Top reviews

• Bookseller review

  Intelligent and ultimately absorbing read

  It's difficult to describe exactly what this is about,it covers so much ground in it's bizarre 127 pages,but it's certainly a psychedelic and chaotic experience as anything James Joyce could muster.Its deep satire is tempered by a rich and brilliant verbal dexterity that is not for the faint-hearted

  Review by Robb of the Leeds Borders on 2009-01-22 19:10:25

• Bookseller review

  The Crying of Lot 49

  This book starts out with a lady called Oedipa Mass finding out she has been made executrix of a former lovers estate. She is then led on bizarre trail, finding out more and more subversive information. After a short time I became hooked on the themes of the book and needed to find out where they were going, whist never really knowing what was going on. As the story unfolds, with the reappearance of a strange symbol and characters that contradict each other you feel like you are becoming none the wiser, which is the underlying theme of the book, the more you know, the less you know.

  Review by Seb of the Bristol Borders on 2009-01-27 10:50:18

• 

  Literary treacle

  Part espionage/crime thriller, part historical drama, part jacobean revenge tragedy, this deceptively slim novel is Pynchon at his most mischevious. Reading the dense textual content can sometimes feel as though you are wading through literary treacle as Pynchon intentionally unravels even the suggestion of a linear plot or narrative. This serves to make the reader dig for meaning and thus become part of the narrative themselves - a true example of post-modern metafiction at its finest.

  Review by Tom Becker on 14:04, 04 Apr 2008

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• 

  The Crying Of Lot 49

  It's difficult to describe exactly what this is about, as it covers so much ground in it's bizarre 127 pages, but it's certainly a psychedelic and chaotic experience as anything James Joyce could muster. It's deep satire is tempered by a rich and brilliant verbal dexterity that is not for the faint-hearted. But do persevere as the novel builds cleverly into an intelligent and ultimately absorbing read. Brilliant!

  Review by Robert Barham on 14:04, 04 Apr 2008

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