Spoilerish review of Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49". I wouldn't worry too much about spoilers here, but if you wnat to go without knowing absolutely anything, just go ahead and read it (spoiler for the review: I'm going to recommend it!).

It's funny. It's terrifying in a strange way, like a ghost story made believable. It is a virtuoso display of use of words, of the art of writing.

It's framed essentially as a detective novel, though there are no detectives, but a lowly executor of a will whose attempt at sorting the dead person's estate uncovers a great conspiracy or perhaps not quite. The novel lives for, perhaps demonstrate, this quantum-like "the electron is here and not here until we observe ita and collapse the wave function", in that we're never quite sure the conspiracy being uncovered is in any way real, and not the product of a paranoid mind (whose paranoid mind, the dead man or the executor, is also up for grabs.)

It is also impossible not to mention the superb finale, though it would be too much to just explain it outright. Let us just say that, same as our main character uncovers the mystery, we uncover the mystery of the book title itself, a seemingly nonsensical sentence which we will, by the end, be assured not just of its meaning, but mainly, of its terrific importance.

Though perhaps not my favourite of the three Pynchon's I have read ("Bleeding Edge" takes that spot), it's short, and it does things some things too well, too well (by which I mean no other book does it quite like that) that it's essential to give it go.

So no excuses! Get it now at your local library or wherever you get your books.