So who was V?

>>8393882
he wuz anonymouse

He was the medic from the ending to ground zeroes.

>>8393882
currently reading it and i'm struggling. it's my least favorite Pynchon and i'm 200 pages in. i've laughed a couple of times but not as much as his other work. the prose is fantastic but not as experimental or, dare i say, refined, as his subsequent work. seems he did not find his perfect pitch until Gravity's Rainbow.

>>8393932
I have like 12 pages left and I agree completely. Confessions of Fausto Maijstral is probably my least favorite thing Pynchon has ever written. Even though I have like 20 minutes of reading left I don't feel like finishing.

>>8393882
whoever you want it to be

>>8393882
Nobody. Thats the point.

>>8393882

In our own special way I think we all are a little bit V

>>8393882
You're being led "down the garden path by symmetry". It's like Hamlet's "Fair thought to lie between a maid's legs -- nothing" V. being a game of mirrors and convergence. EVE flanked by EE, the recurring 55s, the prosaic influence of the Mons Veneris: V. is a vacuum. It is popular misconception to think of Eve as the first Woman, when she is actually the Ultimate Woman, toward whose realization the artist strives. That she is Ultimate is demonstrated in that we find her name in "evening", Eve-on, the end of the day, the evening chant, vespers, the word west... "gone west", we say... to the ultimate place, the country of death.... in the Arthurian legends called Avalon, Eve's island, the western isle of apple trees i.e. where Stencil's headed, but will never find.

Compare this with the V-1 & V-2 in GR and the Pavlovian ideas of the opposite, which converge into nothing, as Oedipa Maas wants "a symmetry of choices to break down".

>>8393962
Without a doubt his worst book

>>8393932
its not the greatest first novel of the 20th century (the recognitions or something might lay claim to that title) but i thought v. was an extremely well executed early work of post modernism. alot of memorable scenes, strong motifs and a compelling mystery made me want to keep reading it to its conclusion. i found the ending pretty weak however

File: Self Portrait.jpg (58KB, 448x553px) Image search: [Google]

58KB, 448x553px

>>8394002
>alot

>>8393947
>>8394002
oh i'll finish it. rare is the book i quit reading partway, especially one of this caliber. don't get me wrong, i am still enjoying the read. however, i think i made a mistake leaving it for last. i've read all his other works and have reveled in his words and worlds for a while now. i felt this way the first time i read Crying Lot (freshman year of high school) years before i tried it again and was hooked on Pynchon. i don't know what put me off from reading it. maybe simply because the other books were more readily available.

Vagina, dumbasses.

Pynchon was making the point that we're animals and life is all about sex, a theme he expands upon in his later novels.

>>8393882
The V-2 rocket

>>8393882
V. was Donald Trump the whole.

I dont know but it sounds like some french lesbian cp thing if you ask me...

>>8393980
tommy go home

>>8393882
V. is short for Venus, referred to in Mason & Dixon with the transit of Venus.


More serious answer is that the shape of it and the inherent unknowability of it are both more important; the shape is symmetrical and suggests two different lines meeting (Stencil's and Profane's stories, union of opposites, Profane a passive schlemihl who just lives life day to day without much self-awareness and Stencil an incredibly devoted, active man who's decided to take life into his own hands by actively searching for V., who's constantly awake and self-aware, so self-aware he refers to himself in the third-person constantly, kind of like mystical Buddhist/Sufi methods of self-observation meant to keep one "awake"...)

>>8394350
Also this, some critics make very clever (perhaps too clever) claims that V. shows up constantly in his works, the transit of Venus (V-ness) being supposedly one but I really fucking doubt that, might as well choose any word he has starting with a v and say it's an illusion to it.

>>8393958
This too.