Whats the deal with "the crying of lot 49" I am almost

>>8777284
Congrats, you found out that pynch is a hack

>>8777284
how did you get sirens of titan out of this? also, it's not that good, Pynchon's range is either incredible to forgettably mediocre to outright bad and boring. With every artist that produces a work or a few that cause major shifts in the landscape, there's always a large section of his/her audience that won't admit they produce bad work too (for example, look at all the Kubrick fans that think his adaptation of Lolita is good).

I really don't think you can judge Pynchon without reading his two best works. Gravity's Rainbow & Mason & Dixon are on a whole different level. I do hope that if you're interested in the hype you give those a chance. They're really good.

>>8777308

Just the feel of the flow of the novel's aimless plot and 'quirky' writing style

>>8777284
Ignore the first commenter who said Pynchon was a hack.... in all seriousness he was before he wrote Gravity's Rainbow. CoL49 is not the place to start with him. Also ignore the cucks who think you should start with V. V is impossibly dense, it's mind-blowing he write it as young as he did. Start with any of the epics past and including GR. I'd recommend his latest stuff desu but not Bleeding Edge it's trash. But yeah, avoid CoL49, dive in and you'll have the best experience of your life.

GR blew Lot out of the water. Maybe I could have appreciated Lot more if I had lived through the 70s. It seems like a terrible place to start reading Pynchon, but I only read it to be a pseud.

>>8777500
>Bleeding Edge it's trash
You are trash, friend.

Pynchon disregards this work, so if COL49 is your first Pynchon, don't judge his writing off it. Read more of him.

>>8777500
>V. is impossibly dense
The start and the Stencil chapters are, but it isn't that hard to follow.

>>8777500
Personally, while the prose and philosophy of GR is total genius, I really enjoyed the novella style of TCOL. It's a thoroughly pointless novel with a mystery we will never solve, but I feel that's just a superficial reading of it. To me, the whole "mystery" and this fascination with death and insanity, is a very short metaphor for our inability to comprehend mortality as purely mundane phenomena. Ophelia - and, quite brillaintly, the reader too - go insane trying to unwind a book with no mystery and give things depth when there is none, only mystifying things further, only moving themselves further from the pointless point. Certainly, the result is frustration for both the protagonist and the reader, and I think this is why Pynchon calls it a "bad" novel, but that was rather the point, because I think if you asked Tommy at this area of his life, he might say his was going much the same.

>>8777291
fuck off already

>>8777291
Faggot.

>>8778058
So half the book then? I dropped it twice before l finally commited to finishing it.

Going from a Navy dive bar in Virginia to Cairo doesn't make any sense at first and it's really frustrating when you can't understand what's happening.

V. is a bad starting point for Pynchon. I started with Lot 49, so l'd recommend it despite what OP said - it's supposed to be an aimless book - it's a good way to get a feel of his writing style. The same goes for Inherent Vice, even though Pynchon is kinda out of his element there.

V. and GR really are dense and hard to digest, you gotta admit that.

>>8778665
I haven't read V., but I think GR is best enjoyed lightly stoned, without much care for the plot or purpose. The joy is in the unbelievable virility of his descriptions, and the marijuana helps you (and Pynchon) focus on that.

>>8778688
so you're saying that you both didn't understand gravity's rainbow and couldn't even enjoy the prose without smoking pot like a retarded stoner

>>8778726
No, you're just being an ass with poor reading comprehension. I think it's one of the few books that can benefit from drugs because the deeply erratic plot style and surreal atmosphere aren't beholden to some grand modernist truth based narrative. Pynchon isn't trying to convey one thing, he's trying to confuse and breakdown all our expectations within the novel, and the nature of the novel. If you're looking for some grand system, you're just another hopeless paranoid or Oedipa clutching at links that don't really hold under closer examination. You can come up with some fantastic readings, and I'd respect that, but I think the purpose of the book is to just enjoy the madness rather than solve it. Pynchon's whole gig is mystery, and I think his own (mysterious) endorsement of drugs within his work is part of that breakdown of typical objectivist reality. By all means, call me an idiot, but I think a perfectly fine reading of a canon of post-modernism is that it doesn't really care for one.

>>8778773
Not the guy you're replying to, but you seem to 1) have a tight hold on the novel's purpose while denying interpretation (and no, he's not the first person to write a novel with numerous interpretations in mind) and 2) I really don't think his purpose was to confuse readers in GR.

>>8778934
I think you're correct to point out that paradox of mine, but the core of my argument is that I feel that trying to "understand" GR as the other anon claimed is not the purpose of the book. Of course, that's based on my own limited understanding of the book, but it's more my idea that there's not really one "total" reading of GR, but a number of equally apathetic ones that, like the conspiracies of the numerous Paranoids leading back to a vague Them figure, hold no hard results or leads over any other. It's basically saying any educated reading of GR is equally correct, and by that logic, none can be correct and it's assinine to chide a reader for thinking that when themes of confusion, madness and surrealism are so prevalent in Pynchon's books. For me, the whole novel was an exploration of systemised insanity, a conflict against entropy and determinism that was never really answered, or will be.

On the topic of confusion, I don't think Pynchon developed such a labyrinthine prose style coupled with such a fractured narrative and dense philosophy by accident. I think confusion is a recurring theme in his work, and my main point (and only real reading) is that we might just have to accept that in his books, and perhaps extend that view to the world.

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>>8778627
I read it a while ago but I remember having this feeling as if the novel/story was torturing Oedipa as I was reading it, and in a way I felt bad for going on with it because she was feeling trapped inside someone else's narrative.