Why is The Crying Lot of 49 so difficult??

[dfw]

I'm reading it right now

I just can't follow these tangents
like right now they're at the play and my brain's just not registering what's going on

[ashulman]

I think Pynchon purposely disorients you because that's how his characters feel - that's the world they inhabit. Something significant is happening but you don't know why or exactly who is causing it. Isn't that the way the modern world feels most of the time? That's why Pynchon is THE novelist of the latter 20th century, IMO. That play is a wonderful takeoff on a Jacobean revenge drama, with all those crazy twists and turns.

[Ser Nevarc]

Nice response ashulman. I agree

[grechzoo]

Yeah I can confirm that ashulman has it 100% right on all fronts.

Col49 was my first Pynchon book. It was a fun read, I definitely enjoyed it, though coherency is not something you should be looking for when reading this book in particular. His objective was to bring you into that world through the eyes of the main character, and considering the main character is unsure of most things herself, he achieves it perfectly.

Ultimately for me though, it was read as a portal into his work allowing me to become comfortable with his writing style. I started reading V. right after finishing CoL49 and have been 100% blown away by every chapter in that book. It goes without saying its a totally different style of book, but the little digressions he likes to make are infinitely easer to take in after reading CoL49 first.

[Charles Darnay]

Pynchon, like others writing around the time, were concerned with disrupting the standards of narrative. Our brains are accustomed to reading a certain way - we expect some form of linearity that we do not get in Pynchon. This is what makes his works so difficult, and also highly re-readable. This is one of those books that you have to accept you will have to read at least twice if you hope to "get anything out of it." Or, just enjoy the ride.

[qimissung]

And there's this from Yale online courses:

http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291/lecture-12

I had to re-read pages of it, then I would get into it. I really enjoyed it, and there are passages of transcendent beauty.

[islandclimber]

Qimi! That lecture is fantastic. Thank you for the link!

I think the beauty of Pynchon's prose is that it induces one to read and reread it over and over, and not always just to get a better understanding but to drop more deeply into its fragmented narrative and disturbing hypnosis. It seems a strange concept to pair together fragmented and hypnotic, yet the narrative is so fragmented and labyrinthine, while the prose remains spiralling out into the hypnotic...