Sean

The Idle Book Club 6: The Crying of Lot 49

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I am 130 pages in, and this seems to me the understatement of the year.

You know you're in for trouble when people say stuff like 'I had to work my way through Finnegan's Wake before I could appreciate it.'

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"If reading a book isn't like running a marathon with your mind, then what is the point of reading it?"--says the person who stupidly took a lot of Russian lit classes in college.

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"If reading a book isn't like running a marathon with your mind, then what is the point of reading it?"--says the person who stupidly took a lot of Russian lit classes in college.

"If X isn't Y, then what's the point?" is the gold standard for being a jackass.

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Transitive property of douche.

If this also worked for regular showers gaming conventions would be a lot more pleasant.

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This marks a number of firsts for me. First time posting in the Idle Forums (howdy!), first time Pynchon, and first time listening to a novel as an audiobook. I'm sure many Idle Thumbs readers were compelled as I was by the dulcet tones of Chris Remo harmonizing with Chris Remo to go claim a book from their sponsor.

I must say that I don't think I would have made much headway on CoL49 had I been reading it in a more traditional format. George Wilson reads the version available on Audible.com and makes a great job of it, and being able to take it in while I'm travelling suits me well.

Though I have initially found the characters difficult (if not impossible) to empathise with, I'm finding myself drawn along with the detective story that Oedipa life spirals into. I'm particularly intested in the concept of the real world being an intensely subjective construction in the mind of the individual. All these strange occurances that happen to her could be nothing more than happenstance, but theories of conspiracy give the events a darker tone and Oedipa's internal monologue seems to become increasingly paranoid as a result.

This will also be the first Idle Book Club I listen to; I'm very interested to see what they make of it.

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The cast is up, and I was absolutely wowed by Sean's feminist reading of the novel. It makes so much sense but I totally missed it in both read-throughs. The discussion of how Pynchon nailed the '60s as a period of counter-cultures and multiple potential futures was really interesting, since I just finished Gravity's Rainbow, which tackles a similar milieu even more explicitly in the post-war Germany setting.

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I think this was my favorite book cast so far. It was so great hearing how everyone had their own interpretations and reactions to what they read, and I agree that the feminist view of the novel is the best. Also, Jake is the master of making me dream about the Coen brother's adapting this movie (they did it with Cormac McCarthy, so surely they can do Pynchon).

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Also, Jake is the master of making me dream about the Coen brother's adapting this movie (they did it with Cormac McCarthy, so surely they can do Pynchon).

PT Anderson is adapting Pynchon's latest novel Inherent Vice, and it should be pretty damn great.

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Yeah, I had heard about the Inherent Vice ​movie. Speaking of movies--weird that a book podcast engenders so much movie discussion--I watched Rosemary's Baby to see the similarities between it and Lot 49 that Sean mentioned. I can see both being good examples of the systemized obstacles that women face just by being women, but I think it's a lot more subtly applied in Lot 49. The movie kind of hits you over the head with the difficulties of being a woman in society, mostly because it has a much more gendered plot (pregnancy) than Lot 49 does. Still, it's a pretty fair comparison. Also, such a horrifying movie.

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Yeah, I had heard about the Inherent Vice ​movie. Speaking of movies--weird that a book podcast engenders so much movie discussion--I watched Rosemary's Baby to see the similarities between it and Lot 49 that Sean mentioned. I can see both being good examples of the systemized obstacles that women face just by being women, but I think it's a lot more subtly applied in Lot 49. The movie kind of hits you over the head with the difficulties of being a woman in society, mostly because it has a much more gendered plot (pregnancy) than Lot 49 does. Still, it's a pretty fair comparison. Also, such a horrifying movie.

Oh certainly. I don't think Lot 49 comes close to what Rosemary's Baby seeds in the "obstacles and loneliness a woman can experience" department BUT the think about the novel was that even though it didn't portray that otherness so obtusely I still felt it as intensely as I did In Rosemary's Baby, which I thought was a pretty mind-blowing achievement.

Nevertheless, and this bears repeating -- I HATED reading this novel. I really did not like a lot a lot of Pynchon's looser work throughout the book; but I still OVERALL really loved the book, which is a rarity for me in fiction. It's like doing a five-mile run or something equally physically horrifying but ultimately gratifying.

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Oh certainly. I don't think Lot 49 comes close to what Rosemary's Baby seeds in the "obstacles and loneliness a woman can experience" department BUT the think about the novel was that even though it didn't portray that otherness so obtusely I still felt it as intensely as I did In Rosemary's Baby, which I thought was a pretty mind-blowing achievement.

Nevertheless, and this bears repeating -- I HATED reading this novel. I really did not like a lot a lot of Pynchon's looser work throughout the book; but I still OVERALL really loved the book, which is a rarity for me in fiction. It's like doing a five-mile run or something equally physically horrifying but ultimately gratifying.

It would be interesting to read some more fiction of this type at some point on the cast--by which I mean fiction that plays with language in challenging or unusual ways for its own sake in addition to being purely in the service of the larger themes or intention. (This seems to be common to "postmodern" fiction, whatever that even means, but I'm not super well read in that department so what do I know.) I don't think that's the kind of thing we're generally drawn to but it seems better suited to literature than to more literally-depicted narrative forms like film.

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Nevertheless, and this bears repeating -- I HATED reading this novel. I really did not like a lot a lot of Pynchon's looser work throughout the book; but I still OVERALL really loved the book, which is a rarity for me in fiction. It's like doing a five-mile run or something equally physically horrifying but ultimately gratifying.

I can totally relate to this, although I quite liked reading The Crying of Lot 49 despite the complicated sentence structure being a major stumbling block for me at first (I read the book in English). There are novels whose world I yearn to go back to once I'm done (the abbey of The Name of the Rose and, incidentally, the Los Angeles of Inherent Vice, for example). Then there are novels that I simply didn't enjoy reading (Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, for instance). Interestingly, some novels fall into both categories. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was incredibly hard read for me, because of the multilevel helplessness the alcoholic protagonist, who was completely incapable of not hurting his loved ones, made me feel. Still, every time I see the novel on my bookshelf, I miss that little Mexican town and the Day of the Dead.

I like the notion of massive amounts of information being lost once a person perishes. This was also one of the major themes in one of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories, the name of which I can't remember right now. It makes one appreciate how unique and precious each person's experiences are, despite how "ordinary" that person may appear at first glance. Like a move camera filming a scene from completely different perspective.

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It would be interesting to read some more fiction of this type at some point on the cast--by which I mean fiction that plays with language in challenging or unusual ways for its own sake in addition to being purely in the service of the larger themes or intention. (This seems to be common to "postmodern" fiction, whatever that even means, but I'm not super well read in that department so what do I know.) I don't think that's the kind of thing we're generally drawn to but it seems better suited to literature than to more literally-depicted narrative forms like film.

Doesn't Calvino do this? I seem to remember a lot of playing around with language in If on a winter's night a traveler, but I read that years ago, so I could be wrong.

If you want something that plays around with language just for the fun of it--there's always Nabokov.

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For some reason this book reminded me of the movie Foul Play, or vice versa I should say. If someone (1) has actually seen this movie and, (2) agrees with this equivocation, then you just may be my soul mate.

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Doesn't Calvino do this? I seem to remember a lot of playing around with language in If on a winter's night a traveler, but I read that years ago, so I could be wrong.

If you want something that plays around with language just for the fun of it--there's always Nabokov.

Nabokov and especially Calvino make me paranoid, because they're in translation. I know enough Italian at least to know there's some serious legwork being done to render Calvino into English, which gives me disquiet.

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Nabokov and especially Calvino make me paranoid, because they're in translation. I know enough Italian at least to know there's some serious legwork being done to render Calvino into English, which gives me disquiet.

But Nabokov wrote most of his best known books in English. And translated at least some of the Russian ones himself.

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But Nabokov wrote most of his best known books in English. And translated at least some of the Russian ones himself.

I was really thinking only of Lolita, which is better in the original Russian. But yeah, fair point.

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Now I'm confused. Wasn't Lolita written in English and later translated into Russian by the author?

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Now I'm confused. Wasn't Lolita written in English and later translated to Russian by the author?

Dammit, you're right. I'm a dumbass and mixed them in my memory. Do you ever wish you could rewind time?

My point stands for Calvino, though. At least until Nappi comes and pokes holes in that.

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Nabokov and especially Calvino make me paranoid, because they're in translation. I know enough Italian at least to know there's some serious legwork being done to render Calvino into English, which gives me disquiet.

This is an incredible Paris Review interview with William Weaver, longtime translator of Italian authors including Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/421/the-art-of-translation-no-3-william-weaver

It's really distressing if you read works in translation. I love Eco and have read all his novels, which is how I ended up reading this interview, but Weaver says some really interesting things about translating Calvino as well. Comparing his statements about the two authors says a lot about the ridiculous range in process required when translating fiction.

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This is an incredible Paris Review interview with William Weaver, longtime translator of Italian authors including Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino:

http://www.theparisr...-william-weaver

It's really distressing if you read works in translation. I love Eco and have read all his novels, which is how I ended up reading this interview, but Weaver says some really interesting things about translating Calvino as well. Comparing his statements about the two authors says a lot about the ridiculous range in process required when translating fiction.

Weaver's description of his process is so illuminating. Umberto Eco has written, "Translation is the art of failure," right? Truer words were never spoken.

Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I get commissions from other professors to translate Latin texts into English. It's a job I hear I'm quite good at, but it's still so daunting. I can work for hours getting down the meaning of the words (which is no small feat in itself, considering that Latin has many more and much subtler words for arriving, leaving, falling, killing, etc.) and still know full well that I've obliterated the artistry of the passage they make up, because Latin has fluid word order and can position words wherever you please, for dramatic or ironic effect. There's just no way to translate it, the entire sense of it is lost. It must take a person much more accustomed to failure than me to be a translator full-time.

That said, I think Calvino will be a great read some months down the line. It'd be a good excuse for me to read it now, rather than when I'm more fluent in Italian, which is what I always tell myself.

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That's a really great article on the process of translation (although the interviewers line about Eco being a writer who is also an intellectual felt a little unfair, I'm sure Calvino would consider himself an intellectual too). Translating is hard enough on its own, I can't imagine having to do it while the author you're translating is still alive. At least Nabokov didn't have to deal with Pushkin after he botched the poet's works in translation.

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Do you ever wish you could rewind time?

Oh no, I'm not making that mistake again!

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First, this is the best book cast so far! A smoother and better balance of conversation, editorializing, and impressions with less summary.

I love the "counterculture as secret society" undertones of the book, especially as somebody who sort of defines themselves through two (diy punx and 80s computer games). It's wild/sad to think about how class has become more rigidly stratified over time but the underground culture that tends to go with that has been largely codified and co-opted.

On the prose: Pynchon seems to have this one move where a character is having an emotional breakthrough, or has reached a point that is important, and the tone of the writing changes, like a camera pulling back, and he switches to a grand and dense style. They seem to be the most challenging parts to read, but also the most important to the story's spirit. Pynchon's intellect is daunting. He can seemingly hold the totality of history, plus his own made up history in his head.

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