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Nov 27, 2018
Title refers to the auctioning of Inverarity's invaluable stamp collection.
Thomas Pynchon can be said to admire the piquancy of selected paranoia in the elaborate works of, say, Kafka, Lovecraft, Orwell, but to mix these otherwise pleasantly sharp and appetizing flavors, ALL, into the banalities of everyday life. In his THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (1966), when wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity dies and designates his ex-lover, Oedipa Mass, the co-executor of his estate, this housewife now-executor is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors and symbols and a conspiracy against the US Postal Service. Traveling across California between Berkeley and LA, she meets interesting and occasionally scary characters, while attaining a noteworthy amount of self-knowledge. Perhaps this novel of multi-parodies is a patriotic lamentation, an elaborate effort not to believe the worst about the USA.
Jan 22, 2019
These are appropriate titles for the novels' content.
Too overwhelmingly nihilistic for me.
Dec 29, 2018
To THE LIGHTHOUSE is not about Lighthouses.
Virginia Woolf’s TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a book of interrelationships among people, and though there are major characters, they are not, as is Clarissa Dalloway—the magnificent, alpha and omega character in Woolf’s MRS. DALLOWAY—but more the means for giving the story certain focal points, with rather abstract concerns of thought, imagination and emotion. The story opens in a single morning, carries through ten years as a brief interlude, and ends, again in a morning, conveying the feeling that one has not quite gotten anywhere.