This isn't a review, and instead it's more a barrage of my thoughts, me just trying to order what happened, trying to make it clear for myself. There's more than enough reviews on this novel, about 50 years worth of it, and there's about 4000 reviews on Goodreads alone. This is also a reminder to myself that I don't always enjoy doing reviews, and that I should do what comes natural. For this one that means just spouting out whatever comes to mind. That does mean spoilers, somewhat.
Oedipa Maas has been made the executor of a an ex-lover who has recently passed away. Wealthy and eccentric, Inverarity Pierce has left behind him a massive amount of assets to be appraised, sold and auctioned off. Despite not having any experience in the legalities of the situation, and now living with her husband, Oedipa makes the journey to Southern California where, in the course of her duties she stumbles on what could possibly be a massive world-wide conspiracy. As she tries to piece together the clues concerning the mysterious Tristero organization, and its secret war with the Thurn and Taxis postal system, with allies disappearing and dying around her, and with signs tying everything she sees into a massive web of deceit, she has to confront the likelihood that she's become insane.
Depending on who you ask The Crying of Lot 49 is either a classic Postmodern work, or a classic work that parodies Postmodern works. But either way, it's become dated, or at least, to someone not living in the USA, the horde of Americana it references; the characters, politicians, brands, and concepts can be quite bewildering. There were a lot of times where I just did not understand what was being referenced, where I felt left out and frustrated. That being said, it never became too insurmountable, in reading sometimes you have to accept that the small hang-ups don't matter and do not necessarily detract from the whole.
The Crying of Lot 49 was a strange but interesting read, most of the time funny and engaging, but also at points quite irritating and a bit of a slog to get through, especially at the start.
It's got a high barrier of entry, but after a certain point it really ends up becoming quite an engaging read. Once Oedipa finishes watching the play, 'the Courier's tragedy', I felt myself quite involved, and interested in the mystery of the W.A.S.T.E./ Tristero - possibility, and likely for quite a different reason than most people would expect, which I'll outline below as an addendum after the main thing.
The entire last third of the novel is riveting and its ending is pretty brilliant, in a postmodern sense.
The central question that drives to the plot is of course the mystery whether or not there is a Tristero entity that was/is in a quiet war with the Thurn and Taxis company, that has gone underground and is doing its best to suppress any and all information about them, using any means necessary.
By the end of the novel, the possibilities have been offered that either the thing is true, or that Oedipa has gone insane, or that she's just fantasized all of the connections, or that alternatively it might all be an elaborate joke, with too much money behind it, too many people bought in order to play along, to piece-meal reveal information, to clamp shut at pre-determined points. That it is a joke set up by a disgruntled or love-sick ex, who, aware of his erstwhile lover's mental problems, posthumously takes her for a ride, either in order to hurt her or to gift her with something transcendental. He might even not be dead and, with this elaborate game, be trying to win her back.
The brilliant thing is that there's no way to really tell, given the novel's ending. Oedipa at the end has either truly gone paranoid, or has had the right of it. But due to how, over the course of the novel, she responds and analyzes the information she's been given, and who has been giving it, she/ Pynchon offers up multiple plausible reasons for those people's actions, allowing them to be puppets moving to the tune of a master puppeteer, but to also at the same time leave room for the possibility that they might just be tenuously linked individuals, all with their own insights into a vast conspiracy.
The idea that she's fantasized all of it holds no water I believe, mainly as that devalues any type of fiction, but I could certainly admit that various incidents might have been imagined.
If she's been suffering from a psychosis, then it's a bit of a disturbing novel, as it manages to catch you in its intrigue, and allows you to see all these connections, making you think that indeed there is something here, in this way managing to bring the reader down into Oedipa's psychosis alongside her.
Either way, there's no clear answer, and not knowing has the effect of making it all the more engaging. Not delivering the answer allows this story to possibly be all of these things, rather than just having it be one of them. It's not really as if you can choose whichever type of story it is, but you can't really say what it isn't either.
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What struck me most is how the Tristero-possibility is gradually revealed, not just as something mysterious, an enigma to be solved and revealed, but also in that the way that the people who seem to be, or might be, in the know refuse to talk about it, with worry and distress written clearly on their faces, as if it is something to be feared, as if even mentioning it might put them in danger from forces unknown, and maybe even unknowable.
Their reactions, their sly hiding of knowledge, whenever the Tristero is mentioned, put me in mind of other tales where similar reactions occur, when words with dangerous or even occult connotations are mentioned, words like; 'Carcosa', 'The Yellow King', 'Necronomicon' and others.
The fact that many of them disappear, and/or die, leaving odd or cryptic warnings behind them adds to it.
Then there are the skeletons of the soldiers at the bottom of a lake, re-purposed, for ink and tourism, the Maxwell's Demon with its Machine for psychic sensitives, the darkly clothed figures, marauders or assassins, using violence to guard their secrets, the strange gathering of night-time children claiming to be dreaming in their closets while they stand in front of a fire happily warming themselves by its nonexistent flames, in fact the whole the mad night that Oedipa spends wandering the streets in thrall to her obsession, and of course the strange, unnerving postage stamps ascribable to the Tristero: all of these could be very well seen as horror elements.
In a strange way, The Crying of Lot 49 might easily fit in with horror literature, at least up until a certain point in the novel, where Oedipa's mental state becomes overbearing and begins to sideline the mysteriousness in favour of plausibleness. But, I can imagine some visionary adapting the novel into a classic horror movie. Like how the Shining adaptation leaves it up to the viewer (mostly) whether or not Jack Torrence is just the only monster in the movie or if there actually might be more things going on in the Overlook hotel. But then inversely, with the mundane origins of the Tristero, effaced the longer the adaptation goes on, to stand at the auction revealed as undeniably supernatural, representative of an Anti-God entity, its existence rightly suppressed by the Vatican, with the Tristero organization as the mad cult hiding their goals, planning for the auction at the novel's culmination where they will kill every person present, with Oedipa Maas either forced to join the cult, or willingly doing so, or falling victim to it as well.
Ah well, it's too hot for rambling. I loathe summer.
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