I have to be honest: the relatively short length (coupled with a conspiracy-laden plot?) is what’s calling to me. But if it’s really just a minor work, I’ll wait until I’m ready to dive into Gravity’s Rainbow.
Also, is it “Pinch-own” or “Pinchin”? :B
No, it’s certainly not a minor work, and yes, it is the best place to start.
It is a good place to start, primarily because it’s short. It’s also somewhat less complex than his other books.
Schweet, thanks.
Still dunno how to say his effin name, tho…
And Oedipa sat back to await the crying of Lot 49
I say ‘Pinchin’ myself.
The Crying of Lot 49 is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Good luck with Gravity’s Rainbow though, it’s brilliant in parts but the whole wierdness factor is hard to get through.
Aside from those two though, his other stuff leaves me a bit cold. I really didn’t enjoy Mason & Dixon as the archaic language became pretty frustrating and *Vineland * doesn’t even register - I know I’ve read it but I couldn’t tell you anything about it.
I started with V, and still like it best. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you about the biological effects of RF energy?”
I’m teaching it next week, and have prepared some secondary material (criticism, book chapters, sketchy bio material, etc) to help my students out.
It’s terrific–complex, deliciously ambiguous, funny in places, spooky in others-- but real work to get through. One of the things I came across while doing research on Pynchon (“pinchin’”, btw) was his response to a complaint that his books were hard: Something to the effect of “And why should books be easy?”
Do not attempt Gravity’s Rainbow without the reader’s guide. It is totally impossible unless you are fluent in English, German, Dutch, Latin, Hererro, you know s significant amount about V2 rocket science, psychiatry, and parapsychology, you are familiar with events of late 1944 to 1946 England and Europe on a day-to-day basis, have a good working knowledge of minor aspects of the liturgical calendar and the Kabbalah, know your jazz and music history, and have a bunch of spare time to figure out a whole bunch more. With the reader’s guide it is still difficult, but it is totally awesome.
They sell a reader’s guide for The Crying of Lot 49 but it is totally not worth it. I would definitely start there. I read it a long time ago so I’ll put the rest of my advice in spoiler tags, simply because I don’t remember if this particular plot point gives anything away. If anybody read it more recently, let us know if it is truly a spoiler.
The story is straightforward and with a bit of knowledge about the origin of the postal system, it is quite worth it. The Wikipedia article on Thurn und Taxis may come in handy.
V is a fun read, but by the end of the book I had a entire legal-sized piece of graph paper with names written out and arrows pointing to each one to try and figure out how the characters were interrelated. My wife started on V, though and she was turned off enough not to want to read any of his others.
“What?” – Richard M. Nixon
Yes, The Crying of Lot 49 is a good start.
I also recommend Vineland– it is superficially quite straightforward and easy-to-read, but has a good deal of clever subtext. It’s also hysterically funny and absurd in many places, while still managing to be psychologically “true” and quite profound.
Work your way up to Gravity’s Rainbow and V., and avoid pigeonholing Pynchon as a “difficult” writer.
I’d start with Vineland , if only because it’s so rare to find a book featuring characters named Vlad and Blood. If I ever gets me some little fluffy doggies, I got their names!
Thanks as always, friends. I hadn’t read many good things about Vineland until now, which shows me again the continuing value of this place.
Two brief follow-up questions: as far as Lot 49 being complex reading, is it similar to the initial patience required to get through, say, Sound and the Fury? Or Joyce?
Also, pseudotrition, I’m curious- what grade level do you teach?
I would say that The Crying of Lot 49 is an easier read than either The Sound and the Fury or Ulysses. The main difficulty is his usual digressive style (which reached its peak in Gravity’s Rainbow). The opening sentence is a good example. If you’re not frightened off by that, you shouldn’t have any real difficulty with the book.
It’s a college class.
Stylistically, I find Pynchon most similar to Nabokov (who was his teacher at Cornell in the 1950s)–complex, elaborate sentence structures, a large, often technical and precise vocabulary, but ultimately parsable sentences that are frequently comical or ludicrous and sometimes also horrific in tone–rather than Joyce or Faulkner, whose grammar and vocabulary often goes beyond the norms of standard English. It’s Pynchon’s content, not his writing style, that presents the hardest challenges.
what pseudotriton ruber ruber said.
V. and GR are extremely satisfying in just the words and style, even if you don’t understand them (V is a little easier to follow, story-wise).
But they are definitely 'read-again’s.
Nah, as the others have said, it’s nothing like as difficult as The Sound and the Fury. “Joyce” covers a lot of ground, from the relatively simple (“Araby” or the other early stories in Dubliners through the fiendishly difficult (Finnegans Wake), but Crying is probably easier to read than Portrait of the Artist or anything after. Pseudotriton ruber ruber’s Nabokov comparison is apt, though I think Crying is probably a shade more accessible than most of Nabokov, and there are no “extended jazz solos for prose style” like that set piece about Roy Thayer and his colleagues in the English department about 2/3 of the way through Pnin in Crying.
I started with Gravity’s Rainbow. I think I had a couple of aborted starts, then took it with me as my only book on a 21 day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon and read the whole thing. Just me, the river, the canyon, the sky, and my Gravity’s Rainbow bound with duct tape.
It’s kind of working backwards, though, or climbing the highest mountain first and the others, well, they’re good, but… So yes, The Crying of Lot 49 is a good place to start. It is his first novel, after all.
I thought Vineland was his ‘easiest’ read, although at the time I read it I thought it was disappointingly conventional and it seemed like he just banged it out while working on something more epic. I’d probably regard it a bit more favorably now.
Actually, V. was published first, in 1963. Crying came out in 1966.