The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 is a 1966 novel by Thomas Pynchon. It is about a woman named Oedipa Maas who, in the process of acting as the executrix for her lover's estate, discovers among his possessions a set of bizarrely misprinted stamps. In trying to trace their origins and potential value, she accidentally begins to unravel the rivalry between two medieval mail distribution companies, the Trystero and Thurn und Taxis -- a bitter and deadly rivalry that to her surprise appears to continue into the modern era. Or does it? She can't be sure she isn't just the subject of an elaborate prank being played upon her from beyond the grave by her late lover.

Despite being (or because it is) significantly shorter than the rest of Pynchon's novels (especially Against the Day and Mason & Dixon), it has become one of Pynchon's most popular books, after Gravity's Rainbow and possibly V.


 * Amateur Sleuth: Oedipa plays this role throughout the novel, starting with trying to figure out the meaning behind Trystero in the play The Courier's Tragedy.
 * Awesome McCoolname: Oedipa Maas, Dr. Hilarius, Genghis Cohen, Mike Fallopian, and a radio station called KCUF.
 * Bloody Hilarious: The Courier's Tragedy, a (fictional) Jacobean revenge play that is featured in Chapter 3.
 * Conspiracy Placement: W.A.S.T.E., despite being a secret alternative postal service, sometimes seems more concerned with spray painting their logo on every wall than they actually are with delivering mail.
 * Creator Thumbprint: Outrageous character names, original song lyrics, no ending?  Yup, it's a Pynchon novel, all right.
 * Deceptively Silly Title: "The Crying of Lot 49" doesn't seem to mean anything or have anything to do with the story until you reach the end of the novel, when Oedipa attends an auction where the set of misprinted postage stamps which started everything is presented as Lot Number 49, and is about to "cried" (put up for bids).
 * Expy: Despite being from Southern California, the four members of the band The Paranoids are very similar to The Beatles. A nickname for The Beatles was "Los Paranoias."
 * Fun with Acronyms:
 * "Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn".
 * "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire".
 * Radio station KCUF, where Oedipa's ex-husband Mucho works as a DJ.
 * Hallucinations: If the postal horn Sigil Spam isn't real and/or a product of an elaborate practical joke played from beyond the grave by her ex-lover, then Oedipa is starting to hallucinate them all.
 * Herr Doktor: Oedipa's psychiatrist Dr. Hilarius reveals himself to be a former Nazi doctor who experimented on Jews at Buchenwald.
 * Masquerade: If it's not all an elaborate prank, then the rival mail systems Trystero and Thurn und Taxis still exist in the modern day, hiding their existence -- and their bitter conflict -- from governments and society at large.
 * Milkman Conspiracy: W.A.S.T.E.  Maybe.
 * Mind Screw: Like most (all?) of Pynchon's work, the story plays mind games not only with the reader but with the characters in it.  In particular, Oedipa.
 * Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr. Hilarius.
 * No Ending: Because it's a Pynchon novel. The book closes on Oedipa attending an auction where she plans to bid on the set of "misprinted" postage stamps from Inverarity's estate that she believes are evidence of the existence of the Trystero, whose representatives she expects will also by trying to acquire them.
 * Perpetual Motion Machine: Engineer John Nefastis is obsessed with the idea and is trying to build one in order to beat back entropy.
 * Post Modernism: The book has been hailed as both "an exemplary postmodern text" and a parody of postmodernism.
 * Posthumous Character: Pierce Inverarity, Oedipa's late ex-lover, whose appointment of Oedipa as the co-executor of his will kicks off the action of the novel.
 * Psycho Psychologist: Dr. Hilarius, who already seems ten degrees off center at the start of the book, goes completely crazy by its end.
 * Punny Name/Meaningful Name:
 * Many if not most of the characters, although some are more obvious than others, such as Stanley Koteks and Manny DiPresso.
 * Some of the place names, as well, such as San Narciso ("Saint Narcissus"), California, near L.A.
 * Sanity Slippage: Oedipa starts suspecting this of herself when she starts seeing the Trystero's postal horn symbol everywhere.
 * Shout-Out:
 * When Serge of The Paranoids loses his eight-year-old girlfriend to a middle-aged man, he writes a song that namechecks Humbert Humbert.
 * To this novel, in the appearance of the Yoyodyne Corporation in the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension..
 * As you would expect from a Pynchon novel, there are dozens of others.
 * Show Within a Show: The Courier's Tragedy by Richard Wharfinger, a Jacobean Revenge play which recounts the origins of the conflict between Trystero and Thurn und Taxis.  Its plot and details seem to foreshadow and mirror the developments of the "real world" around it.
 * Sigil Spam: The postal horn symbol seems to appear everywhere Oedipa looks, from children's jumprope games to signs in Chinese.
 * Silly Rabbit, Romance Is for Kids: Pretty much the entire reason for the existence of Inamorati Anonymous.  IA is a group founded to help people avoid falling in love, which a member describes to Oedipa as "the worst addiction of all".  Of course it uses the postal horn as its symbol, which is how Oedipa stumbles upon it.
 * The X of Y