‘The Crying of Lot 49’

Considering it took me almost a year to read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, it was a strange feeling to finish a Pynchon book in only a couple of days. But that was the case with his second novel(la) ‘The Crying of Lot 49’.

Housewife Oedipa Maas learns that she has been made co-executor of her previous lover’s estate. As she sorts his affairs in order potential secret plots, organisations and realities are unearthed along with a sinister, deeply hidden alternative postal system dating back centuries. But does all this really exist or is it a projection of Oedipa’s fracturing mind? And what is more valuable: our projections or the unnamable reality?

As Oedipa tells her shrink, Dr Hilarius (one of the best names for a psychiatrist ever) -

“I came,” she said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”
“Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it’s little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

‘The Crying of Lot 49’ is a wonderful book and is very much along the lines of ‘Inherent Vice’ or ‘Bleeding Edge’ as opposed to the sprawling historical epics of ‘V’ or ‘Gravity’s’. And Oepida is a great character having some of the sass of Maxine Tarnow and a touch of Doc Sportello’s counter culture glide. It is also extremely funny and with some literary set-pieces that simply blow the mind.

If you love stories about deep patterns, paranoid philately, the futility of imposing order on a chaotic Universe or the revealing humanity of the Second Law of Thermodynamics then this is the book for you.

Just make sure that if you order it through the mail you use W.A.S.T.E..