Book of the Week

I finally finished The Crying of Lot 49 after doing all my grading and such.

The plot is a simple one: Opedia Mass, a restless wife and thinker, is married to a somewhat vapid disc jockey. The novel starts off with her getting a letter informing her that she has been made the executor of her ex-boyfriend's will, Pierce Invararity, who is some rich guy in California. She decides to go to (the fictional) town of San Narciso to fullfill her duties. After meeting her lawyer, the once child star, and the Paranoids--she begins to unravel a world-wide postal conspiracy dating back to the 1400's.

The novel then becomes a satirical detective novel as Opedia meets strange characters that all seem to be connected in some way to W.A.S.T.E--it all has to do with the postal conspiracy. She continues to search through Southern California even though she starts to see the people around her crumble into insanity (mostly from using too much LSD), and she wonders, herself, if she is not falling into the same kind of paranoid fantasy.

The actual plot of the novel is almost secondary. It is not so much what Pynchon is saying, but the way in which he says it. And the way that Pynchon tells his story is fascinating. The novel is, first of all, funny. Secondly, the novel deals with all those complex post-structural ideas that make a English Lit. nerd like myself toes tingle.

If we merely look at the name of the town and the hotel Opedia stays at, into account, we see the reference to the Greek myth of Narcisus and Echo. Opedia is an obvious allusion to the odyssey that Opedia takes. There is a motif in those stories that is seen throughout this one: the problem of communication, the problem about how language is never fully present, about how people are disconnected from each other because they can not understand each other through words. The tension in the novel is achieved through this mis-communication.

I will not get into the deeper philosophical issues here as I promised the owner of this blog that I would stay away from the mental masturbation, but feel free to make comments if you would like to discuss these issues and the many others that arise in the book.

I discovered Pynchon through a great short story called Entropy , and I have been meaning to read Crying for a long time. I highly recommend both of these stories to anyone looking to get into Pynchon and the ideal post-modern novel.

You can read an excerpt of the novel here.

Brooklyn's Books of Wow

As I procrastinate in grading papers, I came across this highly aggressive review which states how this crop of BBoW books are trite and something yadda yadda...

The only book I have read of the books being "reviewed" is "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by David Eggers. While the book has its flaws, it is still, in my opinion, a wonderful and wonderfully original work. And when I see the author say:

Maybe I’m taking literally what’s meant to be sarcastic, but beneath the sarcasm lays real disdain. This is most evident at his sister’s wedding, a presumably significant event in Eggers family annals. Instead of extending the lattice, however, the sole, incredibly tepid description he gives of the groom is that he’s “a nice young man named James.” As for the other guests, Dave thinks, “I am not them. I am . . . a hundred years old.”

This, in my opinion, is a complete misread of the story. It makes the review sound as if he hadn't read the rest of the book. Eggers says he want to be the lattice, but that he can not/does not know how to achieve it. And the reason that Eggers says, "I am not them. I am...a hundred years old" is because of his situation. He was thrown into raising his little brother while still being a bit of a child himself.

A critique like this reminds me of Roland Barthe's "Mythologies" in which Barthe points out how critics claim to "not understand" something-- and in that-- they imply that there is a deficiency in the writing, rather than in their critique. The problem in Eggers's book is not in its hyper self-awareness, but in that Eggers uses that hyper-awareness too much.

And yet, I feel it works even if it is a bit too much shtick. AHWSG is one of the funniest and most original books I have read in a real long time.

I can't comment on the other books this guy is reviewing as I have not read them, but going off of what he says about the Eggers book, I have to assume he is just as myopic in reviewing those books as well. 

Hello...

Hello. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Jose (Apa), and in recently talking to the owner of this blog (Andy), I expressed to him how I was thinking of starting my own blog. He graciously invited me to just join his, so here I am. Forgive me as I become acquanted with this system and learn how to "blog." As a new contributor, I would like to start a weekly (though it will probably end up being a monthly) post on what I'm reading. I know this sounds a bit self-absorbed, but isn't blogging in general such an activity?
Of course, I would love to hear people's responses and opinions on the books being discussed. I offer a review of Chuck Palahniuk's latest work as the first installment of hopefully many. This is a review I wrote for a new magazine (called Backslash, I believe) that is going to be published through FIU, UM, and FAMU (though I'm not sure about that last university). I will post the details as they are made available to me.

Here is the review:
Chuck Palahniuk. Rant: An Oral Biography

Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for presenting characters one hates to love (think Tyler Durden in Fight Club, charismatic and boisterous but with fascist tendencies). In Rant: An Oral Biography, Buster “Rant” Casey is the kid you remember from elementary school who was always dirty and smelled of urine and old Tampons, but he fascinated you because he flustered the teacher.
The reader learns—through the ranting (pun fully intended) of family, friends, acquaintances, doctors, and psychologist— Rant’s story which involves rabies, the tooth fairy, a trained, heightened sense of smell and taste, a game involving people crashing their cars into one another, virtual reality implanted in your brain a la Matrix, time travel, and possibly incest.
In one of the tamer scenes of the novel, the reader learns how Rant got his name from a Halloween prank he pulls off in which he makes all the school children of his little town vomit. Remember those Halloween parties in which you were blindfolded, and then told to put your hand into a bowl of “brains” and “eyes”? Take out the quotation marks, and you have kids ranting after touching cow eyeballs and pig intestines.
Tension is added in the novel through the use of a myriad of contradictory anecdotes detailing not only Rant’s life but also the setting of the story: a pseudo-apocalyptic future in which over-population has led to laws which relegate people to “Day-timers” and “Night-timers,” and in which the government has an Orwellian eye on their citizens.
The anecdotes are entertaining, and leave the reader wondering what is real and what is artifice. Until the final fourth of the book when Palahniuk tries to explain all the obscure time travel and rabies he's deftly introduced rather than leave the reader in the dark, and let the reader use his own imagination. It is like getting food poisoning. You enjoy the meal while you eat it, but then you are left (excuse the pun) ranting afterwards. Palahniuk should stay away from the pseudo-sci-fi and stick to the pseudo Gothic he is much more talented at.