| Title | : | V. |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 2020418770 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9782020418775 |
| Language | : | French |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 640 |
| Publication | : | First published August 1, 1963 |
| Awards | : | William Faulkner Foundation Award (1964), National Book Award Finalist Fiction (1964) |
V. Reviews
-
When I’ve been reading V. quite a while ago I couldn’t get out of dictionaries and encyclopedias – the book is a carnival of words and ideas.
Say a man is no good for anything but jazzing around. He’ll go live in a cathouse, he’ll jazz it all over town.
People like anything: gossip, rumours, hearsay, tall tales, myths… The only thing they don’t like is truth…Geronimo stopped singing and told Profane how it was. Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over Nueva York bought these little alligators for pets. Macy’s was selling them for fifty cents, every child, it seemed, had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown and reproduced, had fed off rats and sewage, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, all over the sewer system. Down there, God knew how many there were. Some had turned cannibal because in their neighborhood the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror.
V. is a luscious and scrumptious salad of baroque urban legends, frilly drinking bouts and fanciful history lessons.Love’s a lash, Kisses gall the tongue, harrow the heart; Caresses tease Cankered tissue apart. Liebchen, come Be my Hottentot bondsman tonight, The sjambok’s kiss Is unending delight. Love, my little slave, Is color-blind; For white and black Are only states of mind.
The style and language of the tale is a quintessence and epitome of that lush, rebellious, tumultuous and alchemical epoch.To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
And somewhere in the wings of history stands a cosmic actress – a capricious, mercantile, decadent and frigid harlot.
And this omnipotent cocotte is entropy. And entropy rules equally the doom of a soap bubble and the destiny of human being, therefore any human life is nothing but a soap bubble. -
How Hard Can It Possibly Be?
"V" isn't so much a difficult novel to read - it is after all just words, most of which are familiar - as one in which it is sometimes hard to understand what is going on and why.
What does it mean? Does it have to mean anything? How does it all connect?
Ironically, if not intentionally, the inability to determine what and why, as well as who, is part of its design. Pynchon mightn't want to answer all the questions he or life asks.
However, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of food for thought in the novel.
Pynchon actually tells us a lot all of the time. Like "Ulysses", there are lots of hints and clues and allusions, and it's easy to miss them, if you're not paying attention to the flow of the novel and taking it all in. It's definitely a work that benefits from multiple readings.
Characters Both Sacred and Profane
"V" starts with one of two protagonists, the schlemiel Benny Profane, on Christmas Eve, 1955.
On the anniversary of the sacred day upon which a Virgin, Mary, gave birth to Christ (and thus started what would become Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant), Profane is wearing black levis, a suede jacket, sneakers and a big cowboy hat, a sort of bohemian uniform at the time.
He drops into the Sailors' Arms, which welcomes sailors from the tempestuous sea onto solid ground. For them, it's a dream come true, where the barmaids "all love to screw" and "remind you that every day is Christmas Eve".
This tavern is a haven and safe harbour. The big-breasted women here provide comfort and succour to men, something we can easily get used to and take for granted.
A Form Guide to Stencil
Sixty pages later, Pynchon introduces us to the second protagonist, Herbert Stencil, a man who refers to himself in the third person, which allows him to create a repertoire of bad faith or inauthentic identities (or Sartrean "impersonations").
He has no one solid persona, but somehow the ability to think of himself as and be not just the third person, but a first, a second, a fourth and a fifth permits him to function reasonably adequately (if not always normally) for a male, and so the multiple personalities "keep Stencil in his place".
When we meet him, however, his "place" is not static, it's dynamic. He is on a single-minded quest to find evidence of a woman named V. who he believes once knew his deceased father:
"As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory birds to the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production machinist, so was the letter V to young Stencil.
"He would dream perhaps once a week that it had all been a dream, and that now he’d awakened to discover the pursuit of V. was merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind, in the tradition of The Golden Bough or The White Goddess."
With these V-shaped analogies and the allusion to these non-fiction works (is "V." itself just such a scholarly quest?), Pynchon gives us some insights into the myth and mystery and significance of "V".
The next paragraph gives us even more clues as to the nature of the pursuit or quest in general:
"But soon enough he’d wake up the second, real time, to make again the tiresome discovery that it hadn’t really ever stopped being the same simple-minded, literal pursuit; V. ambiguously a beast of venery, chased like the hart, hind or hare, chased like an obsolete, or bizarre, or forbidden form of sexual delight.
"And clownish Stencil capering along behind her, bells ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad. For no one’s amusement but his own."
In Pynchon's next novel, "The Crying of Lot 49", a woman, Oedipa Maas, would be the subject in and of the quest. She would be the one doing the detective work. Here, a male is the subject and a woman is the object of the quest or pursuit.
While both Oedipa and Stencil take their quests seriously, they meet with mixed success (perhaps a hallmark of a post-modern fiction). However, Pynchon seems to venerate Oedipa more highly. For all his earnestness, profundity and third person pretension, Stencil is a clown or a fool to match Profane's picaresque schlemiel.
"A Beast of Venery"
We all know the word "venereal", but how often do we see its root, "venery" (which means sexual indulgence or the pursuit of or hunt for sexual activity)?
The quest for man, if not necessarily for Stencil, is a quest for sexual pleasure, for sexual delight, for the sexual conquest of woman.
Stencil is looking for one woman. However, because she is of his father's generation and vintage, you have to ask whether in reality he is trying (potentially on behalf of all men) to understand the mystery of sexual attraction, the mystery of womanhood and the place of women in society and, if only from a male perspective, the role of woman in a man's life.
The Birth of Venus
From an etymological perspective, the word "venery" derives from the Latin "veneris", which in turn derives from the Roman god of love and sex, Venus, who in turn was modelled on the Greek god, Aphrodite.
The connotation of pursuit is thought to come from the resemblance of the word to the Latin "venari", which means to hunt.
Not coincidentally, the Botticelli painting "The Birth of Venus" features in the novel.
According to Robert Graves, Venus was also adapted from the pagan sea-goddess, Marian, who was often disguised as a merry-maid or mermaid. Suffice it to say, this Venus rose from the sea, hence the shell in the painting.
If we go back further in time, we meet another goddess Astarte, whom the Egyptians worshipped as a goddess of war and tenacity, while the Semites worshipped her as a goddess of love and fertility.
The Greeks would later adapt Astarte as the basis of Aphrodite (on the way to the Latin Venus). It is also linked to the goddesses and names Astoreth, Ishtar and Esther.
Esther is the name of a character in the novel, (partly Jewish, she gets a nose job in an attempt by her plastic surgeon who wishes to make her look more Irish), while a model of Astarte is the figurehead of the xebec or sailing ship upon which Stencil's father Sidney died in the Mediterranean off Malta in 1919. In a way, Sidney's death might be a return to the embrace of Venus (after all, she was a V) and the great unknown of the ocean?
Opposing Protagonists
Profane and Stencil inevitably meet each other over the course of the novel and collaborate in Stencil's quest as it moves from Manhattan to Malta.
They approach life and womanhood in contrasting ways.
Here's a summary of Profane:
Aimless, directionless, concerned with the present, existential, free-style, random, improvisatory, profane, superficial, more interested in the surface, physical, decadent, irrational.
And Stencil:
Motivated, purposeful, concerned with the past, in pursuit of understanding and meaning, structured, organised, profound, more interested in depth, metaphysical, civilised, rational.
Despite their differences, they join together in Stencil's quest. What they share, obviously, is their manhood, the fact that they are men in a patriarchal society.
Whatever their differences as men, they are on the inside, whereas women, in contrast, are on the outside, subjugated, unable to exercise political power or social influence, whatever other means of persuasion they might have at their disposal.
"Not Who, But What"
Stencil's quest starts when he inherits a journal in which his father wrote the following cryptic note:
"There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report."
There is a suggestion that Young Stencil is trying to find his own identity in V. He was raised motherless, having been born in 1901, which we are also told was the year "Victoria" died.
Stencil, speaking in the third person, says:
"You'll ask next if he believes her to be his mother. The question is ridiculous."
But does it mean the answer is ridiculous? Does it mean we shouldn't ask the question? Are Stencil and Pynchon simply steering us away from the obvious or the possible? Is Pynchon suggesting that fiction (at least post-modern fiction) need not be obliged to offer up answers, that not every quest leads to its Holy Grail?
I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that there's not just one V, but potentially many. Or at least, Young Stencil finds clues as to the existence of many candidates.
Does it make any difference though? Does it matter who this particular woman, this V., is? Does the identity of any individual V. matter, when it is the "what", the abstraction of woman that Stencil might be seeking?
Is he, like us, simply trying to understand womanhood in all of its complexity?
Animation and Agitation
Whatever the answer, Stencil's quest animates and energises him. Beforehand, he had been inanimate:
"His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to - if not vitality, then at least activity. Work, the chase...it was V. he hunted...
"Finding her: what then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had become directed entirely inward, toward this acquired sense of animateness...to sustain it he had to hunt V.; but if he should find her, where else would there be to go but back into half-consciousness? He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the search. Approach and avoid."
Sidney, on the other hand, was a spy and interrogator for the British Foreign Office whose function was to perpetuate the British Empire.
He regarded V. as a threat to order. He viewed her as an agent of chaos who, in her different manifestations, always arrived at a time when the world was in a state of siege. She had an unerring ability to appear when the patriarchal world of Western Imperialism was under threat, whether by civil war, rebellion or revolution.
In a way, V. represents an undivided, less phallocentrically structured world that unites the stability of land and the fluidity of the ocean, as well as Europe and Asia, West and East, Woman and Man.
At a more generalised level, V might represent the relationship between the Animate and the Inanimate, between Life and Death, between Eros and Thanatos.
The Woman Question
It's interesting that neither Stencil really wants to find a definitive answer to their particular woman question. They are males, and they can't see beyond an era during which men are firmly ensconced in the saddle of power and influence.
There is no preparedness to share power or to improve relationships between the sexes.
The nature of womanhood is therefore a question that remains unsolved at the end of the novel.
Women remain a mystery to men, perhaps because they (men) don't try hard enough or don't really want to understand. They are unable to change their own perspective, so that they might listen and learn. They are content to live with the allure of mystery.
In a way, what hope would there be for relationships if all of the mystery was obliterated?
As Profane says towards the end of the novel:
"Offhand I'd say I haven't learned a goddamn thing."
In a way, the unresolved concerns of the novel, from a male point of view, reflect Freud's plight:
"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?"
What is to be Done?
Both protagonists are selfish in their own masculine way. Profane seems to be oblivious to the issue of what women might want. Young Stencil is ambivalent. However, at least Pynchon is posing a question, which I hope he did not view as ridiculous.
Ultimately, while it's arguable that "V" is a pro-feminist novel, I think Pynchon's view was that, as at the time of writing in 1963, there was no solution to the relationship question in view. There was, quite simply, more to be done.
Perhaps the underlying truth is that, unless and until man understands the place of woman in the world, he will never understand his place next to woman.
Some perspective and hope might come from McClintic Sphere, the jazz musician in the novel.
His counsel, almost zen or beat, is to "keep cool, but care." Don't worry too hard about it, just do it. But try to do it with love, not just lust and desire.
Of course, the Women's Liberation Movement was only then starting to gather force. However, for all the good it has achieved since then, I think there still remains much to be done.
Maybe at the level of couples it can be done, if we keep cool, but care.
VERSE:
Esther Got a Nose Job
After years of childhood misery,
Red-headed Esther got a nose job.
One day the doctor removed her hump
And returned it to her in a bottle.
He thought it was such a great success,
He gave her another hump for free.
Pig's Story
Task force off
Gibraltar
Moving forward
En route
To Malta
On tar-coloured
Mediterranean
Waters under
Stars blooming
Fat and sultry.
The sort of night
When there's no
Torpedoes
On the radar
And Pig tells
Us all a story
About how he was
Never caught
Behind the green door
The night Dolores
Held an orgy.
Nothing if Not Profane
They met mid-function
At the Rusty Spoon.
Although she's nowhere
Near his age or size,
He dreamed that he might
Find himself one night
At the conjunction
Of her inner thighs.
Voila, Vera Meroving!
[After and Mostly in the Words of Pynchon]
Twin tendrils of sunlight
Illuminated a crimson stain
In the courtyard of the
Baroque plantation villa.
A window swung open
On this fantastic day
To reveal a striking woman
In her forties, and otherwise,
Barely clad, in a negligee,
The hues of which were
Peacock greens and blues,
The fabric transparent,
But not especially obscene.
One Kurt Mondaugen,
A crouching tiger, hid behind
Wrought iron curlicues,
Astonished by his desire
To see and not be seen.
If he waited long enough,
A movement of the sun,
This woman or the breeze,
It might reveal to him,
A voyeur, yes, it might reward
His impatient gaze, his stare,
With a glimpse of nipple,
Her navel or some pubic hair.
For Want of Godolphin
[After and Mostly in the Words of Pynchon]
Vera wanted
Godolphin
For reasons he
Could only guess.
Her desire arose
Out of nostalgia
For the sensuous,
Her appetite
Knew nothing at all
Of nerves or heat,
Or flesh or sweat,
Or last night’s caress,
But was instead beholden
Entirely to barren,
Touchless memory.
Schoenmaker Offers to Make Esther Beautiful
[After and Mostly in the Words of Pynchon]
You are beautiful,
Perhaps, not as you are,
But as I see you.
I, my love, yours truly,
Want to give you
Something that
Is truly yours.
I can bring out
The beautiful girl
Inside you, latent,
The idea of Esther,
As I have done already
With your face and nose.
Do you think me so shallow
That I would only
Love your body?
Don’t you want me
To love your soul,
The true you?
Well, what is the soul?
It is the idea of the body,
The abstraction behind
The reality, the perfect Esther
Behind the imperfect one
Here in bone and tissue.
Just an hour of time
In my plastic surgery.
I could bring your soul
Outside, to the surface.
I could make you
Perfect, radiant,
Unutterably
Beautiful and
Platonically ideal.
Then I could love you
Unconditionally,
Truly, madly, deeply, dearly. -
So I opted to tango once more with Thomas. The results are a mix of the same frustrations I had with the first 150 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow (dropped thereafter), and a newfound appreciation for the most famous maximilist’s skill for writing sentences of incredible inventiveness, rhythm, and frenetic lunacy. After 300-odd pages of this novel, the niggles (new and old) returned—the introduction of innumerable madcap characters and their endless zing-flinging dialogue in the same voice; the overabundance of plots and their incoherent-seeming natures; the constant battle to nail a lucid understanding of every third or fifth sentence; the repeated use of ‘whaa’ in the mouth of too many characters; the painstaking detail and brilliance of contextless scenes that could not be appreciated without sufficient foregrounding or a roadmap; the guilt at feeling ennui when so much is happening on the page that screams ‘appreciate this’!; the screwball humour that lapses into searing pain through excess—and reading to the end turned to work. On the plus side, for the first 300-odd pages, I was zipping along on Thomas’s often divine prose style, allowing myself to be taken into weird and wonderful places, regardless of their driftless-seeming drift, and for a few days, I at last had a window into what ecstasy the Thomas fanboys experience when reading their man. It went many, many places, and somehow also nowhere, and for a little while, I ‘liked’ Thomas Pynchon. Triumph!
-
4.5/5
Knowledge is a funny business. Everyone pretends omniscience in the classroom, but god forbid you spout off like an intellectual outside of it. And then you have the subculture of people making an effort to read Pynchon in public, and the other subcultures that amuse themselves at their expense. The verdict seems to be know it all, but please, spare us from your efforts to prove it.
I'd sell my soul to write like this at the age of six and twenty. There, I admitted to lack of know-how when it comes to the realm of Pynchon. Of course, the reference to souls might not be worth much coming from someone with no memory of being religious in any sense, but I'd like to think the Catholic upbringing accredits the statement somewhat. My horse may be hitched to atheism, but I can still appreciate good theological diatribes with healthy roots in philosophy and literature.
Which is what I'm getting at here. Roots. Easily graspable statements with esoteric legs to stand on. A sense of context that spans the contemporary as easily as the ancient, and ties the two together in the delightfully tangible sense. Ivory computers, porcelain circuitry, old materials caking the eternal Street from 1955's Norfolk to 1919's Malta and beyond. To say the word 'automaton' and have the images of golems and cyborgs seamlessly interweave on the succeeding pages.
This isn't your banal tactic of cultural references and knowledge dropping at every turn. I suppose I should give credit to Neal Stephenson for setting up an apparatus of tin foil and pipe cleaner, to better display Pynchon's idol of ebony and titanium. The desire to imitate that deceptive depth of story is understandable. Not everyone can write in the style of the yo-yo, apex to apex, apocheir to apocheir, without the bottom ponderously dropping out or the string severing at the zenith or the snagging speed making the ride sickening to the stomach.
And again, six and twenty! 1963! In the US! Did you know that this book passes the Bechdel Test? I wouldn't have believed it either, least not without reading it for myself. Or believed without experiencing for myself how conscious the story is of life and its seeming coincidences, long lines of 'plot' drifting back and forth from immediate relevance to useless trivia. It never forsakes the surface details for the underlying meaning, and vice versa, and there's even spots of real humor and true beauty to be found. It's a rare talent that belies Pynchon's youth, to describe the passions that drive the intricate clockwork of the small days, and contextualize them in the themes that have, do, and will span for millenia. And to switch from one to the other without any noticeable jerks or shuddering! It makes one question the validity of the categories of knowledge that we function in, conventional discourse that so many gain use of by sacrificing the essence of their critical thinking. Puzzle pieces guaranteeing a pretty picture, inherently forsaking its right to a blank canvas."Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words--"events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic"--pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty, round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.
So, knowledge? Pynchon has it, and shows it in endless waves of connective tissues. I don't claim to understand all of it. But I have to thank him for my new-found way of thinking about this reading business of mine, my yo-yoing along the V shaped tracks of books like his, picking up bits and pieces with every passing over the same old stomping grounds. There's a surface of tin cans and plastic rubbish in those lands, and a wind whistling of ages past that sounds all the clearer the longer you walk. You can walk forward, and you can walk back, but to tread the same way twice is an impossibility, for better or for worse. -
Who or what is V? Would love to sit here and say that I even cared. It's certainly advisable to read this novel with a clear head. Not the sort of book you want to sit up in bed with late at night with one eye open whilst the other one sleeps. No, this requires complete and utter attention. Alternatively, you could forget what I just said, let one's hair down, grab a drink, forget the plot, and just be dazzled by some preposterously madcap and rollickingly eccentric passages of writing. If someone passed me this book and I didn't know who had written it, I would assume it was some wacko whos marble bag is a few balls sort.
Just because it's highly original, and it truly is, that doesn't mean it just gets to automatically qualify for masterpiece status. Although for the hardcore Pynchon fans shouting at the screen I can fully understand if you view it that way. If he really is the Godfather of postmodern hip lit then good for him. I remember reading Vineland back in 2015, and it still remains the most fun I have had with a book, ever!. This simply couldn't match it. No way. I even prefered Inherent Vice, which oddly made much more sense to me. Normally I would have quit this, but abnormally something keep me going, but I don't quite know what is was. Probably just wanting to know what lunacy was awaiting in the coming pages.
One thing I would love to give Pynchon a pat on the back for is his characters names. They have to be some of the most brilliant out of the ordinary in all of literature. So then, what does V. have that other early post-war novels lack? It certainly emphasizes the creation of a sort of modern mythology which becomes apparent the further in you go. Digressions of both idea and narrative here prove hard to crack most of the time, it was like playing around with a device that had a ten-digit code. The mode of storytelling stretches far back from the postmodern era though. Of course most will think Of Joyce. He did it for the moderns with Ulysses, writing a Homeric odyssey for a generation in which heroism lay flat on its face.
V. kind of reminds us that we never really made it that far away from ancient polytheism. Benny Profane, one of the central characters walks the streets of New York City alternating between spells of Erotic and Bacchic revelry. As wanderer back from the war, an archetype as old as written words, Profane lacks a homeland where he might end his voyage. Whilst the obsessive Herbert Stencil, searching for V., finds the quest for his Holy Grail undercut with the eternally unknowable.
He isn't the only one.
Profane and the whole sick crew blunder along, tormented by drunkenness and misunderstanding, and I only found a remote likability to the whole cast of players. Pynchon creates characters, so many of them in fact, it's difficult to truly make heads or tails of any of them. His world and his overstretched sentences seem bent on proving that even though the planet may be more nonsensical than say Alice’s Wonderland, there’s no reason we can’t have fun along the way. If only I could have found this more fun. But another F word comes to mind. Frustrating. Ultimately V. serves as a metaphor even for characters who aren’t, at least on the surface, searching for her or it. She may be this person or that, that country or this, this down here, or that over there. Their crackpot epic journey always seemed to have the feel of one running blindfolded down an alley before nutting a brick wall.
That leaves me now to ponder over Mason and Dixon and Against the Day, which some say is his best book. I will likely read Vineland again though before considering one of those two. -
“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
Thomas Pynchon's V has long been one of my favorite novels. Describing it, however, is next to impossible (for me at least). There are a host of fascinating characters including including Benny Profane, Rachel Owlglass, Stencil, a group of artists known as the Whole Sick Crew and as well as the mysterious entity known as V who seems to represent one thing and then another and is tied up in endless webs of conspiracy.
Pynchon goes back and forth in time between Profane's yo-yoing on the subways in Manhattan in the present to Stencil's search for clues to V's identity in the late 19th and early 20th century. This isn't the easiest of books to tackle, but it pulls you in and is nothing short of fantastic! If you aren't ready for this one but want to experience Pynchon, you might give The Crying of Lot 49 a try. It's more accessible and much shorter, but definitely another great book! V, however, is my go-to and a book I will return to again and again! -
I propose that the titular "V." is neither a person nor a place but a preposition.
What, really, is more personal than a first novel? It's that all-or-nothing, balls-to-the-wall debut effort that can either send a fledgling writer plummeting to dream-shattering depths with an effort that falls flat for any number of reasons or it can be the inaugural celebration all starry-eyed young scribes dare to hope for, that which heralds a staggering new talent to a canon populated by the many great wordslingers who've scribbled their way to well-deserved immortality. (For argument's sake, we'll work under the assumption that those flimsy flavor-of-the-month bestsellers that are so in vogue for their seemingly eternal 15 minutes will, in time, be forgotten and written off as yet another regrettable mistake born of groupthink's lapse in judgment while these truly remarkable feats of literature persist through the ages.)
If one is to write what one knows, how daunting must it be to know so much about such a wide range of complicated topics -- minute historical details of a time one either never experienced or was simply too young to fully digest, regardless of youthful precociousness; engineering equations requiring mathematical acrobatics and a more than adequate grasp on physics; an insider's take on the naval experience; an innate understanding of how to perfectly mix high-minded concepts and lowbrow humor with a dash of poetic lyric -- and attempt to whittle it all down into a tome that won't crush potential readers under the weight of both the volume itself and the awe-inspiring ideas roiling within?
The little we do know about literature's most elusive enigma points to pieces of Pynchon being flung along the narrative's parade route like confetti, adding flashes of biographical color to his intricately structured and beautifully written first novel that pits the animate against the inanimate and the internal self against the external veneer (and has the best-ever bonus of an Ayn Rand stand-in reduced to baby-talk in the presence of a pwecious widdle kittums-cat?). Aside from what can only be thinly veiled allusions to his Cornell days with Richard Fariña and their cult of Warlock -- regarding the Generation of '37: "And we did like to use Elizabethan phrases in our speech"; "A farewell celebration for Maratt on the eve of his marriage"; "Dnubietna leapt up on the table, upsetting glasses, knocking the bottle to the floor, screaming "Go to, caitiff!" It became the cant phrase for our "set": go to."; "The pre-war University years were probably as happy as he described, and the conservation as "good."", to say nothing of the nod to a novel called Existential Sheriff -- the internal conflicts of the writer seem to be scattered throughout V. like a breadcrumb trail back to the source himself.
Because Pynchon has be one conflicted dude. To be a notoriously private man juggling such derision for the spotlight with the compulsion to write for unseen but rabid fans, to churn out maddeningly, densely obscure works that are nevertheless guaranteed to meet both critical and commercial success (and increase sales of Excedrin in the following months), to posses such finely tuned right and left brains that he can be considered nothing less than an engineer-poet in his own right, to walk such a fine line between historical fictions and fictional histories -- is it any wonder that a man so in touch with dueling perspectives would build his first novel on the foundation of This v. That? -
Thomas Pynchon... twenty six years old... first novel... twenty six... first novel... twenty six?
Reads like The Adventures of Tintin on hallucinogens. Full of great comic scenes mixed with political espionage and paranoia amidst philosophical comments on the nature of politics, religion, death, time, sexuality and war. V. is undeniably complex and I can admit that there were moments of mind numbing confusion, but the book is so beautifully written that you just go for the ride. It's a haunting and frequently hilarious postmodern satire.
V., to me, represents enlightenment, or finality. The quest itself is a long journey, hence the time and globe spanning nature of the story. The book itself is like a series of interconnecting short stories that sweeps through the majestic settings of New York, Paris, Malta, Egypt, Africa and Alexandria. The nature of V seems nurturing, motherly and caring in times of stress and suffering. Pynchon is operating on a metaphysical plain, where particles and matter can be seen and felt and the world is different from our own 20/20 vision. V is eventually seen, felt and experienced for those who are willing to take the necessary steps. Too many times are we fed little slices of fear from the characters who contemplate the nature of dying, growing old, separation from mans ignorance. These men in search of V are, in some way, in search of an ego death, to cure their fears in the face of God, a maternal presence of spirit, a being of upmost enlightenment.
Obviously, there is so much more packed into this near 500 page novel, but that's what I got out of it first time around. Political theory is examined extensively through different countries and characters. Sexuality and youth seems prevalent within The Whole Sick Crew. There are some comments on the Christian Church and Christianity in general. Freudian psychology, science and mathematics pop up and colonialism is touched on as well.
Or you could be a schlemihl and take Benny Profane's approach: "I haven't learned a godammn thing." -
"A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words-"events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic"-pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to ordered into an ominous logic. He found paper and pencil and began to write the sentence in varying hands and type faces."
As wartime paranoia, obsessiveness, elusiveness, and ambiguity all seem to be trademark characteristics of Thomas Pynchon's more epic narratives, it's easy enough for the reader to constantly stumble upon these intentionally scattered, meta-clues. Because his novels cover such a broad realm of subjects, while proposing a very unique, and humorous philosophy of history, the connections and transitions of V.'s hodgepodge of vignettes concerning a rich tapestry of characters struggling with both World Wars becomes more and more apparent as the "story" reaches its conclusion. Overall, this passage seems to function as an accurate metaphor for what it feels like to read V..
With his eagerly anticipated seventh novel coming out in August of this year, V. now stands as one of his more accessible works, not to mention a fascinating example of his writing to look back upon in retrospect. Benny Profane is the archetypal Pynchonian schlemihl; an endearing protagonist, merely trying to get by as the rest of the world struggles obsessively with finding existential meaning in a universe full of closed systems. Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity's Rainbow would later act as a more carefully constructed version of this character. While it's true that not all of Pynchon's protagonists are slackers simply looking for a good time, they still function as tour guides who offer a more or less objective view of the events taking place. Even Herbert Stencil who exists as sort of an opposite of Profane, still shares a set of common characteristics, namely, humility or humanity. Call it what you will.
We follow Profane after just getting out of the navy, living in New York. He falls in with a crowd of bohemians and drifters referred to as the Whole Sick Crew. This group resembles the social crowd in the Recognitions as well as characters belonging to any standard party scene in a beat novel (albeit far more tolerable, and acting as intentional parodies). Profane loafs around, finds a job hunting alligators in the sewers of New York. After shooting Stencil in the ass on one of his jobs more characters enter the picture, and we are introduced to Stencil's obsessive quest to find the elusive V., a sort of character that his father before him had been fascinated with. From there the narrative drifts back and forth between historical episodes set during the tail end of the 19th century, and the first half of the 20th.
Pynchon's sympathies have always been directed at the marginalized, poor, oppressed, idealistic, liberal, etc. Even when he sketches portraits of his capitalist, fascist, hateful villains, he still manages to show their early development from wide-eyed, idealistic dreamer to avaricious monster, while avoiding a sort of idealistic bias because he presents the reader with the inherent weakness and hypocrisy of his liberal heroes just as well. Gaddis did the same thing with Wyatt Gwyon and Edward Bast, albeit both met more morbid, Faustian ends.
V. functions as a metaphor for the late twentieth century, synthetic dehumanization, which has now become one of the more blatant examples of postmodern theorizing, but in 1961 this all must have read as more of a prescient idea. Several episodes in the book, as ambiguous as they are, sort of portray "her" as an unattainable object of desire. The fourth chapter entitled "In Which Esther Gets a Nose Job" is the earliest introduction to this theme. Naturally, Shoenmaker the man who performs this operation, later to become her insensitive lover is the first sort of villain to appear. Robots modeled after humans appear later on. Profane has a particularly profound and hilarious conversation with one of them. Pynchon utilizes this theme as a way of revealing how human beings desire this sort of mechanical, empty ontology, as a way of escaping their own horrific human condition. Once again, this is why Profane's character is so very important. He exemplifies the human spirit. In his lackadaisical approach to life, he achieves what is of the utmost importance to Pynchon. The ability to merely exist, and deal, regardless of whatever sort of astronomical terror will abound. Another reason why his own unique brand of historical fiction functions so well. What's more horrifying than the first half of the twentieth century?
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Although not nearly as perfect as some of his later works, there are many traces of Pynchon's genius in this novel. It is not as drug-induced, decadent or heartbreaking as Gravity's Rainbow, nor is it as beautiful, ambitious or creative as Mason & Dixon, not to mention as impressively human or historically conscious as Against the Day.
Pynchon's writing in this early novel, though showing early incarnations of his later works, seems unrefined and confused. There are so called "Pynchon sentences" here, but none as decisive or as wonderful as in his later writings, in which almost every page is stacked full of incredibly sharp, yet long and haunting passages. Most significant in Pynchon's later writing is his incredible writing on the movement of social and political structures and mechanisms. In other words, Pynchon's later writing is dynamic; things and people move in Pynchon's world and the movement feels significant, as if it reflects on the movement of things and people in real life; a movement that is hard for us to grasp unless it is written by Pynchon's genius-pen.
That being said, "V", is a very good book. I really enjoyed it. There are some incredibly funny passages, specifically some about alligator-hunting in the New York sewers, and some interesting passages on Malta. Many of Pynchon's later thematic concerns appear in "V", such as automata, transhumanism, war, capitalism, historicity, truth, and most important: Love, but none of those thematic concerns seem as important as in his later novels, given the fact that Pynchon had not found his artistic style yet. -
Πριν απο αρκετα χρονια ειχα επισκεφτει ενα μουσειο μοντερνας τεχνης σε μια μεγαλη ευρωπαϊκή πρωτευουσα.εδω να πω οτι σιχαινομαι τη μοντερνα τεχνη και ειμαι συνηθως αυτη η ανωριμη που στεκεται πισω πισω απο επισκεπτες σε μουσεια που θαυμαζουν πχ ενα εκθεμα με εναν κουβα και μια σφουγγαριστρα και απλα γελαω.σε εκεινο το μουσειο ομως ετυχε να δω εναν απλουστατο πινακα με διαφορα χρωματα "πεταμενα" στον καμβα. Ακομη και σημερα ,δεν εχω ιδεα για ποιον λογο, αλλα εμεινα εκει να το κοιταζω περισσοτερο απο οσο εμεινα σε οποιοδηποτε αλλο πινακα.ειμαι ενας ανθρωπος που μου αρεσει η λογικη, το νοημα , η κυριολεξια πισω απο τις μεταφορες.ομως εκεινος ο πινακας με εκανε να σκεφτω οτι πρεπει να επιτρεπω στον εαυτο μου να θαυμαζει απλα κατι ωραιο που και που χωρις γιατι και πως.
Ετσι, μετα απο αυτη τη μεγαλη εισαγωγη και για να συνδεσω τα παραπανω με την πρωτη αναγνωση μου βιβλιου του Πυντσον, εχω να πω πως προφανως και οποιος διαβασει το συγκεκριμενο(και ισως ολα?)βιβλιο του πυντσον, δε πρεπει να περιμενει ενα μυθιστορημα με αρχη μεση και τελος, με καταιγιστικες εξελιξεις και μια τελικη καθαρση και λυση ολων των "μυστηριων". Γενικως δεν πρεπει να περιμενει τιποτα.πρεπει να βουτηξει με το κεφαλι και απλα να απολαυσει την καταδυση στο μυαλο του συγγραφεα.ειναι πραγματικα σαν να σε εχει καλεσει ο Πυντσον στο ονειρο του.εικονες, χαρακτηρες, ανεξηγητα γεγονοτα παρελαύνουν μπροστα σου χωρις καμια λογικη σειρα και πολλες φορες χωρις συνδεση.ομως το αισθητικο αποτελεσμα -ειδικα σε ορισμενα σημεια- ειναι τοσο μεγαλειωδες που απλα ξεχνας τη "λογικη" που οι περισσοτεροι αναγνωστες εχουμε τοσο αναγκη στα αναγνωσματα μας.το βιβλιο αυτο λοιπον ηταν σαν εκεινον τον μοντερνο πινακα πριν χρονια.εσπασε κατι στον αναγνωστικο μου χαρακτηρα.καποιο φραγμα.και το ευχαριστηθηκα οσο δεν περιμενα. -
What to say of Pynchon's half-century spanning epic?
Like
Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's first novel (published, I think, at an astonishing age 26) is concerned with questions of life and death, here both at the internal, personal scale of our relations to people, things, and the outer world, and on a broad international scale of war, colonialism, and political intrigue. Linking the two, Herbert Stencil, adventurer and obsessed historian, tracking the intertwined history of his British foreign office agent father and the enigmatic V., represented in various forms across 50 years in a slow progression towards the inanimate. Questions of the animate and inanimate worlds serve as central life/death dichotomy here, and the novel is filled to the brim with significant objects, automatons, prostheses, and bouts of tourism/colonialism (both of which, it seems, are joined in their ability to take a living place and convert it to small spheres of inanimacy, both literal, in a truly chilling Sudwest setpiece, and metaphorical, everywhere else people cluster around notable buildings and monuments (embodied by frequent references to mid 19th-century travel guide writer Karl Baedeker)).
Stencil himself, curiously, seems to be one of only a few characters in the teeming cast not occupying an obvious spot on an animate to inanimate continuum, as his obsessions simultaneously encompass the human and inhuman worlds (people, but lost to the unliving past). His off-the-scale foil is ultimate sad-sack ex-seamen Benny Profane, whose role as uber-schlemiel seemingly places him at both the far left position of animacy (the born bungler's natural enemy, we are told, being the inanimate objects that conspire to trip them up like so many banana peels (which, fortunately, appear nowhere in the novel -- it would just be too much)) and the deepest inanimacy of sloth and of one who, giving in to his perceived (self-created?) role, inevitably sabotages every human relationship he finds himself in. Potential Profane paramour Rachel Owlglass, on the other hand, may sit at the fulcrum and be as a result the novel's healthiest character overall.
What can be said? Lots apparently, and yet much, much more than I can possibly describe here. What matters most is that the novel is beautiful and tragic, a marvel of both clockwork convergent plotting and the ultimate nonconvergent spinout of human passions. And one which manages to be considerably more gripping and less opaque than some of the subsequent Pynchon I've read.
I've seen the book described elsewhere as "cubist". It is an accurate term, evoking both the book's violent modernism and chorus of impossible angles. Angles which, we find, are still capable of describing a human portrait. -
Reading Thomas Pynchon's first novel is like plunging head first into a room with very little light. As the novel progresses, Pynchon regulates that light sometimes letting the reader see very clearly, narratively speaking, and other times enveloping the reader into near darkness.
The two main characters are discharged Naval officer Benny Profane the self-described "schlemiel" and Stencil, the hunter of the elusive woman/idea known only as V. Though not exact opposites, their destinies do not intersect until the last part of the book. Profane's story is the more traditional narrative of the two as he passively wanders into alligator hunting, bar brawls, and an enigmatic security job. Profane with his friends known as "The Whole Sick Crew" could be Pynchon's alter ego and could be also an amalgamation of Naval and literary figures.
The breadth of Pynchon's encyclopedic knowledge comes through with the emergence of Stencil as he wanders through time and multiple identities taking up his father's mission to find V. V wanders time and space (presumably though- its never clear) showing up in 19th century British Egypt, as a rat in a New York City sewer, and (in a very difficult chapter) as a "bad preist" mangled by children in the ruins of World War II. Pynchon's strokes are most broad in sub-stories regarding a German colony in South Africa and later in another chapter surrounding an impaled ballerina that entrances V.
The connections are not often clear but the indictments of colonialism and war ring true. V is a challenging must-read postwar American whirlwind that remains consistent in its aggressively cubist tone. -
“Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.”
V is for Virginia, V-Note, Victory, Victoria, Vendetta, Vibration, Voice, Vision, Valletta, Voyeur, Vodka, Vieux, Villas, Villages, Voluptuous, Vainglorious, Vinegar, Vistas, Vomit, Victims, Vehicles, Veins, Vocal, Vice Versa, Voodoo, Volunteer, Virtue, Vertical, Vicious, Vanity, Vanishing, Vitality, Vacated, Ventures, Visible, Virgin, Venery, Veiled, VaudeVille, Vantage, Vegetables, Vicinity, Valley, Verge, Villiers, Violence, Vagrant, Voslauer, Vague, Violation, Vast, Varkumian, VelVet, Vatican, Veronica, Viennese, Violin, Vocalist, Vibes, Vultures, Volume, Vessels, Via, Vheissu, Vecchio, Vaporetto, Venus, VoVV, Veil, Veteran, Venezuelan, Vicinity, Vice, Vials, Vaulted, Vat, Vary, Vindicating, Vogt, Viola, Volcanoes, VesuVius, Votes, Vada, Void, VergeltungsVVaffe, Van, Veldschoendragers, Vera, Vogelsang, Vestiges, Vernichtungs, Vellum, Vampire, Versailles, Virility, Vibrato, Vaterliche, Vile, Valediction, Vinyl, Vittoriosa, Vulnerable, mons Veneris…V is for V.
Like the number 23 enigma, V is eVeryVVhere if you look for it, and once you see it your Vision is irreVersibly altered/altared.
In general, Pynchon’s prose is quite unique and the generous amount of songs he includes, depending on the context, sometimes feel Lynchian, like VVhen Mondaugen leaVes the communal shelter in South-VVest Africa, other times they giVe a musical Vibe (and by “musical” I mean the noun). There is an epically long sentence in chapter nine, a sentence of utter VerVe, something I VVish occurred more often, not just once.
The stories, taking place around the VVorld, including NueVa York, France, Egypt, and Malta, do not eVolVe but orbit a black hole of misinformation, noninformation, or VVhat one could simultaneously call a (non)eVent horizon. “V.’s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth.”
There are a lot of great scenes, including the Visceral rhinoplasty, the alligator hunting in the seVVers VVhich has an eVen stranger substory about a priest VVho VVent beloVV the streets to conVert rats and VVho may have sodomized a rat VVhose name begins VVith, you guessed it, V. Alas, some scenes are not as interesting as all that and I ended up ploVVing through them to see VVhat VVould come next.
I found all the characters more or less unlikeable, but I simply cannot understand the notion of reading something in order to ‘like’ (or like like) the characters, it seems immature, VVhich is not say that I’m unable to haVe fondness for characters in noVels, it’s just that this is not a criteria for my enjoyment, and if anything, disliking characters might help me understand my oVVn misanthropy. Jokes aside, does our ‘antihero’ learn anything at the end of the noVel? VVell, this is hoVV he puts it: “Profane didn’t have to think long. ‘No,’ he said, ‘offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing.’”
OVerall, this is a great first noVel, complex and richly peopled, but this is not Pynchon’s masterpiece, yet there are seeds of a masterpiece in here that I hope blossom as an arbor Vitae in GraVity’s RainboVV, VVhich VVill probably be the next Pynchon I read. Voilà! -
The search for the identity of V is the primary question in this masterwork from Pynchon. It is funny and tragic and crazy and totally Pynchon. I honestly cannot remember everything this book - it does not stick in my memory as much as Mason&Dixon, Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day. I mean, I loved the pleasure of reading it. But months later, I remember just the story of the genocide in Africa and some other snapshots but overall the image remains vague. Perhaps I read too much Pynchon in too short a time? I definitely will need to reread this one again.
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Ignore talk below of my previously setting this aside - I am giving it try #2 and am enjoying it much more - perhaps it's the timing - it begins on Christmas Eve and the first chapters unfold during the week between Christmas and the new year...
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It’s a long distance from 1963 to 2009. The prior, V.’s pub date. The later, when I thought maybe I had found perhaps the Pynchon key in Inherent Vice. I unlocked a bunch of great stuff with that key. Fantastic stuff. Stuff I dug. Stuff I got lost in. Against the Day. The newest thing. That one from the early ‘90s. I’m still waiting to see if it fits Mason & Dixon. Gravity’s Rainbow is next, but I’ve already done 2/3 of that one and know I don’t need no damn key for it.
That key doesn’t fit V..
Well, at least it didn’t key it open in the kind of immediate manner a million+ candle Klieg might have brightened it up. In other words, to my only slight disappointment, it’s still the same damn novel it was back when I first tried my hand at it ages and ages ago with the mere assistance of Sam Adams. I don’t think Sam Adams or any of his kin are helpful in the reading of V.. And probably not helpful for reading other Pynchon either. But that might just be my thing about disavowing any pretense about drugs of various sorts making entertainment products better. Drugs are entertaining enough on their own without the supplement of other artistic genres.
But speaking of drugs of various sorts, what one should point out is that the distance between 1963 and 2009 is a length of 46 years. That’s a pretty damn old Scotch. And I’ve never been able to afford one. These later vintage’d Pynchons have treated me very very well. And GR is being sweated with a great deal of anticipation by me. But this V. thing would require a third pass through to get itself cracked (or key’d, depending on our metaphor here) by Yours Truly. And it doesn’t need to be cracked by My Truly. You’ll do just fine with it. I liked lots of stuff it in though. To be sure. There’s a lot of that stuff that pops onto a wave length I’ve tuned myself to and I really like it and there’s other stuff where you know the sentences don’t really follow from themselves so much the way I prefer my sentences to follow themselves. And they really don’t need to. I really liked the way sentences followed themselves in Against the Day.
On thing I really like about Pynchon, and a thing I noticed first when reading his 2006 novel, or maybe it was his 2009 novel, is that when you’re reading along and you get this recollection of something that happened a while ago and you start paging backward to find that thing that happened a while ago and you realize that what happened a while ago happened only three pages back not thirty pages back like you had anticipated because that’s how long back things like that usually happen in other novels you read. I had that experience with V. and really kind of appreciated it.
I guess so the reason maybe why I’m hemming and hawing is that I sort of failed to do that part where the reader picks up his part of the task and sews the whole damn thing into a unity. And I know that with someone like a Pynchon that unity is designed to be frustrated, but dammit! there’s still a unity even within that fracturing. So the episodic stuff of course is de rigour these days and I dig it; making a novel out of a collection of short stories. Which is emphatically not what V. is. So with a bit of a synchronic approach I have no doubt that I’d be able to zip this thing into a proper novelistic unity were I to read it a fourth and fifth time. (I really can’t believe that in this post-structuralist age folks still think novels need to be written and read diachronically!) That’s not the thing. The thing is, the thing that sort of bugged me or kicked me out or left me cold or didn’t work for me was the way the sentences didn’t exactly follow themselves. And thank the gods they didn’t! because in 1961 The Novel needed some shaking up. And I’m glad Pynchon shook it up. And I’m glad he continued to write novels because I think he’s written some of the Best Novels Ever. This is just not quite one of them. Maybe. Still and all, it’s Pynchon so lots of good people will read it. Some will love it. Some will move on with great Begeisterung back to GR and M&D. (That’s me!) -
Thomas Pynchon has written some of the best pieces of English fiction that I've ever read. He projected worlds in
Against the Day and in
Mason & Dixon that were amazing, magical, utterly enthralling. The world he tries to project in V., however, went over my head.
The writing feels upolished, unrefined, not really the Pynchon I've grown used to. The sub-plots and digressions, which are rambling to an extreme degree even for Pynchon's standards, are less-than-stellar most of the time. Except for some funny moments -- some sewer crocodile hunting in New York, and a somewhat unusual bus ride towards the end of the book, to mention two of few -- there happens almost nothing here that is noteworthy, nothing, to my mind, that is particularly memorable. There are glimpses here and there of what Pynchon is capable of, but for the most part, this book is simply not any fun.
The themes so present in, say, Against the Day are here too to some degree, but as with the writing, the themes' presentation feels unrefined. You know, the duality thing, change (universal and political), the nature of knowledge and, well, everything, the opposites: like it says on the back of the book, one man "looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose." There are Wittgenstein references and hints of something philosophical under the surface, but it's impossible to garner the strength (or will, if you will) to really care about all that and to dive deeper into it when the book is generally so boring. A massive disappointment. -
Huhu tại sao mới 26 mà người ta đã có thể viết được một cuốn như vầy! Tầm tuổi này tôi vẫn còn đang vắt óc suy nghĩ caption 10 chữ cho mấy tấm ảnh chụp chó mèo up instagramm!
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EDIT: I give up again. 'V' is a travesty of juvenile puns, unconvincing dialogue, and (my own pet peeve) characters with impossibly trite names. Seriously, what gives?
EDIT: I decided to try reading it again.
have you ever had the feeling that an author is simply trying to bludgeon you over the head with abstruseness? have you ever read one of those books that all of the "serious readers" swear is an infallible masterpiece, despite its meat-fisted appropriation of the stylistic innovations of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, et al.? If you haven't, then read 'V'.
(seriously, though, 'V' is a great book. i just read it too soon after my Ezra Pound phase, and it sort of rang hollow and derivative. i'm sure i'll love it when i read it again in a few years.) -
From this book I learned that:
a) Thomas Pynchon may be the smartest man alive.
b) Pynchon's vocabulary is one of the most extensive I've ever come across.
c) Reading Pynchon is tedious and often unpleasant.
Even with the companion and a book discussion group, reading this novel was like wading through a bog. Every time I grasped the plot, I'd lose track of Pynchon's message, and every time I caught a glimpse of the message, I lost the plot.
No wonder the man's a recluse. Talking to him must be like spending an afternoon with Stephen Hawking. -
Video-review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prMAv...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017
A puzzling but glorious read that is, paradoxically enough, both breath-taking fast and extremely broody, thrilling and self-absorbed. It will require quite a lot of dedication to be fully enjoyed. -
Tomas Pincon, pisac koji je sam po sebi misterija kao i sama V. ko god ona bila ili sta god to ona predstavljala anti junacima ovog anti romana ili vama koji ga citate.
Ali dodjavola Tomase kako si sa 26 ili 27 godina baratao ovolikim, po meni cesto, i nebitnim informacijama. Bio sam na korak do ludila toliko puta dok sam citao V. i taman kada pomislim da su reci samo bujica Pinconovih buncanja on nekako uspe da poentria kroz jednu recenicu ili jedan pasus. I kao da je je celo delo samo jedan fragment njegovih misli dok se u pozadini odvija nekakava opipljivija i bitnija radnja koju se nije setio da prenese na papir. Puno borbe, puno atmosfere, previse istorije, premalo nade i na kraju osecam samo ljubav prema ovoj knjizi ali ne i dovoljno odlucnosti da joj dam pet zvezdica. -
”Finding her: what then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had become directed entirely inward, toward this acquired sense of animateness. Having found this he could hardly release it, it was too dear. To sustain it he had to hunt V.; but if he should find her, where else would there be to go but back into half-consciousness? He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the search. Approach and avoid," (44).
This was my 255th and final book of the year.
It was fun to return to Pynchon at the end of 2022. After finishing Gravity’s Rainbow around last Xmas, I read Vineland and Inherent Vice in quick succession early this year. Perhaps because I’d been casually mulling over Pynchon’s works for several months and had grown accustomed to his madcap style, perhaps because I’d come to accept the feeling of profound confusion or even craved it — the barely keeping up with Pynchon’s profusion of ideas, narratives, characters flung across the world — I found V. to be a much less difficult read than his other longer works I’ve read so far.
Accepting the premise, which is made clear throughout the book — that the mysterious “V.” both does and does not exist, and that V. is, as such, a symbol of the object of human longing, which is always receding and reinvented at every impasse — then the whole narrative vortex comes together — indeed, converges like the legs of the letter V to a final point, a mysterious disappearance into the fathomless sea.
Like the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke with his unreliable parlor-room narrations, Herbert Stencil traces a history he only witnessed in imagination, as he, like Oedipa Maas, brings all events “full circle into some paranoia.”
But uniting the profusion of characters and situations are a few persistent themes — most notably, the dichotomy of the animate and inanimate. From cyborgs and marionettes to sexual fetishes and abortion, from memory and identity to the nature of love and history, from scientific progress and post-war peace to imperialism and genocide, this theme constantly recurs.
One of my favorite chapters was “Mondaugon’s Story.” Kurt Mondaugon, along with Captain Weissman, reappears in Gravity’s Rainbow. In V., we see the young Mondaugon’s involvement in what Pynchon regarded as Germany’s run-up to the Holocaust: the colonial genocide of the Hereros. The parts describing the Herero death camps are brutal and apocalyptic in tone. Before reading Pynchon, I’d never learned of this. Here’s what Pynchon said about the Herero genocide in a letter:“When I wrote V. I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper… I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration," (qtd. in David Seed's
The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon, pp. 240-43).
Having now read Pynchon’s first novel, I’ve got two left: his longest (Against the Day) and his last (Bleeding Edge). But is Bleeding Edge really last? Just this week I saw that The Huntington has acquired Pynchon’s archive. In the
press release, they describe Pynchon as “the author of eight novels thus far.” Thus far? I got into an interpretive debate with someone about this phrasing, holding the line that it clearly implies Pynchon has more to come before he dies. Will 2023 be to Pynchon as 2022 was to Cormac McCarthy? In any event, I do hope that with the archive being made available to researchers, we’ll get a book on Pynchon’s oeuvre like Michael Lynn Crews’ archival study of McCarthy’s literary influences. -
I'm suffering from a painfully drawn out flu so I feel bad enough already. It can't be made worse by trying to review V. on gr. (If I wanna hit my head in frustration, well, it already hurts plentiful.)
V. was my first Thomas Pynchon. I chose it because it was cheapest (used). I like discounts. The notes in the margins for a college paper were fun too. I'm proud of my mercenary side. Now the self-congratulations end and I'll wrestle my mind and alligators in those mental gutters to convey why this is one of my favorite books. Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew. (Love those guys.) Getting through life without sketching circles in the sand. Yeah, going through life not quoting the philosopher Belinda Carlisle (it's too late for me). (Slacker characters appeal to me. I have an inferiority complex. It's torture to read fantasy novel after fantasy novel about over-achievers.) He Ventures out and has another friend, Herbert Stencil (stencilling in the sand? Shutup, Mariel) who sets him on his quest for the mysterious Victoria. I'm not gonna win this battle. There's no Victoria for me. It's gonna eat me alive. (Shit, maybe I need to consult that kid's notes.) (Because I never shutup: we'll get a "V" on our paper. V for venarial diseased.)
My pet alligator wants me to write that this book is about alligators who live in the sewers of New York City. (Her name is Gatorella. I can tell she is a she because of the bow on top of her head. Gators are reptiles and therefore don't have penises. Not that I checked.) (Could've been mutated into pizza loving ninjas in those sewers where people dump all manners of things like radioactive chemicals, in addition to taking a dump, after all. Anything is possible.) Shutup, you cold-blooded monster. It is not! There are alligators in the book though, those mythic gators flushed down the sewers when their humans (rightfully!) grew tired of them. I remember vividly reading Benny's time in those sewers, hunting and feeling hunted, not just by toilet reptiles but by nagging thoughts of right and wrong. (Gatorella says she wants to flush my review down the toilet.)
Argh. Yeah, it's dense and rambling and worth it for the spending of the time. Benny Profane, Stencil and the poet Fausto. V. connects to them as a circle: round and round unprogressively. And a line, like a connecting thread between them, because Pynchon does get somewhere about history and how it fucks with us. History doesn't make sense, and only rarely do we get to see the little man (or angel) it made in the snow. It takes its toll. Any place, any time.
It's easier to review books one doesn't like. Like breaking up with someone and you can name some reason to explain everything away (if it doesn't cut it. It just is what it is, is all) and explaining love is really hard to do if you're me. I like to ramble. I like reading the ramblings and looking for the happy and sad moments of clarity in the engaging messes. I know I felt something. That's love for me. Now I'll get eaten because Benny didn't kill all those gators.
p.s. I like the Sarah Silverman joke about getting raped by a doctor being bittersweet for a Jewish girl. Reminded me of Rachel. -
I'm pretty convinced Thomas Pynchon might actually know everything. I was explaining a typical Pynchon reading experience to my partner during this, my first go-around with V. (Pynchon's first novel written while he was a twenty-something in college (!)): When you know everything, it's probably really hard to stay on any kind of narrative track. Every proper noun could be (and often is) a potential springboard into a lengthy digression. Using the word "butterfly" in a metaphor? Well now we have to write a 50-page scene set in 1938 so we can include American actress Butterfly McQueen playing a student in the Broadway comedy "What a Life," which will somehow tangentially (and more than likely symbolically) relate to the main story.
20 pages in and I had already Googled at least 20 different words or events, including the siege of Malta in World War II, the South African Bondelswarts Rebellion in 1922, Muammar Gaddafi, the History of Veneuzuela (1830-1908), the Fashoda Crisis, and what a Mahdi is (a messianic figure in Islamic eschatology). Pynchon could probably rewrite by heart most articles on Wikipedia having to do with any event in world history from the 19th century to now.
Most readers struggle with Pynchon because he is a "systems novelist"; a writer much more interested in how an entire society and its ideologies work, and how those ideologies provide a regulating framework for the action of its people. His characters are often mostly well-meaning losers who are hopelessly caught up in these giant systems, yo-yoing around events beyond their control, trying to uncover what seems like a larger conspiracy to it all. It's not about traditional story -- if you're looking for an A-to-B plot or character development, you're not going to get it from Pynchon. You have to try and look at the bigger picture behind the bigger picture.
Most Pynchon novels have so much going on that it's impossible to summarize, and V. is no exception. The main "storyline" consists of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane bouncing around between different jobs and locations in the 1950s. He eventually ends up in New York and falls in with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and gets caught up in the quest of an aging traveler named Herbert Stencil who aims to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V."
Understanding who (or what) V. is is instrumental to understanding the novel, and Pynchon doesn't make it easy for you, particularly because we often aren't sure if it's the same person (or even a real person), and the effort to track V. down is often interrupted by large, seemingly unrelated chapters in different time periods with lots of kooky characters.
I was just enjoying the ride (which is the best advice I can give to any Pynchon newcomer), but eventually started to piece together an interpretation. V. shows up in various points throughout time, always in places right on the verge or war or violent rebellion. These are times of decadence, where the evil powers-that-be are enjoying the remains of their money and influence (mostly by enacting violence on slaves and having fabulous orgies) right before their fall. As one character tells us: "To have humanism we must first be convinced of our own humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult." Had this novel been written today, you could pretty much envision V. showing up in our current society as it seems to be reaching the end of a period of decadence.
As V. moves throughout time, she also becomes less human quite literally, by becoming more and more inanimate, slowly replacing parts of her body with glass, stones and prosthetic appendages. V. descends into automation throughout the 20th century along with our society; and Pynchon makes it clear that it IS a decent. He seems to imply that the West's rise into mechanization has proportionally declined our humanity.
You could also read V. as representing religion, and as we fall fuse further into technology, we fall further from God, worshipping objects instead. Or maybe V. is our declining humanity pushing us towards fascism, as there are allusions to V. serving to represent the ideals of Mussolini and Hitler.
It's striking how much is there when you start to look for it in what could otherwise read like 500 pages of seemingly unrelated nonsense. But Pynchon is a master at making it feel like you are peeking behind the ultimate curtain, giving you just the tiniest glance at the real Truth behind it all, and then making you question if you really saw anything at all.
Each Pynchon novel is a treasure and this one is no different. I'm only giving it 4 stars because it was basically a dry run for Gravity's Rainbow, which takes a lot of the themes here and cranks it to 11. Any time I'm in a reading rut, Pynchon never fails to get me out of it. -
I will always remember 2022 like my "Pynchonean" year. I read seven of his nine books during this year.
At the end of 2021 I re-read both Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge and I realize just how much I love Pynchon style. So I had to do it.
I started this year with "Against The Day" then "Vineland"; "Mason & Dixon"; "The Crying Of Lot 49"; "Slow Learner"; "Gravity's Rainbow" and finish with "V".
I heard and read before getting into "V" that it was really good, one of the best debut novels in the history of literature. But still I had my doubts I must admit I started reading "V" more in the spirit of finishing the authors catalogue than of genuine interest for the novel... How wrong I was!! Pynchon is never to be underestimated. This book is truly a masterpiece of literature. Mindblowing.
It has a lot of iconic moments, having read all of his other works I can now say that this book is not to be taken lightly.
There is a lot to say about it but am sure there are lots of great reviews in here so I will finish mine saying this:
Pynchon is my favorite writer of all time and if you like his books considered me your pal.
My Pynchon ranking is this:
9- Slow Learner
8- The Crying Of Lot 49
7- Vineland
6- Bleeding Edge
5- Inherent Vice
4- V.
3- Mason & Dixon
2- Against The Day
1- Gravity's Rainbow (my favorite novel of all time) -
Seems to be a book of 2 separate (although related parts):
1) The present (well, as of the time the book was written) involving a rag-tag set of characters centred on a group of US Navy sailors (probably based on Pynchon's own stint in the navy)
2) A series of flashbacks to periods from late 19th century up until the end of the 2nd World War, at various locations around the Mediterranean
For me not classic Pynchon, it shows signs of the greatness to come with some hints of the humour and wackiness to come later but some parts I found hard to get through. -
V *****
Τα γνωστά μοτίβα του Pynchon που θα τον κάνουν παγκόσμιο είναι εδώ. Ανακάτεμα χρονικο , τοπολογικό και ιστορικό της τράπουλας φέρνει συνεχόμενες κεντες , παρουσιάζοντας ένα ακόμα μωσαϊκό της περιφέρειας του κόσμου λίγο πριν κ λίγο μετά τους δύο πολέμους.
Το ανοίγεις τυχαία, διαβάζεις 50 σελίδες και παίρνεις ισχυρή ντόπα
Η Βεϊσού μπορεί να οριστεί ως ένα σύμπτωμα. Συμπτώματα σαν κι αυτό παραμένουν πάντοτε ζωντανά σε κάποιο σημείο του κόσμου.
Δεν έχουμε άλλο χρόνο να παραμείνουμε στη Βεϊσού -
Wherein a young Thomas Pynchon writes a post-war Moby-Dick-esque epistemological grail quest wherein the veiled titular grail, V., is a stand-in for Melville's leviathan, and the whole-ness is unseen thru obscurity, omission, chaos, conspiracy and uncertainty rather than the vastness of its size and the shifting nature of metaphor, language and humanity.
Besides, Vineland and Slow Learner, I'm a versed Pynchonite, so it's funny that I had yet to read his first. But having read so many of his other novels gave me a unique perspective on this book; an ability to look back through the prismatic lens of his oeuvre, and see the threads and strands and starts and fits of what Pynchon would later hone and sculpt in to more successful works. As a first novel, V has that hairy, wild quality, unruly with lots of ideas thrown into the cauldron, simmering into a potent and life-giving stew. Of course, that stew would only be improved later, as V is a kind of first draft of Gravity's Rainbow, the arc of the rocket an inversion of the titular V.
Many of the Pynchonian check boxes get marked here: weird sub-plots, a sprawling array of characters who intermingle in deeper ways as the book moves on, dark and nefarious undercurrents of the paranoid within, high-zaniness, low-brow humor, highfalutin plotting, and, of course, weird sex. A true pleasure to read, but perhaps that pleasure was minimized by having read some of his more superior works, but also magnified in ways by having strands from other works linked here, like the Hereros and Weissmann of GR, even if some of the linkages are only glancing.
Perhaps I'll close out the rest of Pynchon's writing this year. Maybe he's just waiting for me to do that before dropping a new tome—the soil murmurs that one's coming. Let's hope sooner rather than later.
