single sentence was out of order. Would you enjoy it? - of course not. Even if you watched it 20 times and managed to figure out the basic storyline it still wouldn't be good, you've just managed to understand it a bit better.

Don't listen to all the other reviewers giving it 4 or 5 stars - they just want you to suffer as much as they did!

Mind-Altering Achievement, 03 Jan 2008
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, 18 Oct 2007
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, 24 May 2007
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.

essential re-read, 24 Nov 2004
One of the funniest books I've ever read. Constistently amusing and quirky, this book takes you down avenues of thought so esoteric and profound, and still keeps you fixed in a concrete present that is a pure slice of America, like watermelon on a hot day. And I defy you not to fall head-over-heels for Oedipa Mass (what a name!?), the book's heroine, if thats the word?

hhmm..., 05 Sep 2003
This is one of the strangest yet most haunting novels I’ve ever read. It seems to stand apart from many other novels just by its seemingly obscure subject matter and the way in which it draws you into it. The novel is written in quite free flowing, dense text. This, whilst not making it indecipherable can be quite a challenge at times. It is by this method Pynchon draws the reader themselves into the story. The fact that Pynchon can create so much atmosphere in such a short novel is a testament to his craftsmanship.
The Novel (for me) was mainly about the notion of possibility. Nothing much is resolved in the story but so much is suggested. Is WASTE just an isolated cult in that part of California or is there a sector in every town in America? Oedipa goes through the novel with all these possibilities running through her mind. The more she finds out the more possibilities appear to her. It’s like staring at a dark wall and then suddenly realizing is crawling with ants. Her discoveries could change everything, even the ground beneath her feet or it could just be a joke set up by a dead guy with a sense of humour.
The crux of the novel is quite a frightening prospect. If such a massive network, like this can exist beneath Oedipa’s nose and she has never even considered the existence of it, what else could be there that Oedipa and all of us are not aware of?
Pychon draws the reader into this world which resembles an old fashioned X-Files tale. The detail of the historical information in the novel even makes the reader question whether WASTE exists in the real world. Thus putting us on a par with Oedipa and making the experience of the novel all the more vivid. WASTE could just be a small benign thing that is kept running by a few devoted anti-establishment types or maybe, just maybe...

This novel will certainly stay with me for a long time to come.

Thomas Pynchon is a show-off, 07 Oct 2008
~Thomas Pynchon is a show-off. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that; he knows phrases in scores of languages - which hints that he can get by in them all - and is familiar with the names and theories of oodles of mathematicians and philosophers. He isn't bad on explorers and composers, though it's possible that he has invented some and hidden them, and his geography implies that he has spent more time in exotic locations than is humanly possible. But most impressively, he can hold together a plot for more than 1,200 pages, so complex that the interactions between the characters and the locations forms a web that will remain unravelled by mere mortals. To some extent, with Pynchon, it was always thus, though his first book, The Crying of Lot 49 only runs to 138 pages, and Gravity's Rainbow, almost 900, makes the machinations of Against The Day seem a walk in the park. His characters have wonderful names, there are good jokes, though they are thinly spread, and some great set pieces. Sometimes hilarious, always inventive, there's a lot to praise, but exactly what it all adds up to is far from clear. And there are his usual ploys: not introducing major characters until at least page 150, and then not flagging them as such, and again and again passages that deal with some threat that is just out of reach, and all his characters talk in exactly the same way, often forming mysterious half-formed dialogues which are probably more realistic than most attempts to write down conversations, but as eavesdroppers we rarely get the whole sense of what is being said.
But the problem is that it doesn't make sense for Pynchon to be a show-off because he is a complete recluse - and how difficult must this be in this day and age? According to the blurb in Lot 49 he was born in 1937, attended Cornell University and was 'rumoured to be living in California and Mexico'. There is one very old photo and that is it. Perhaps all will be revealed at a later date, but what would be the point? and isn't there are danger that he might leave it too late?
Against the Day is - more accessible than Gravity's Rainbow, more wide-ranging than Mason & Dixon...... I could go on and compare to all his books, but this would just show you that I have read them all, and who is showing off now? But I can't escape the conclusion that although it is a very impressive body of work you could spend your whole life reading and re-reading in a continuous cycle, I, for one, would be little the wiser about anything that I could pass on. But, as with his other books, I don't feel that the time (three months)I spent reading Against The Day was a complete waste.

against the day, 05 Aug 2008
being the first to review a