V.

Si leer 'La subasta del lote 49' es como prepararse la mochila con un bocadillo y una botellita de agua para pasar el día en el campo, la lectura de 'V.' supone sacar la caravana con lo que ello conlleva, es decir, preparar la tienda de campaña, comprar víveres y coger ropa suficiente porque vas a estar fuera una par de semanas, vivienda en plena naturaleza. Por esta regla de tres, el día que me decida a afrontar la lectura de uno de los libros de más de mil páginas de Pynchon, será como prepararte para un safari en Kenia o una aventura por el Amazonas. ¡Miedo me da!

Querer hacer una reseña, no ya de 'V.' sino de cualquier libro de Pynchon, es una ardua tarea, que además supone contar algunas de las tramas, sorpresas y trampas show more que el bueno de Pynchon nos ha preparado. Porque la novela se compone de múltiples historias, unas más largas que otras, incluyendo cambios temporales y localizaciones, además de docenas de diferentes personajes. Hay varios de éstos más recurrentes que otros, como son Profane, un ex soldado de marina; Stencil, que tiene fijación por encontrar a V., alguien o algo que apareció entre los papeles de su padre, antiguo miembro de Asuntos Exteriores; o Rachel, que mantiene una extraña relación con Profane.

Leer 'V.' es como adentrarse en Territorio Pynchon, donde todo está relacionado y no existen las casualidades. Al principio cuesta adaptarse al terreno, pero dándole un poco de tiempo, llegas a disfrutar del paisaje. Sin embargo, de vez en cuando es posible que te pierdas mientras exploras, pero no pasa nada, siempre terminas encontrando la salida, aunque a veces no sepas cómo y por lo tanto no te hayas enterado muy bien de dónde has estado (salido). Pero en cuanto terminas tu estancia en 'V.', te queda la sensación de haber pasado unos momentos bastante agradables e interesantes, y no te importaría repetir.

Hay que leer a Pynchon, aunque algunas veces no lo pilles del todo, porque lo importante es dejarse llevar por sus ardides conspiratorios. ¿Recomendaría leerlo a todo el mundo? Ni mucho menos. Sobre todo porque no quiero estar pendiente de mis espaldas por si alguien me sacude con el libro en cuestión. show less

It took me five whole months to read this book and I am so ashamed by that fact. But sometimes a book grabs you and you breeze through it. Other times, a book is gripping, but it’s too heavy to finish in a single sitting.
When I heard of this book the first time, it was in a class when a professor told us that this book had the best description of Valletta he had ever read. Surprised that a book written by an American featured Malta so heavily, I bought it and promised myself I would read it and fully enjoy it one day.
This book, first off, is heavy. I’m not talking only material and plot wise, I mean physically. This book is huge and weighs a ton, but damn if it isn’t a good read. But plot-wise, there is so much going on all the show more time that I was very confused at first until I learned who all the characters were. It was like watching Game of Thrones for the first time and struggling to remember who everyone was and their relation to each other.
Trying to explain this book simply is a bit of a struggle, but we can try, anyway.
The story takes place in America and Malta, but it actually also bounces between a lot of different locations in flashbacks. It follows a group of disillusioned individuals – some of them navy deserters, some of them artists trying too hard to be the next best things, and some of them deadbeats and prostitutes – who all meet and live together (in some capacity) in New York City. A common tie between some of them is the island of Malta, and one particular individual named Stencil is obsessed with ‘V’. Stencil’s only problem is that he doesn’t know if V is a person, a place, or an object, and he has dedicated his entire life to finding out. In Stencil’s eyes, finding out what V is will bring him one step closer to his father, who died in Malta in the 1919 riots.
The entire novel keeps you guessing up until the last second what, who, or where V actually is, and introduces you to a host of different characters with different connections that could all be V. And Pynchon really knows how to make characters memorable. Every single one of his characters, big and small, is given a brilliantly explained backstory and exposition, making them seem so lifelike even if they are just background characters who don’t contribute much. A small thing I really enjoyed was his ties to his other novel The Crying of Lot 49, with the brief mention of an industrious company that is a big part of The Crying.
I think one of my biggest qualms with Pynchon’s writing, and it comes out very clearly in this novel, is his long-winding sentences. Sometimes I get lost reading, and forget who’s talking and what they’re talking about, which is probably why it took me so long to finish the book.
Another thing that bothered but also pleased me slightly was his use of Maltese. Pynchon tries his very best to make Valletta as accurate as possible, and he really does try to include Maltese words and names into the whole thing, which really made me happy. I wish that the spelling of Maltese words had been more accurate, but then again it is a language that most of us Maltese aren’t sure how to spell either so I can’t fault him too much for that.
However, another positive point for this novel is that he does the whole idea of magical realism quite well. While it isn’t really outright said that there is an element of magical realism to the book, there is the sense that some things are being done in that vein. There is also the way that characters speak that lends to this idea, because the way that most characters speak makes it seem like they’re actually caricatures rather than real people. And I think that Pynchon is trying to make a pretty successful point here about how our idea of the American Dream, or really of life itself, is all a caricature and isn’t real. And these characters who are striving for just that have in turn become caricatures as they try to pursue something that doesn’t exist.
Did I enjoy this book, though? Yes. Immensely. I’m really glad I read it. Do I recommend that you’re in the right head space to read it? 100%. It’s heavy, and you might need to take breaks or even take notes while you’re reading it, but it’s so worth it in the end. I give it a 4/5, simply because the long-winding sentences really put me off while I was reading, but the story ties together beautifully in the end and I can’t fault him for that, or for depicting my homeland so accurately. show less

As Yogi Berra sort of said: “When you come to a V. in the road, take it!”

So I did.

But I wish Thomas Pynchon had found a way not to take any fork leading to the soporific Stencil, no matter which character so named paraded into view. Focus on Pig Bodine! Let McClintic Sphere preside! It’d be a different book and maybe a worse one, I guess, if my wishes had been anticipated and fulfilled. I don’t care.

That’s my only big complaint.

Mr. Pynchon is funny, imaginative, and knows way more than the average Yogi (be prepared to encounter obscurities). There’s much to hold one’s interest while reading his novel and V. inspires respect for the author’s abilities. It also can strain one’s patience. How many named characters are show more there, 200? How many of them mattered?

V. is a curious book that becomes curiouser as things go along. Then, it ends. Don’t count on finding full satisfaction in that. But for the right reader (one whom Stencil interests), V. might be a marvel. show less

Hmm. So, V. is a very fragmented novel. Fragmented in such a way that it threatens to fracture your cognition, like you're in some kind of marathon dream that switches lanes as soon as you believe you've found your footing. I've gathered too late that this was probably not the best place to begin with Pynchon, which is ironic, considering that this is his first novel, but at least now I know what I'm in for. Whether or not something deeply profound or coherent lies at the heart of the novel's many derivative paths, well, I think that's irrelevant. Pynchon's purpose here is to obscure any semblance of conventional storytelling behind countless walls of disjointed yet vaguely related ideas, thus leaving it up to you—if you're game show more enough—to form your own ideas about what's going on; or, if you prefer, to just enjoy the random tumbling of dream (in)coherence. People who are really into this sort of post-modern helter-skelter style may find lots to enjoy about V., but this is just not for me, which is strange considering Pynchon was a student of Nabokov's, and I enjoy the labyrinthine approach to literature that authors like Nabokov and Borges have. The idea of a mysterious "V" appearing throughout time was a great core concept, but Pynchon failed to pull it off in a manner that was more appealing in its mad way, choosing instead to go the completely mad route and fling your sanity all over the place. Which, all things considered, was probably his aim. show less

I've read four Pynchon books, and the only one I was healthy for was Lot 49, which barely counts. For Gravity's Rainbow I was not only violently ill, but also on a cross-country road trip with my also violently ill father and my long-suffering mother, who could do little more than look on while we fought over things like whether it was acceptable to order dessert. For Inherent Vice, I was recovering from having my wisdom teeth removed. And now for V, not only did I finish it with Hurricane Sandy knocking limbs from trees outside my windows, but I was at the depths of a comparatively mild cold.

The lesson is that one shouldn't read Pynchon when doped out on legal drugs, because all I remember of GR is an octopus, and I don't recall much show more from IV, either. On the other hand, I remember nothing from 49 despite having read it twice, and I suspect that's because it just isn't that good. This whole trend worries me some, but the good news is I won't be forgetting V any time soon, because it's a flat out masterpiece and, I suspect, better than GR.

'V,' in ascending order of abstraction, is a person with a robot eye, is a Utopia that large numbers of people think actually exists, probably stands for 'vagina' as in the source to which a large number of people wish to return, is a way of symbolizing reflection, either with reference to the mirror stage or reflection theories of vulgar materialism ('culture is simply the reflection of economics'), and is the convergence of two strands of the plot.

The two strands follow, respectively, Stencil, a paranoid obsessive, whose story should, according to the paranoid perspective, be perfectly coherent but is in fact an endless search for an indefinable x (V). The second follows a picaro (Profane the schlemihl) whose story, as with any good picaresque, should have no coherence whatsoever but is, in fact, a fairly good illustration of the twentieth century decadence ("falling away") that 'V' chronicles, and the despair that decadence can induce.

Various characters have various ways of coping with this decadence: different religions, art, drunkenness/hedonism, dentistry, and so on, but none of them can hold a candle to the disasters that follow everybody, like colonialism, war, unemployment, deracination and general ennui. The human beings slowly giving way: a nose job here, a belly ring there, becoming more and more object and less and less subject, more and more merely what "is the case" and less and less that which cannot be said(there's much play with early Wittgenstein here), more and more cyborg, less and live alive.

The two narrative strands converge in Malta; the guiding metaphor is siege (Malta, which was besieged by the Ottomans, French under Napoleon, and the Axis powers in World War II). The human being is under siege, and neither the paranoid truth seeker nor the schizoid schlemihl can cope. Those who can and do cope (e.g., Schoenmaker) are manifestly dehumanizing evil bastards. But the book's manic energy makes it much less depressing than this sounds, and after all, there's still wine, wo/men and song. Including song about Wittgenstein.

Books of which 'V' weirdly reminded me: Vile Bodies (decadence); Siege of Krishnapur (siege & colonialism); Graham Greene & Javier Marias for the spy thriller aspects; Roth for the 'Jews in America' aspects; Rilke for the ambivalent drive to become pure matter.

Many reviewers say this is a really hard book, but I think maybe they're over-reacting: once you know or work out that there are two narrative strands, one of which is 'present day' and one of which is historical narrative, you can make your way through this book pretty easily. Particularly if you eschew all the 'V moves through time' nonsense. V does not move through time. Stencil's paranoia connects a number of things that need not be connected, just as my paranoia has linked together many aspects of the novel. The difficult aspect of the novel is to read it not as another dull pomo pastiche, but as the late modern masterpiece it is, dealing with difficult psychological concepts and historical realities. You can only read this book with paranoia: the urge to connect and seek order. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. show less

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 references 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 show more 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. show less

I downgraded this by a half star after a reread. Although it's innovative with its structure of alternating between the young people in NYC and the various historical sections that have to do with the search for V, the NYC portions are rather pointless, unless the point is that the lives here seem pointless (although a lot of fun). The historical portions , however, are quite good and have something to say about the increasingly mechanized and dehumanizing effect of the modern world.