The Crying of Lot 49 (Paperback)

by Thomas Pynchon (Author) "One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find..." (more)
Key Phrases: muted post horn, San Narciso, Baby Igor, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060931671
• ISBN-13: 978-0060931674
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (189 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #71,500 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

181 of 191 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn, August 10, 2001

By	A.J. (Maryland) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Conspiracy buffs, look no further than "The Crying of Lot 49" -- a book that indulges in paranoia so much, you almost expect to see your own name mentioned somewhere in the text. There is an incredible amount of narrative inventiveness on every page, employing a wild concoction of dry humor, non sequiturs, bizarre characters with puns for names, and an endless barrage of references to a wide variety of pop culture, science, and technology. This is the first novel I've read that has introduced the concept of entropy as a narrative device.

The protagonist is a woman named Oedipa Maas who, when the novel begins, learns that her former boyfriend, the wealthy Pierce Inverarity, has died and designated her to be the executor of his enormous estate. Inverarity's assets include vast stretches of property, a significant stamp collection, and many shares in an aerospace corporation called Yoyodyne. As Oedipa goes through her late boyfriend's will, aided by a lawyer named Metzger who works for Inverarity's law firm, she learns about a series of secret societies and strange groups of people involved in a sort of renegade postal system called Tristero. She starts seeing ubiquitous cryptic diagrams of a simple horn, a symbol with a seemingly infinite number of meanings. Every clue she uncovers about Tristero and the horn leads haphazardly to another, like a brainstorm, or a free association of ideas.

This is a novel that demands analysis but defies explanation. My initial interpretation was that it's an anarchistic satire of the military-industrial-government complex, but it's deeper than that. Like Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire," it establishes a very complicated relationship between the author and the reader, where Pynchon seems to be tricking the reader in the same way that Oedipa is unsure if she is witnessing a worldwide conspiracy or if she is merely the victim of an elaborate prank. By presenting Oedipa's investigation to be either circular, aimless, or inconsequential, the novel seems to satirize the efforts of people who try to find order in the universe. Pynchon uses the concept of entropy to illustrate that the more effort (physical and mental) we put into controlling the universe, the more random it becomes.

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best Book I've Read Since "The Courier's Tragedy", May 16, 2000

By A Customer

For no particular reason, I've avoided reading Pynchon novels but finally decided to take the plunge with this book. I was not disappointed.

I thought it was great. Really great, actually. His writing style strikes me as very similar to a number of his contemporaries (Robert Stone, DeLillo, etc.). The central riddle of the book and the mixing of obscure historical fact and fiction reminded me strongly of authors like Borges.

With regard to some of the negative reviews below I would say the following:

1. I consider myself a pretty typical reader and I did not find this to be a particularly challenging book to read, although Pynchon's style (punctuation-sparse and prone to occasional lapses into heavy factual detail) takes some getting used to.

2. This is not a "neat" story in the conventional sense. There isn't a tidy conclusion to the story and there isn't a "typical" character development arc. But so what? I don't think either of those things are a necessary requirement to good fiction.

The deliberately silly-sounding character names should be the first clue that Pynchon does not intend this to be a conventional work of fiction. It isn't. But that doesn't mean it's not a great book.

The book is clever, well-written, and confounding with its plot twists and turns. That's what made it a fascinating read and that's also what makes it the kind of book that I think I could read over and over again and not get bored. I think I'll always find something new that I didn't see before.

Isn't that what makes a book enjoyable to read in the first place?

60 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tidy little work, November 25, 2000

By	Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Okay it's not his best novel (that'd be Gravity's Rainbow) and it's not his worst novel (that'd be Vineland, which is still darn good, actually) but it is his shortest novel, so if you could say one definite thing about it, that might be it. The length is actually a good thing because is an easy book to hook people on Pynchon by giving them something short and say "Hey look he's great!". Because this is classic Pynchon, as good as anything he's ever done, a great big step forward from V. In these one hundred and eighty pages he manages to cram more prose and ideas and paranoia (because it wouldn't be a Pynchon book otherwise) than most authors can do in twice the space. Simply put, it's a fun book, and for all the trappings of "post-modernism" you can easily enjoy this book without camping out in your local library near the reference section if you just take everything on faith and read it. The story concerns Ms Oedipa Maas, who is executing the will of her late boyfriend and stumbles upon (she thinks) a conspiracy involving either the US Postal System, the Mob and just about everything else, a conspiracy that might stretch back hundreds of years. Or it might not. Pynchon proceeds then to play with Ms. Maas and the reader for the rest of the novel, throwing out obscure fact after obscure fact, toying with her perception of things (are things just happening randonly or is there a guiding force behind them?) and basically having a crackling good time doing so. His prose still consists of long winding sentences with a bit too much detail (it's a postmodern trademark to describe every single item on a desk at least once during the story) at times but the jokes are still funny thirty years later, the story is still good and frankly if you look past the fact that the story doesn't have a neat and pat ending then you'll probably enjoy this very much. Some folks find Pynchon too silly at times, but I think taking anything too seriously is bad and especially literature, where there's so much potential for humor. This is a good example of how you can write a serious, timeless piece of literature and still have the ability to make folks outloud. Remember, Joyce liked fart jokes. Keep that in mind.