- Unknown Binding: 183 pages
- Publisher: Cape (1967)
- Language English
- ASIN: B001ORVIUO
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.......
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.......
Format:Paperback
Truth be told, I ought not to like this book. I've never been much of a fan of post-modernism, and this novella almost certainly falls within that category. As for conspiracy theory novels, well, don't get me started! But, and here is a very big 'however', this book is funny, perceptive and thought-provoking. It has all the density of Pynchon's other works but in a much shorter form. Read other reviewers to learn something of the plot and characters, but just be warned, reading this might send you seriously paranoid. Unmarked white vans, strange symbols and the revenge of the disposessed all come into it. Then there is the evidence of a collection of strangely defaced postage stamps. It is precisely because there is no satisfactory resolution to the story that you start to worry that some of it might just be true.
Format:Paperback
I was glad this book was short as I had to read it twice before I (vaguely) understood it. When I first read the crying of lot 49 I thought the prose deliberately impenetrable and in places a bit too nerdy with a weak plot running through it. The second time I read it I began to get all the pieces of the novel, though some things I find as irrelevant, like the description of a Jacobean play, and the history of two rival postal systems. We are in the electronic age, right?
I am (partly) a Pynchon fan, loving Gravity's Rainbow, thought V al right, and hated Against the Day, but I don't know how to class this one, except maybe with a shrug of the shoulders. Read this if you want but you won't get anything out of it.
I am (partly) a Pynchon fan, loving Gravity's Rainbow, thought V al right, and hated Against the Day, but I don't know how to class this one, except maybe with a shrug of the shoulders. Read this if you want but you won't get anything out of it.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
I couldn't quite keep up but some very funny parts
The Crying of Lot 49 is a small book at just over 100 pages long and I only got the general gist of the plot. Read more
Published 6 months ago by J. Willis
Not for me
I finally read this because I've never yet managed to complete a Thomas Pynchon story. I managed to finish this novel only because it's short. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Judy Croome
Great writing, terrible plot
I just couldn't get on with this book; I read it expecting a lot but could not get past the fact that I thought the main character would never make the choices that she did and... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Simon
Post-Modernist Masterpiece
This book changed the way I think about the world. It's a fun and intrigueing detective story in its own right, but read this in conjunction with some Baudillard anf Lyotard and it... Read more
Published 7 months ago by The Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Dan
Oedipa's Mess, but what an impressive one
Despite its brevity in pages, Thomas Pynchon's `The Crying of Lot 49' is one of the most bizarre, erudite, referential and absurdly compelling texts of the post-war period. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Mr. D Burin
A circle, a triangle and a trapezoid...
... did Pynchon deliberately leave out the line, or more precisely, the line segment that connects the circle with the triangle? Read more
Published 15 months ago by John P. Jones III
Grandiose Articulate Regurgitated Burblings Aimlessly Generating Ennui
At times humourous, packed with information (often obscure) and interspersed with a collection of disparate characters, this short novel should be a classic but for me it was too... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Kiwifunlad
Interesting, shocking, or just overrated?
Thomas Pynchon is widely regarded as one of the great American writers of the twentieth century; an author who leads us down the dark paths of the human mind towards the light of... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Nic Turner
Pretentious rubbish
Pretentious, overblown, pseudo-intellectual rubbish. The plot beggars belief, and it seems that it was beneath Thomas Pynchon to provide us with even the small saving grace of a... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Jon Turner
Good one for the conspiracy theorists
It is 1960's California a place of pop music, free love, recreational drugs but also an underbelly of folks buying swastikas and SS uniforms. Read more
Published on 15 Oct 2009 by Officer Dibble
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