"The Crying of Lot 49"

[fiefoe]

Thomas Pynchon's shortest novel made me feel the author had more fun writing it than I had reading it. Despite the author's curious phrasing choices and distaste for punctuation, the book did grow on me, but just when I thought things were really getting somewhere, the end was nigh.

Poetry in paranoia:

• (His eyes) were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears.
• She would give them order, she would create constellations.
• She looked around, spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal.
• Two very old men. All these fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth.
• Shall I project a world?
• (The city:) She had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see.
• "You know what a miracle is... Another world's intrusion into this one."
• The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.
• "dt,".. meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate.., where death welled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick.