V. - Thomas Pynchon

I’ve given up on trying to follow the plot of Pynchon’s novels. I accept that there is one, but I lack the sustained attention and investigative prowess to suss it out with any great accuracy. Instead, I treat them as a series of loosely connected scenes and images to be enjoyed in sequence. They are more like roller coasters than novels, vehicles for visceral reaction with a theme one senses more than deeply grasps.

V. has some good images. Benny Profane (allegedly the protagonist, in fact appearing in probably less than 10% of the novel) hunting alligators in the New York sewer system. The tragic result of an innovative but faulty form of plastic surgery utilizing inorganic materials. Flares of mid-fifties bohemian bedlam and bacchanalia.

The book’s throughline concerns its other supposed protagonist, Herbert Stencil, who is on a lifelong quest to uncover the identity of a mysterious woman in his father’s wartime journal, an elusive figure known only as V. Through conversations and archives, Stencil dives back into moments of crisis over the last several hundred years, during which we catch glimpses of V, who appears to manifest in multiple forms. There’s more, but my recollections are impressionistic and I’d be hard-pressed to give an actual summary of the story beyond that.

Maybe I’m not smart enough to read these books. But I do enjoy them for what they are.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino

What do you even say about a book like If on a winter’s night a traveler? I normally start these things by writing what the book was a bout, but what would that be in this case? I suppose Winter’s Night is, more than anything else, about the act of reading itself.

The story—or should I say, the book, since we’re not being told a story as such at this point—starts with a description of our physical act of reading, presupposing a specific example of us (the book is in second person, so it really is you, assuming you’re a guy, but he’ll get to that) going to the bookstore and purching the eponymous title. From there, we begin a type of espionage story in which a character follows cryptic advice in order to deliver an unspecified package at a train station. Except the story cuts off at a key moment, leaving us (the fictional us, and maybe also the real us) wanting to know more.

A second trip to the bookstore brings a new book and a chance encounter with a fellow reader—a woman, and presumed love interest—who was likewise bamboozled by the misprinted copy of Winter’s Night. What follows is a trail of different books, each masquerading as something they are not, juxtaposed with an increasingly byzantine—dare I say Kafkaesque—quest to retrieve this growing wishlit of incomplete literature, as stories pile upon stories, styles upon styles, and mysteries upon mysteries. The story caromes satircally of such topics as editors, the fidelity of translation ,and repressive regimes, all the while maintaining a throughline from its very disorientation.

You can’t say much for the character,s since they are either the reader themself or set up as a clear archetype, yet strange undercurrents keep their appearances form feeling cheap or lazy. Even Ludmilla, the prototypical love interest, becomes more than she seems in an interesting passage where the perspective flips, second person beocmes third, and the “you” the narrator speaks to becomes female instead of male.

The entire thing is a metaphysicla exercise that should be taxing, but isn’t. I’m not sure how many writers could have pulled it off. Between this and The Baron in the Trees, it’s clear Calvino is one of the 20th centuries greatest writers. I’ll be reading more soon.