The Crying of Lot 49

If I were to sum up this book in one gif, it would be this one. I don't think there was ever a more suitable opportunity for me to use this gif than in this very moment lmao.

I'm aware of the stereotype that surrounds fervent enjoyers of Pynchon's books, and for the longest while I was kind of uninterested in giving his books a try. In addition to that I'm also not a huge fan of books that are exhaustingly hard to read sentence structure wise, much like what is said about Pynchon's style, because that's when my ESL rears its head and perhaps that intimidated me a bit as well.

However, I try to go against my prejudices every once in a while. And I didn't regret it...

This book is regarded as the easiest Pynchon book to read, namely because it's short. It still took me about a chapter or two to get into it, but once I did it wasn't that bad. It's true that the way sentences are structured is out of the ordinary, not just syntax wise but also just... where they take you. Each sentence is a journey, and the best way I could describe it is when you're in a dream that suddenly transitions into another dream while you were busy looking at your feet. Almost as if... there's a high amount of randomness... DUN DUN DUUUUNNNNN!!!

The core theme of this novel is centered around information theory and some concepts surrounding it, particularly Shannon's understanding of entropy in communication and information theory. By interesting coincidence, I learned about Shannon's entropy at like 4 different points in university and I got hives upon reading that name once again lmfao.

Entropy in communication is calculated by randomness and unpredictability. The more unpredictable something is, the more entropy it holds. 50/50 split is max entropy, so a coin flip has maximum randomness, for example. The more disorder and uncertainty... the more entropy.

In the novel, the main character Oedipa becomes an executor of her ex's estate after his death. While trying to settle this matter she is sent on a wild goose chase upon discovering a potential conspiracy regarding an underground post distribution system, tied to all kinds of underground societies, theatre, potentially even her ex so on and so forth.

So, how does this concept of entropy relate to the novel? Well, besides entropy being a mentioned topic in the story itself, everything that Oedipa processes and gets confused by exactly displays this "event" of being oversaturated by information to the point that everything makes sense to an equal degree and therefore nothing makes sense, every pattern becomes equally plausible and signal and noise become indistinguishable. Everything is noise, and everything is a signal. It is comparable to a jpg being saved and screenshotted and compressed and saved and screenshotted and compressed and saved and screenshotted and compressed until we get one big mush of deep fried pixels. Boy am I so happy that my degree finally got to be utilized... To go back to the beginning, much like the gif up there, the woman begins to see the word lesbian in all manner of places. She becomes oversaturated with signals and noise and she both can and cannot derive meaning from everything, all options becoming equally likely to her, bringing her to a state of maximum entropy, confusion and chaos.

I really liked the whole post distribution conspiracy too. Oedipa going down a rabbithole and finding signs in any little thing, her bumping into all manner of underground movements, it was just such a trip. Everyone being a freak of some sort only attributed to the dreamlike quality, things randomly getting sexual and Oedipa running away from it lmfao. It was a really fun book...