the crying of lot 49.

sometimes i wonder if i haven’t read enough novels yet. after all, there are only so many emotions to display, so many recurring themes to refer to. these recurrences and similarities can be charming at times; the fact that jonathan coe, siri hustvedt, douglas coupland or iris murdoch always seem to write the same novel over and over again doesn’t matter at all, since it doesn’t come off as a rehash, but rather an expression of a leitmotiv of some sort.

once in a while, though, even the most jaded reader finds a novel to get obsessed about, not because it’s a good expression of something seen before, but rather because it’s something totally outlandish that doesn’t incite any associations or deja-vus whatsoever. this was the case with nicola barker’s excellent darkmans, and is the case with thomas pynchon’s classic, the crying of lot 49.

seriously, i don’t know why i never read this book before. pynchon’s other novels are hulking, complex monstrosities with their very own charms, but this one is rather small at 200- pages, and slightly less complex, and utterly engrossing, too.

oedipa maas, a twentysomething young republican housewife hailing from the charming northern californian town of kinneret-among-the-pines, one fine day finds herself the executor of her ruthless billionaire ex-lover pierce inverarity’s testament.

her husband, the insane dj wendell ‘mucho’ maas, and her shrink, the ex-nazi doktor hilarius, are too busy doing acid and making faces to each other to help her get started, so she travels down to the resort town of saint narciso on her own, and gets caught up in an intriguing feud between two medieval postal delivery agencies that seem to have survived into twentieth-century california, making casualties at random and delivering their mail through a network of rubbish bins called W.A.S.T.E.

this might sound shaky enough already, but seeing as she finds out who she’s dealing with by way of a child star-cum-lawyer, an obscure jacobean play set in renaissance italy, a sinophile inventor and demonologist and all manner of strange philatelic clues, the story is just plainly nonsensical and hysterically funny.

why is it funny? the idea that someone like oedipa (seriously, oedipa?!) really believes she’s on the tail of some conspiracy, just blithely accepts every single fact thrown at her head, and ends up having sex/playing footsie with every single man on her path is just… endearing.

everyone needs something to believe in, and oedipa believes in the continued existence of a medieval conspiracy. there are worse things to devote your life to… and worse things to read about.