pyridine

All the deep conspiracies, dazzling erudition, and paranoia of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum condensed into just 128 pages. However, there is something unique about Lot 49 that sets it apart from the rest of “hysterical realism” lot. While Eco rummaged through every single cliche in the garbage bin known as conspiracy theory to find inspirations for plot elements, Pynchon’s central conspiracy is truly bizarre and obscure. These days you encounter Knight Templars and Freemasons everywhere*, from comic books to TV shows, but I have yet to see a single reference to Thurn und Taxis in popular culture. The fact that Turns und Taxis seems to be so unrelated to anything in the world, so faceless, so invisible, makes it much more sinister.

The most refreshing part of The Crying of Lot 48 is its setting. The world of Foucault’s Pendulum is that of academics (in very old European universities). Graduate students holding their thick folders of papers running between lecture halls and libraries. Textbook editors sipping latte in a sidewalk coffee shop. The world of Lot 48, on the other hand, is entirely worldly and unromantic. It’s set in southern california for heaven’s sake! Thomas Pynchon, despite his impenetrable mystique, can write convincingly about the mundane modern life, not the pick-up-your-clothes-from-the-dry-cleaner, Seinfeld kind of mundaneness but the really dirty stuff: property developments and stock holder meetings. Extramarital affairs and hollywood has-beens. The fact that the heroine is situated in a normal, non-abstract world gives the outrageous turns of event a grittiness not found in a typical book in this genre.

Despite its age, The Crying of Lot 49 is still refreshing and edge-cutting. It’s also relentless funny and irreverent.

* I even met a Knight Templar traveling from Los Angeles to San Diego on an Amtrek Pacific Surfliner.

Call me a snob but a science book by a travel writer? Every 5 minutes I mumbled to myself: I'll have to check the reference. I never really did because the prose is so engrossing that I didn't want to break the flow. But I simply couldn't completely trust Bill Bryson.

The other day I was reading the chapter about the evolution of Homo sapiens. Bryson said that the diversity of the human genome is so small that an average community of chimps has larger genetic variation than the entire human race. I was like, really? So I turned to the back and found a reference to a report (not a research paper) in Nature. Impressive. I didn't expect that from a travel writer.