A Year's Worth of the Most Celebrated Novels

[Xray]

Hilarious character names, don't you think?

Absolutely! Highly connotatively loaded, nearly all of them. The author uses hyperbole in the name-giving to such an extent that one could interpret it as a ridiculing of the "meaningful name-giving" frequent in fiction.

Absolutely! Highly connotatively loaded, nearly all of them. The author uses hyperbole in the name-giving to such an extent that one could interpret it as a ridiculing of the "meaningful name-giving" frequent in fiction.

"Oedipa" Mass makes the reader think of a character who is on some kind of Odyssey, erring around.

In trying to put the fragments of a puzzle together. Oedipa encounters an absurd world.

Her husband is called "Mucho Maas" which made me think of Spanish "mucho más" ('much more'), and to me it looked like he probably expected "mucho más" from life than he got with working as a DJ for a radio station called "KCUF"(!).

Metzger is a German family name ('butcher').

The shadowy deceased character is called "Pierce Inverarity".

Inverarity - I connote Latin "verus" ('true') with it, see the "In" as a negation and get something like "Untrueness". How "real", how "reliable" is the reality Oedipa Maas encounters as she is trying to "pierce" through the veil of a mystery?

But since every reading experience is an individual process, different readers will have their own associations. What were yours?

Just as Oedipa on her journey through the story is trying to construct sense in figuring out what the mysterious sign stands for, the reader is trying to construct sense in the novel as a work of fiction, trying to find out the author's intent. I have not finished reading it (Gengis Cohen just showed up), but it looks like the story thematizes the endeavour to construct sense, and since this is a post-modern novel, one may find what is called is called "Sinnverweigerung" in German (refusal (by the author) to offer sense).

Are you reading it in German or English?

I'm reading the German translation but am impatiently waiting for the English original to arrive by mail any day

Does "Koteks" translate?

The German translator has kept the name.

It sounds like the brand name of something in the U.S., I'm not sure if that fact travels.

I first thought it might be an allusion to Stanley Kubrick, but then also connoted the firm which produces 'femine hygiene' articles (Kotex). "Waste" is a big theme in the novel, and these articles are used to get rid of "waste" shed by the body, so to speak.

What do you think of this piece of satire?

Expert Dispels Nuclear Power Fears, Encourages Following Japan in Reactor Development and Whaling as Clean Energy Sources

By BC Bass

SAN NARCISO, Calif. -- Gregory Jaczko, the top nuclear regulator for the United States, gave a dire assessment of the burgeoning crisis at Japan’s nuclear reactors yesterday, saying that lethal radiation from exposed spent fuel rods could force emergency workers to abandon their efforts to prevent meltdowns of damaged reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Several members of the Nuclear Regulator Commission (NRC) and the Union of Concerned Scientists have begun issuing tentative warnings to states off the western coast that dangerous levels of radiation could make their way to the nation’s shores if the situation worsens. The exigency has fueled outrage from environmental groups about the perils of continuing the Obama administration’s pledge to build new reactors on U.S. soil. GOP and Tea Party politicians, however, scoffed at the “hyperbolic” nature of the concerns, and cited nuclear fuel as one of the cleanest and most efficient energy sources available, next to whaling.

Reliability of Information in Question

If Jaczko’s assessments and testimony before Congress were correct, Tokyo Electric Power Co., the owner of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, may have withheld information about the gravity of the crisis. And although Japanese authorities didn’t dispute Jaczko’s assertions, several area politicians did.

Stanley Kotex, a senior nuclear engineer at San Narciso-based Yoyodyne and former Tea Party candidate for Congress, addressed the City Council this morning to assuage fears over a nuclear winter in California.

Kotex has been working abroad in a joint venture between the Japanese government and Yoyodyne for the last eight months.

“I apologize in advance for my appearance,” Kotex began, responding to comments that he appeared bloated, balding, and under the weather. “I’ve clearly put on a few pounds in the last couple of weeks, my hair seems to be thinning -- probably from stress -- and I’ve come down with some sort of stomach virus, so I’m a bit nauseous. But nothing to worry about.”

http://www.benningtonvalepress.com/2011/03/expert-dispels-nuclear-power-fears.html

Edited April 16, 2011 by Xray

[9thdoctor]

The author uses hyperbole in the name-giving to such an extent that one could interpret it as a ridiculing of the "meaningful name-giving" frequent in fiction.

I’d say it’s “ridiculing” in the same way that Spike Jones ridiculed music by substituting sound effects for notes. He used to say that if you’re going to substitute an Eflat with a gunshot, the gunshot needs to be in Eflat, otherwise it sounds awful. Hmm, I’m not sure that makes sense as an analogy, but that’s what your comment brought out by way of immediate reaction, so I’m sharing it.

Most of what you wrote could have been cribbed from the many commentaries and reader’s guides that are available online (I’m not saying your plagiarizing, rather that you seem to be getting it).

I first thought it might be an allusion to Stanley Kubrick, but then also connoted the firm which produces 'femine hygiene' articles (Kotex). "Waste" is a big theme in the novel, and these articles are used to get rid of "waste" shed by the body, so to speak.

I’m not sure Kubrick would have been famous enough, Dr. Strangelove came out in 1965, so maybe. I think you’re missing it on the waste connection to the name Koteks. No sense giving you my view until you've gotten to the end. Hint: TP wouldn't name a character Mike Fallopian just for the lulz.

What do you think of this piece of satire?

Yup, it’s obvious what they’re riffing on. BTW, I just checked, and Gregory Jaczko is a real person, not a Pynchon name.

[caroljane]

Further to Hemingway and the American Masculists...the best writers from this tradition mutated in the next generation into Philip Roth and John Updike, among others. My Roth faves are Letting Go (his most confessional novel on life and literature) and The Great American Novel (it was great). Updike's short stories were just unsurpassably acute, and his Rabbit really ran.

To Roth I owe one of my favourite quotes, on looking at a cityscape

cloaked overnight by sparkling snow:

"Moral: don't be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on."

[Xray]

Hint: TP wouldn't name a character Mike Fallopian just for the lulz.

At first I wondered whether "the sign" might be a Fallopian tube ...

To Roth I owe one of my favourite quotes, on looking at a cityscape

cloaked overnight by sparkling snow:

"Moral: don't be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on."

That's a great quote Daunce, and reminds me of how thin the veneer of civilization often is.

From Roth I read "The Dying Animal" and was impressed by its radicality.

P.S. Down Among The Women arrived by mail yesterday!

Edited April 16, 2011 by Xray

[Xray]

Thanks, Xray. I was hoping people would offer a couple short sentences of explanation (or a telling passage - either one) about a book they recommend -- as you just did.

Some remarks about LOLITA which also was on my list:

I must admit I had been very prejudiced against the book at first, the scandal surrounding it making me think it might be soft porn which for some odd reasons had made it into word literature.

It was on our reading list, and we had to read it as an assignment for our literature seminar.

It was no soft porn of course. but is a story, masterfully put in writing, about a middle-aged man (Humbert Humbert), whose obsession with the budding sexuality of a young girl ends in a tragedy,

It can be read on many levels, for example as the desperate attempt by the first-person narrator Humbert Humbert to stifle his own fear of decay and - ultimately - death, by becoming 'addicted' to the very young Lolita.

Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation is excellent, brilliantly acted and directed.

Great performance by James Mason who plays Humbert Humbert and also by Sue Lyon in the role of Lolita.

Lyon was older though than the Lolita in the book who at the beginning is only 12 years old.

What a superb narrator Nabokov was! The first chapter begins with:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." (V. Nabokov, Lolita p. 11)

There has been some talk about the music and rhythm of prose. The above is an example.

Edited April 16, 2011 by Xray

[Xray]

Lobby for The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, it’s surely reached classic status and is quite short.

Your post inspired me to finally start reading it (the book has sat on our bookshelf in the German translation, yet unread, for ages). I think I'll get the English original though.

Hmm, I wonder how well it translates. .

I now have received the English original by mail; the German translation is quite good actually.

See how many people figure out the ending.

I have finished the book; I could not figure out the ending. Since Ghengis Cohen showed up at the auction, could he have been the mysterious bidder? Or was it all in Oedipa's head?

Is one of the messages of the story that the process itself of trying to figure it out is the real 'creative activity'? Just some thoughts in no particular order, which are running through my head right now.

The story takes the reader along with the heroine Oedipa Maas on a journey through a world where she discovers the existence of some mysterious conspirational underground postal delivery system (Tristero).

The narrative perspective of the novel (the reader almost exclusively perceives the events through Oedipa's eyes; the reader moves where she moves) makes it impossible though for the reader to find a 'distance' to Oedipa's perspective; creating this difficulty for the reader was no doubt intentional on the author's part.

One of the scenes that impressed me most was where Driblette sticks out his head of the shower and says: "But the reality is is this head. Mine."

How "real" is that reality?

Imo the book would also be an interesting read especially for Objecivists because it tries, in some passages, to sever the meaningful relationship between the "word" and "reality", a relationship Ayn Rand so adamantly defended, e. g. in her attack against the extreme Nominalist school.

Example from the novel: (p. 54) "The words, who cares? They are rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers of an actor's memory, right? But the reality is is this head. Mine."

Edited April 24, 2011 by Xray

[9thdoctor]

I have finished the book; I could not figure out the ending. Since Ghengis Cohen showed up in the auction, could he have been the mysterious bidder? Or was it all in Oedipa's head?

I’m not going to pontificate about how to interpret the ending, it aims for ambiguity, to be something to think and talk about. When I wrote "See how many people figure out the ending" it was meant tongue-in-cheek, but it got a couple people to try the book, and I gather you're glad you did.

What if there is no resolution because there’s nothing to resolve? Or, maybe any possible resolution could only raise more questions, now that she’s impregnated with paranoia and seeking sinister connections even where a perfectly mundane explanation would suffice. If you look into fan commentary you’ll find a lot of theories, a favorite is that Pierce himself will be the bidder, and that he staged the whole thing. We never learn how he died, right? There's lots of other theories.

Anyway, this is no great spoiler: in Vineland we meet Mucho Maas again, about 20 years later. We learn that he was married once, and had an easy time with the divorce process. Pynchon hasn't revisited any of the other characters (unless I missed something). Wait, no, Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz is in Gravity's Rainbow, but he's hardly a character in TCoL49.

One more little detail, when you read the song lyrics that were being sung to the tune Aura Lee, did you take the time to find out what tune that was and hear the song in your head? It's the same as Elvis Presley's Love me Tender, and it's hilarious when you read it that way.

[9thdoctor]

One more little detail, when you read the song lyrics that were being sung to the tune Aura Lee, did you take the time to find out what tune that was and hear the song in your head? It's the same as Elvis Presley's Love me Tender, and it's hilarious when you read it that way.

I just thought of an even better one, it's from Gravity's Rainbow, here's the words and the tune:

Ja, ja, ja, ja!

In Prussia they never eat pussy!

There ain’t hardly cats enough,

There’s garbage and that’s enough,

So waltz me around again, Russky!

[9thdoctor]

One more little detail, when you read the song lyrics that were being sung to the tune Aura Lee, did you take the time to find out what tune that was and hear the song in your head? It's the same as Elvis Presley's Love me Tender, and it's hilarious when you read it that way.

I thought I'd find a video of someone doing Aura Lee, and came across this, it's so damn funny I've got to share:

Check out the guy's channel, he plays avocados, you name it.

[Xray]

I have finished the book; I could not figure out the ending. Since Ghengis Cohen showed up in the auction, could he have been the mysterious bidder? Or was it all in Oedipa's head?

I’m not going to pontificate about how to interpret the ending, it aims for ambiguity, to be something to think and talk about. When I wrote "See how many people figure out the ending" it was meant tongue-in-cheek, but it got a couple people to try the book, and I gather you're glad you did.

Definitely, yes. There is a compelling intensity to the book, it has a tension which never loosens (not even in the end), with the writer displaying his gift for creating both vivid and unusual imagery, like on p. 16, where he compares a road to a hypodermic needle inserted into the "vein" of a freeway, and the city to a drug addict nourished by the freeway-vein leading to it:

"Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape - it wasn't.

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner LA, keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or what ever passes with city, for pain." (TCoL49, p. 16).

Again the topic of illusion, of not facing reality is addressed.

What if there is no resolution because there’s nothing to resolve? Or, maybe any possible resolution could only raise more questions, now that she’s impregnated with paranoia and seeking sinister connections even where a perfectly mundane explanation would suffice.

That's where the writer leaves the reader at the end, together with the heroine: in a position where he really does not have the alternative of a meaningful choice between possibilities A or B because A may just be as right or wrong as B may be right or wrong.

The reader's expectation of a dénouement remains unfulfilled.

If you look into fan commentary you’ll find a lot of theories, a favorite is that Pierce himself will be the bidder, and that he staged the whole thing. We never learn how he died, right? There's lots of other theories.

While Oedipa may 'later' get to see the mysterious bidder, the reader is cut off from the story because the book ends before the auction starts.

And strictly speaking, Oedipa won't get to see the bidder either because when the book ends, so ends her appearance as a creation of the author's imagination. There is no Oedipa "outside" the story, and all speculations by the fan community as to what the "real" solution of the mystery will end in a road to nowhere: this "real" solution does not exist.

So the irony is that the readers, in feverishly trying to "figure it out" after the book has ended, fruitlessly continue what Oedipa has been doing throughout the story.

One more little detail, when you read the song lyrics that were being sung to the tune Aura Lee, did you take the time to find out what tune that was and hear the song in your head? It's the same as Elvis Presley's Love me Tender, and it's hilarious when you read it that way.

I hadn't taken the time but know the melodoy of Love me Tender and just sang it to the text.

Priceless indeed!

TCoL49, p. 57:

Being led in this by the president of the company, Mr Clayton ("Bloody") Chiclitz himself; and to the tune of "Aura Lee":

Glee

Bendix guides the warheads in,

Avco builds them nice.

Douglas, North American,

Grumman get their slice.

Martin launches off a pad,

Lockheed from a sub;

We can't get the R&D

On a Piper Cub.

Convair boosts the satellite

Into orbits round;

Boeing builds the Minuteman,

We stay on the ground.

Yoyodyne, Yoyodyne,

Contracts flee thee yet.

DOD has shafted thee,

Out of spite, I'll bet.

Edited April 25, 2011 by Xray

[9thdoctor]

So the irony is that the readers, in feverishly trying to "figure it out" after the book has ended, fruitlessly continue what Oedipa has been doing throughout the story.

Yes, though I may just have robbed you of some of the fun. I should have strung you along in earnest, with one or two of the many theories.

I hadn't taken the time but know the melodoy of Love me Tender and just sang it to the text.

Priceless indeed!

There are others too, but he doesn’t always disclose what the tune is. If you’re into audiobooks you must try Inherent Vice, the reader sings the songs and does a terrific job.

[9thdoctor]

Here’s something that’s interesting to ponder. Time magazine’s list of the top 100 novels of the last x number of years. TCoL49 is there on the list.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1951793,00.html

But here’s Time’s original review of the book:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901889-2,00.html

What is the meaning of the gibberish literature that is currently being published as fast as it can be gibbered?

Oops.

[Xray]

So the irony is that the readers, in feverishly trying to "figure it out" after the book has ended, fruitlessly continue what Oedipa has been doing throughout the story.

Yes, though I may just have robbed you of some of the fun. I should have strung you along in earnest, with one or two of the many theories.

Yes, that would have been fun, and yet another experiment in how "real" is what is presented as reality.

This would then have been a case not only of the author stringing along the reader who expects a dénouement, but of a reader stringing along another reader. ;)

But here’s Time’s original review of the book:

http://www.time.com/...01889-2,00.html

What is the meaning of the gibberish literature that is currently being published as fast as it can be gibbered?

Oops.

Thanks for digging up this review, ND.

This was way back in 1966, and Pynchon's deliberate 'degradation of a mental synthesis' in this post-modern novel obviously irritated the author.

If memory serves, Pynchon created the term "creative paranoia".

I'm currently rereading some Hemingway stories, and when one thinks of the effort he took in finding the "objective correlative" (defined by T. S. Eliot as "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion"), when one thinks of how important it was for him to employ "the exact word, not the nearly exact, not the merely decorative word", and how he identified with the Imagist manifesto of concentration being the very essence of poetry ... in comparison, post-modern novels can came across as 'disintegrating'. For attempts on the reader's part at constructing meaning, or the reader's relying on objective correlations are often negated as senseless, with the linguistic sign itself frequently becoming the center of attention, often in the form of a 'receding signifier'.

I have just started Marge Piercy's Vida which Daunce recommended. It looks like the world presented in this book has a more 'realistic' setting, and going by the writing style, one would probably not categorize it as a post-modern novel.

Vida is an 'un-put-down-able' book for me, I know that already.

Edited April 30, 2011 by Xray

[Xray]

I wish Wilder's "Our Town" were on your list, but maybe you aren't doing plays. It is so full of the bittersweet beauty of life.

"Bittersweet beauty of life" expresses it perfectly. I must admit I have cried during many of the scenes of this wonderful, poignant play.

Vida by Marge Piercy, which has the whole student protest world also, brilliantly done.

Looks like this is a must-read. I googled a bit and virtually all comments about the book were enthusiastic. Thanks for the tip, Daunce!

Great, I'll look forward to how you like it. I have read it three times. In Vida you will find a complete human character and a real hero. Her work is her life, and her work is advancing her beliefs under constant duress and threat. Her beliefs are wrong, but she gives her life to them because they are her self, which she cannot betray.

I have arrived at chapter 4 now and am already 'hooked'.

This is also for Phil if you are reading this! Dump Betty friedan if you can -- Vida will not depress you or bore you, I guarantee. And it has the added value of a full portrait of the turbulent Youth Movement, antiwar protest, early feminist years.

(Daunce's two sentences above are a step toward that but, no offence, still not enough for this reader at least to buy it, especially since I've never heard of it.)

An odd book for someone who claims to know something about American literature not to have heard of.

Have you read Vida, JR? If yes, I'd be curious to hear what you think of it.

Edited April 30, 2011 by Xray