The Crying of Lot 49 Book

Thomas Pynchon is a novelist renowned across the globe for requiring the utmost concentration when reading his books, and despite being written when the author was just a young 27-year-old man, The Crying of Lot 49 proves to be no exception within the author's stellar oeuvre. Don't allow yourself to be misled by its brevity as a novella compared to some of Pynchon's thousand-page novels; The Crying of Lot 49 will leave you behind if you aren't paying attention.

Like many of Pynchon's works, this novella takes the form of a quest. Our heroine is Mrs. Oedipa Maas, who begins her journey as a housewife in the suburbs of California in the mid-1960s. She returns home one afternoon from a Tupperware party, representative of the conformist life that she leads, to find a letter in the post that tells her that an old lover of hers, one Pierce Inverarity, a real-estate mogul, has died, and she has been named the executor of his will.

What follows is Oedipa's story as she tries to bring some sort of clarity and meaning to Inverarity's estate upon his passing. Yet the harder she tries to do so, the more impossible the task seems, and the deeper she delves into her paranoia.

This novella is often hailed as exemplary of postmodernism, seeking to go against the conventions of having one single, ultimate Truth, or a grand narrative, and it does so incredibly well. First published back in 1966, the novella was very much ahead of its time, doing things that would be done in the decades that succeeded it. As has become typical in Pynchon's writing, The Crying of Lot 49 features an array of wildly comically-named characters that have personalities to suit their name: Dr. Hilarius, Oedipa's psychiatrist; Manny DiPresso, a colleague of one of Inverarity's lawyers; Gengis Cohen, a well-respected philatelist; and of course, Oedipa herself. Often interpreted solely through the Freudian lens of her masculine counterpart, Oedipus, Oedipa in fact more closely reflects Oedipus in the fact that both are set upon a quest, which lies at the heart of both characters' stories.

What Pynchon does better than almost any other writer that appears in this novella is termed in literature and art as "mise en abyme," the idea of the greater story being reproduced within itself in a smaller form; the "play within a play" concept. Here, it appears more than once, which is an astonishing feat by the author. It appears first as a painting within a novel, in which the painting can be seen as reflecting Oedipa's journey; and then again later as a play within a novella, where the actions of the play, The Courier's Tragedy, reflect the wider action of The Crying of Lot 49, but it isn't until the novella is over that we are truly able to understand all of its parts.

The enjoyment that is to be derived from reading Pynchon is the fact that it often takes more than one read through his works to fully grasp exactly what it is that we have read, and even then we find ourselves turning pages back to make sure that we understand where we are in the story. His is a magnificent literary ability that few writers are worthy of comparison to, and more than four decades on, Pynchon is still writing at his best, having recently published a new novel, Inherent Vice, that is nostalgically set just a few years after The Crying of Lot 49, and makes for an incredibly interesting read in relation to his earlier novella, and seeing what has changed over the passing years.

Despite the tenets of postmodernism going against such things as the literary canon, Pynchon has nonetheless been welcomed as an important part of the American literary canon ever since he published his first novel, V., in 1963, and many of his works have appeared on a number of established critics' Top 100 Books of All-Time lists, and The Crying of Lot 49 is certainly one that frequently appears on such lists. If you can brace yourself for a book that will challenge you, and that is all but guaranteed to satisfy your desire to lose yourself within its pages, then Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is definitely a good choice to read. It will never fail to leave you wondering in which direction it could possibly be going next, right up until its closing words. It is truly an astounding accomplishment, especially from such a young author. It is nothing short of a literary masterpiece.

By far the shortest of Pynchon's great, dazzling novels - and one of the best.Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.'Engineered like a rocket' Ned Beauman, Independent'The best book to start with' Guardian

The Crying of Lot 49 : Paperback : Vintage Publishing : 9780099532613 : : 06 Jun 1996 : Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she haas been made executrix of a former lover's estate.