Product Description

The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256962 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

-- New York Times
"The comedy crackles, the puns pop the satire explodes."

-- Chicago Tribune
"The work of a virtuoso with prose.intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce's Ulysses."

-- San Francisco Examiner
"A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force with a strongly European flavor."

Customer Reviews

None dare call it conspiracy
You know those really-need-to-give-medication-a-try types who constantly scribble in notebooks using tiny, densely packed letters and nodding knowingly at things that barely penetrate your attention? This is the kind of novel they'd write if they had somehow acquired an English degree with a specialization in Elizabethan England.

I found it not that difficult, at times amusing and a useful tool for understanding the last three decades of post-ironic, post-modern, post-clarity "serious" literature. But I was quite glad it was no longer than it was.

A Beautiful Sad and Funny Book
One day Mrs. Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executor of her ex-lover's will. As she proceeds she discovers that the legacy with which she has been entrusted draws her ever deeper into a complex web of conspiracies. Yet what she has discovered may be no more than her own paranoia, and the novel ends ambiguously with the final revelation still impending like a judgement day forever suspended.

The book walks a careful line between the comic and the tragic. It is a difficult balance and Pynchon maintains it beautifully. Unlike many literary comic novelists Pynchon is genuinely funny. Yet as Oedipa wanders around San Francisco encountering alienation and loss everywhere she turns a genuine pathos creeps into the humor.

I'm sure there are many ways to read the Crying of Lot 49. I think we may approach it as both a social satire of consumerism and as a larger statement about the breakdown of communication in all human communities.

On the whole I consider this to be one of my favorite novels.

Pynchon is God
Back in the sixties, I remember carrying a well-worn copy of LOT 49 around with me wherever I went, wherever I hung out in Berkeley. Pynchon was God; He knew. He gave us the California landscape, its craziness, its mindscape as no other author had done before. So what if the book was a put-on? So what if it was really about the "selling" or "crying" in real estate terms of the lot that is California, the state created by the 49ers? So what if the characters were straight out of comic books? It was the way he had woven it all so artfully together, a California of one piece, comprehensible for a change, maybe even understandable. I thank Pynchon for doing that. From time to time, I go back to LOT 49, taste the language and descriptions, do a few mental jumps in time back to that bizarre period in American life. Pynchon saw it all so early, so clearly.