basically I’m not sure why a lot of things in the book happened. I’m probably going to have to re-read it, especially as we go through and discuss it. There’s so much of it to talk about I’m not sure where to start, I was kind of waiting for someone else who had finished it to pick a starting topic.

Good book overall though, it was really funny at parts and the whole thing was page turning, I only got my copy like 3 days ago. I really loved the name of the husband’s radio station, KCUF.

I know what you mean, there was one point where the narrator just announced the word trystero, and introduced it as being the word to control her for the rest of the book, but I also never understood her true motivation to pursue the matter to its conclusion. Especially when every time she found a new lead or something, she would go out of her way to avoid it. Maybe that goes along with the idea that she was never meant to find the whole truth out, or was always to on the verge of discovering it like the epilepsy simile.

Her whole characterization did change for no apparent reason. All of sudden the people around her are changing, dying or just leaving. Perhaps that was the books summery means when it says she discovers herself or whatever. As for whether or not the whole was real, idk. The whole time I was kind of thinking schizophrenia in the back of my mind, like the people she talked to, and all the muted horns poping up everywhere was unlikely. After all, in the beginning she saw that uncle sam hallucination. But on the other hand I queestion if the author would have known enough about the disease to properly write about it, since Idk the status of schizophrenia research in 1965.

How do you imagine Oedipa Maas? For me, she looks like Julia Louis-Dreyfus

I finished to book today. However I am still not sure what was going on. I started to read it at the gym while on the elliptical. I couldn’t get very far as it was impossible to read that way.

It almost seemed like the author was trying to outdo himself to see exactly how long of a run on sentence he could write. Made the book incredibly difficult to read since the end of many of the sentences didn’t seem to have anything to do with the beginning. The punctuation could also have been better.

Adapt mentioned schizophrenia, but I would say the author had it. The story was not cohesive.

“The question is, if the guy at the front desk, and his friends, are gonna keep walking into the room while you’re having sex, don’t you find a different hotel?”

One of the many problems. She is able to leave the Inverarity when she needs to, but is ok with sleeping in a closet they can’t even close the door to?

The night beginning the affair was another one, she didn’t even really seem to like him, then decides to have sex after the elaborate clothes thing? And really, who is gonna give somebody a second time when they were so pitiful that you fell asleep the first time.

The only thing that could have made out of it, to me, was if Pierce was the one coming to bid.

I have read other books that seemed disjointed, but usually they were trying to come across with some great truth, or message or something that just didn’t work. I didn’t see one here. Anyone else find one?

Shishi Posted:

I have read other books that seemed disjointed, but usually they were trying to come across with some great truth, or message or something that just didn’t work. I didn’t see one here. Anyone else find one?

This is true – and this is not true. Pynchon was already beyond the usual structure of a having a solution at the end of a book. Breaking those structures can mean, you won’t get a satisfying end at all. Just like life, some things end abruptly. I find this interesting.

Fortunato Posted:

I would clbumify this as postmodern academic fiction.

Other examples of style incorporated from other genres or sources would include the funny names (slapstick humor imo) and the elaborate conspiracy and her subsequent follow-up on it (detective fiction).

I’d like to add influences of surreal drama and road movies (in literal form).