<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default">Yes. I think, perhaps cynically, that there are two primary reasons CoL49 is underrated:</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">1) Because of its modest length it's in a lot of curricula for modern/postmodern fiction courses in colleges and some secondary schools. So True Pynchon Fans and True Pynchon Critics, who have wrestled with the Big Books, may tend to look down on it as beginner fare.</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">2) Pynchon deprecates it in two sentences of the Slow Learner intro, after speaking fondly of The Secret Integration: "As
is clear from the up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it was too
much to expect that I’d keep on for long in this positive or professional
direction. The next story I wrote was  'The Crying of Lot 49,' which was
marketed as a 'novel,' and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I
thought I’d learned up till then."</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">I disagree on both counts (add a grain of salt here, as CoL49 transfixed *me* when it came out, sending me back to V. and priming me for GR). CoL49 is a gem, and  -- not that it matters -- I regret that IV will now replace it as the most frequent "way in" to Pync<span style="font-size:12pt">hon.</span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"></span></p></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 9:41 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lorentzen@hotmail.de" target="_blank">lorentzen@hotmail.de</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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Interesting stuff on <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i>, --- a novella
often underrated here on the list. <br>
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What this review ignores is the influence Henry Adams had on
Pynchon's "literary catholicism."<br>
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My favorite sentence:<br>
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"Pynchon might be considered the synthesis of the Catholicism of
Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol, whose communions of saints
spanned the electric and artistic worlds."<div><div class="h5"><br>
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On 18.02.2015 12:15, Mark Kohut wrote:<br>
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<pre><div><div class="h5">Catholic Pynchon. ( which we have discussed here). best novelist of his time, he sez.
<a href="http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/fiction-and-the-discourse-of-man/" target="_blank">http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/fiction-and-the-discourse-of-man/</a></div></div>
Sent from my iPad-
Pynchon-l / <a href="http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l" target="_blank">http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l</a>
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