Ordered my fifth Pynchon four days back and still no sign of it. The online store I use has a big selection of cheap ass shit but sometimes you just wait for two months and then they tell you they don't actually have it.
But anyway -
Crying of Lot 49 was awesome, I read it in English and I might do it again as it's pretty short but there's a lot of shit going on. Apparently the only czech translation is a pile of shit, so I'd rather read it again in the original than spend money on poor attempt to do the impossible.
It's interesting though, Bleeding Edge translation was great. Vineland's translation was pretty poor but the book was still enjoyable.
I'm waiting for english version of V to arrive. That one hasn't even been translated so I don't have to make any hard decisions.
Forgive me, I'm going to nerd out for a minute--since Pynchon is my favorite post45 American writer and I'm excited to talk to someone else who's actually reading him (since a lot of people give up after CL49).
CL49,
Vineland, and
Bleeding Edge are Pynchon's shortest novels (BE might be longer than
Inherent Vice, I can't recall off the top of my head). It's been a while since I read Vineland, but Bleeding Edge is kind of Pynchon-lite (and a rehash of CL49 in a lot of ways, like CL49 for the post-9/11 east coast). Still a good book though.
CL49 is phenomenal, although it's best understood (in my opinion) as a kind of bridge between what I think are Pynchon's two most significant novels:
V. and
Gravity's Rainbow. It's his shortest novel, but still has a lot going on, as you say. Lit critic Mark McGurl writes that CL49 miniaturizes Pynchon's "more typical sprawling maximalism," by which I take him to mean that CL49 manages to capture the historical breadth of Pynchon's longer novels in an impressively short space (the whole backstory with Trystero and
The Courier's Tragedy channels a sense of deep--and secret--history).
You're going to get that "sprawling maximalism" with V. It's his debut novel (published in 1963), and it's a fucking wild ride. Not only is it physically chunky (some 500 plus pages), it's conceptually dense. It jumps around chronologically and can be tough to follow. In many ways, it feels more like a modernist novel (Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, or Orlando) than his later works. That said, there's still a mystery at the heart of it; but you occasionally have to be patient to get the juicy investigative parts (and they usually involve stories that take you back in time).
For me, CL49 feels like a kind of channel between V. and Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow. In fact, it feels more like a preface to GR than a standalone novel (although of course, it is a standalone work). I'll be really interested to hear what you think of V. I think you'll find it surprisingly different than CL49, Vineland, and BE, while still possessing plenty of Pynchon's identifying markers (there's a lot of humor and absurdity galore).
