One of the considerable upside with the goal that I have set for myself this year is that it will afford me the opportunity to read authors I normally would not go for. It shames me to say that I had to google Thomas Pynchon given his notoriety. I have 4 works of Thomas Pynchon in my list and first up was The Crying Lot of 49.
The Crying Lot of 49 is a postmodern fiction that deals with one woman's struggle to prove a theory: the existence of Tristero and the conspiracy behind it. In her effort to find meaning among all the rambling information and seemingly meaningless events, she struggles between believing that it is real or that it is just an elaborate plan on the part of an ex-lover and that there are two possiblities: "Another mode of meaning behind the obvious or none."
Authors like Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and Kurt Vonnegut have already initiated me in postmodern fiction and I am well acquainted with "magical realism" but what made TCL49 so challenging were the multiple cultural references that were lost to me and would have offered me a more fruitful experience if only I got them. But given that I was hampered by my own limitations when I read this book, I still found the experience a gratifying one and is a testament to the benefits of stepping out of one's own comfort zones.
"Oedipa wondered whether, whether at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back"
