My first two reviews were for books recently published - this one was published way before my time - 1965. This, among other reasons, might be why I must file this novel under: WTF?
The description on the back states this is a satire - okay, so maybe I don't fully understand the genre of satire, but I couldn't help but think "what exactly is this satirizing?"
The edition I read was a 152 page paperback and compared to my other readings this summer, this took me far too long to finish. I'll admit to reading other readers' reviews of this on Goodreads.com to see if I wasn't alone. It seems Pynchon is a writer that is either loved or hated.
i didn't hate this book, but I can't say that I loved, or even liked it - it was really nothing to me. The issue was that I couldn't properly invest in the characters because too much was happening and it didn't seem logically. Things that one might assume to be important turned out to be seemingly insignificant. And I'm all for books with open endings, but this brand of post-modernism isn't for me. The book starts to end with what you think will make it all make sense - it doesn't. You finish this book feeling used.
Why spend pages and pages describing the sexual encounters between the main character, Oedipa Mass, and the lawyer if it wasn't really going to be revisited again? It's the type of book where either everything is important or nothing is. I have no clue what's what.
I don't really feel like describing what this book is about because I don't really know - I do, but I don't. If you really care read the description on Amazon that reeled me in, but be warned, it isn't as clear as they make it seem. Maybe I'm just dumb, but this book was a bad choice for me, as I like to read late at night, right before bed, and I just couldn't focus on what was happening - it was all over the place.
I see that Pynchon has a new book out - I may skip it though. Even though he's one of those mysterious reclusive writers, I can't really see myself investing in his back-catalogue, let alone his new material.
I tried it, let's move on.
Next on my shelf: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
