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    The Odyssey of Homer
    The Odyssey of Homer
    The Odyssey of Homer
    Ebook630 pages7 hours

    The Odyssey of Homer

    By William Cowper and Homer

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1966

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    Reviews for The Odyssey of Homer

    3.5/5

    60 ratings59 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Had to read this for school, and it's the last week of classes so my attention span is very, very limited. Perhaps if I had cared more, read more slowly, or bothered to retain any information while I was reading I may have enjoyed it better. But as it was it seemed like just a bunch of words thrown together at many points. There were definitely some humorous moments, but they just couldn't outdo how pointless the whole thing seemed.
    • 3/5
      I think I would have gotten a lot more out of this if I had been in popular culture at the time it was written. Still, it was fascinating and every so often I draw a little muted post horn on a bathroom wall somewhere.
    • 3/5
      Thomas Pynchon’s books have intimidated me for a long time now. The scary specter of allusions that would fly right over my head kept me away for a while, but I finally just picked up a book and started reading the damn thing. So now that I’ve bitten the bullet, how did it turn out? Not painful at all. It helped that I chose to start with this shorter novel. It was disorienting and the language took some getting used to at first, but I just held on for the ride and hoped for the best. By the time Oedipa is caught up in a gathering of mute people dancing to no music, things were already clicking into place and I found I’d already gotten caught up in the mystery and how far down the rabbit hole Oedipa had found herself.

      It’s a modern classic, so there’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said. It is funny, depressing, fucked up, odd, playful, and moving all at the same time. I’m sure that if I read it again, I’d be able to plumb further into the depths of all that Pynchon has packed in here. My favorite passage involved Oedipa’s encounter with the sailor in a flop house who wanted her to deliver a letter to his wife in Fresno, simply because it’s an example of the amazing language scattered throughout the book: “What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?” (p. 126)
    • 5/5
      This was my first psychedelic experience with Pynchon and loved it. So I'll start with the basics. The plot involves a conspiracy with the mail system, which is only mildly interesting. The Oedipus reversal thingy didn't amuse me, but I was fascinated with the writing style and reading experience. Pynchon is like a hybrid of Faulkner and Burroughs. If you don't like Faulkner, don't fret. Pynchon uses a simple stream-of-conscious method and he only uses it in spurts. Pynchon also uses esoteric 'subliminal cues’ like Burroughs, but with Pynchon, you can comprehend the action in the scenes.

      The reading experience is what I enjoyed the most. By the time I reached chapter three, I had developed my own conspiracy theory and only used the book's plot for sleuthing. At the end, I wasn't really sure what the plot was actually about; for I had injected so much of my own crap I basically rewrote the story. I love this 'trippy' effect and really admire authors who can pull this off. So, this book gets five stars for the experience 'man'.

      Not all is fun-and-games though, the book raises serious issues. To give you an idea, here are a few; feminism, history, politics, science, modernism, technology, communication, music, drug culture, psychology, religion, sex, discrimination, materialism, consumerism, dependency, skepticism, and propaganda - and that is the short list.

      I searched the web to see if my theories about the book matched up - it wasn't pretty. The good thing is nobody appears to have a clue either. So, if you’re insecure about discussing an over-your head book, this is the one to do it with. Below is my brief, fake intellectual opinion.

      I felt non-goodreads reviews missed the big picture, and paid too much attention to small details. I thought this was one the main themes, if not 'the' theme, in the book. The 60's were turbulent times and saw the breakdown of multiple systems. The result was anti-intellectualism (alas the hippies). But what surprised me most, was the lack of importance people placed on the Kennedy administration and assassination. Most reviews mentioned this only in passing, but for me, this was the glue holding the book together. After all, the plot is a conspiracy against a government entity (the mail system in the case). But don't take my word for it. I'm one of those people who thought "Animal Farm" was actually about farm animals.

      Highly Recommend, if you like creative ‘freaky’ things.
    • 4/5
      This short little book kept fascinating and frustrating me. But what else would you expect from a book that can be considered both a great postmodern work, as well as a great parody of postmodern writing? Pynchon himself tended to look down on his own work as he aged, and yes the book does have it's weaknesses, but for the most part, it's a fascinating little tale of both suspense and conspiracy, as well as postmodern musing on the nature of fact and understanding vs perception and fantasy.

      If you're on the fence about Pynchon or are unwilling to tackle one of his longer works, start here. I think you'll know whether or not you feel like reading him more from this very comfortably short novel.
    • 3/5
      Typically, I have little trepidation expressing my feelings about a book--I like it, I didn't like it, and here's why. With The Crying Lot of 49, however, I'm not sure what to say. Not because I don't know how I felt about--not entirely, anyway. More so, because I know a great many people whose opinions I generally agree with--or at least understand--who love this book.

      So rather than rant on and on about why this book didn't work for me, I'd like to open it up to others and have an actual conversation about this novel. I know that's not what I'm supposed to do here, but I'm going to anyway. What's the worst that will happen? Goodreads will revoke my librarian status? Wait, that would suck.

      Sure, I agree that Pynchon is an intelligent writer, and that there is quite a bit of wit in this pages. Overall, however, I found it to be a tedious and pretentious read. Now, rather than ramble on about that, I want to hear from you. What did I miss? Why do you love Pynchon? And were The Paranoids really necessary?
    • 3/5
      Off-beat, sometimes in an interesting way, sometimes not so much. Oedipa Maas, a decent enough lady runs from a boring husband to take on responsibility as executor of the will of a former boyfriend. She becomes obsessed with a puzzle or puzzles and follows clues that eventually reveal.....self-realizations, realizations about life, America, and more. The novel is deceivingly thin, and deceptively accessible. Read simply as a story, the stars would only blink link a bored cat. If one dives with all brain cylinders, I'd think the rating would be 5 stars. My problem with the novel was that I wasn't overly inspired to comb every word and focus on the drippings. I don't know if I'm compatible with Pynchon yet. We may lack the necessary chemistry for a long haul. Well, I'll soon find out because I'm off to Gravity's Rainbow. And maybe V.
    • 3/5
      So far so good, strange prose, cryptic sometime. Oedipa lives in a really strange world, seemingly because she sees it like that.
      But it's considered a Canonic book, so I decided to give it a try.
      It is a slow start, then it grips you and then slows a bit in the last 10 pages. A nice read, but I guess much of the hype is due to the complexity of the text, according to the habit of thinking "hard to understand... must be very good", I don't subscribe to this view.
    • 3/5
      the book falls in line with many other postmodern conspiracy works. it followed Vonnegut's Cats Cradle and came well before Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. was it a great leap forward? im not sure. it fits so snugly between all the other contemporary works...reviewers often point to the complexity of this guy's work. its not difficult to understand, its just filled with a lot of twists. like Vonnegut. they are quite similar. they build a story moving from tangent to tangent.overall i was somewhat impatient with this book, hoping towards the end just to get it over with. it gave me nothing until i read professional literary critiques, some of which seemed delusional inventions.the book was eh.
    • 4/5
      This is the first Thomas Pynchon novel I read. I don't think I get it. It seems to be full of drugs, sex, rock bands, and a strange conspiracy involving an alternate postal service. I found the book to be right at the edge of nonsensical/meta and interesting - at times I enjoyed this book greatly, but sometimes, it got really heavy and unknowing. I don't know if I enjoyed it or not but the book is well written.
    • 3/5
      Are you old enough to remember the sixties? I certainly remember them very well but sometimes I wonder if I was living in some sort of parallel universe because the sixties I was a part of wasn’t nearly as chaotic and drug-fueled as the one that is most often portrayed in books and movies. This book, which was written in 1965, is all about one of the most politically and socially turbulent decades in U.S. history: the rise of the drug culture, the Vietnam War, the rock revolution, as well as the birth of numerous social welfare programs, John F. Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's assassination, Robert kennedy’s assassination, Civil Rights, and, to some extent, women's rights. The novel uses this explosion of cultural occurrences, depicting a dramatically fragmented society. But of course, being a post modern novel, it doesn’t come right out and say this in any way. No it’s all done through symbolism, substitution, puns and plays on words, and smoke and mirrors. After a few pages the reader is left to wonder, ”Is the protagonist on drugs? Are all the other characters on drugs? Maybe I’m on drugs, because none of this is making any sense.Oedipa Maas comes home from a Tupperware Party (remember those?) one day to find a letter naming her executor of the will left by a former lover, Pierce Inverarity (don’t underestimate the power of names in this novel). In the course of fulfilling her duties in this regard, she discovers what appears to be another functioning postal system, known as Tristero, unknown to her (really to any of us) prior to this time. (Here, Pynchon was foretelling the rise of UPS, Fed-Ex and DLS.) Part of the use of the postal system is the requirement that anyone using it is required to mail a letter once a week even if they have nothing to say. (Perhaps this requirement could save our present postal system.) Oedipa seems to go about completing her task mostly in a drug-fueled haze. Not that it matters. Everyone around her is in the same state. At least, that’s the only plausible explanation for all the things happening that, otherwise, made no sense at all. At any rate, her world systematically falls apart as she goes about resolving the issues involved with the will.Along the way she meets Randolph Dribbelette, Dr. Hilarity, her husband Mucho (a disk jockey at radio station KCUF!), Tony Jaguar, Mike Fallopian----on and on, names with other names, names with other meanings. OK enough. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the narrative. This is not the kind of straight forward story that I enjoy. Who wants to work so hard to understand what the author is trying to say? I like to lay back and sink into a deeply satisfying novel and this wasn’t it.
    • 5/5
      Quite simply the best of Pynchon's books, and the most successful in what he called "projecting a world". It's worth mentioning that the Bantam paperback is disfigured by the most incomprehensibly stupid, irrelevant, and just plain ugly cover in recent decades, even surpassing the excrescences on the paperback editions of Dan Pinkwater's LIZARD MUSIC and the Woolf-Sewell collection NEW QUESTS FOR CORVO.
    • 3/5
      An entertaining if not always engaging novel.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book, but rather doubt that it will lead me on into a full- scale exploration of Pynchon. It appeared 45 years ago (which does date post-modernism, since it was hailed as either an exemplar or a parody of post-modernism) and vividly captures the ethos of the time -- and I would know. But ethos isn't all there is: to enjoy this novel, you have to let yourself slide into Pynchon's very strange world. The plot, sketched in more detail by several other reviewers, centers on Oedipa Maas, a California woman who has been named executor of her lover's estate. As she becomes involved in this process, she becomes more and more enmeshed in what may be a massive and long lived conspiracy, or may be her own paranoid delusion, or may be a plot to convince her that she is paranoid. What's fascinating about the book are the side trips, into a mythic Jacobean drama, into the lives and times of a Beatlish band, into Oedipa's personal life.What does it all mean? Who knows: it seems to me that it is something about humanity's efforts to impose meaning, but it could be about drugs, or California, or postal conspiracies. Anyway it's a great trip, though it pushed me to the edge of my toleration for non-linear fiction. And this is generally referred to as his most accessible work ------
    • 4/5
      So much information, so little clarity.
    • 1/5
      I finally read this because I’ve never yet managed to complete a Thomas Pynchon story. I managed to finish this novel only because it’s short. I’m left confused about many things, but not about this: I enjoy interesting and different books, but books loaded with pretentious intellectualism bore me to death. There’s story-telling (which entertains and moves its readers) and there’s word play. ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ clearly falls in the last category and, while it might provide many readers with a satisfying read, I find the weirdness too weird, the “cleverness” too clever for its own good and the deliberate manipulation of names, references and language constructs silly. Is Pynchon actually laughing at us, the readers, who swoon at his “brilliance”? Either that or, like Sacha Baron Cohen of the dreadful movie “Borat” fame, Pynchon is a sad man with a rather warped and gloomy view of the world. As a reader, I want more to a novel than pretentious intellectualism posing as literature. I enjoy reading a wide variety of genres and styles, fiction and non-fiction. I don’t care what I read – as long as it’s good writing and keeps me engaged. Despite the occasional glimpse of what could attract people to this story (for example, Mucho & Oedipa’s obsessions apparently suggesting ordinary folks’ obsessive need to believe in some kind of reality and order – I say “apparently,” because I’m not entirely sure I “got it”), Pynchon’s writing required too much effort to make any sort of sense to me. Perhaps that was the point of the difficult, delirious writing style: that, despite modern technology supposedly assisting mankind in communicating, Mucho & Oedipa (representing the average human) were still unable to communicate with each other. This novel, far from solving this dilemma, exacerbated it!It does have its moments of post-modernist epiphany (modern life is uncertain; there is no guarantee of a happy ending), but I’m a reader who prefers a more traditional (and optimistic!) form of story-telling and will leave Pynchon’s existential explorations of an entropic society to those readers who prefer ‘high literature.’
    • 2/5
      A disappointment. The main thread through the novel, the “Tristero system” conspiracy relating to mail delivery through history, is ultimately ridiculous. It’s all over the map, and a bit like listening to a Jazz musician high on something. There are scenes which “hit”, like the strip poker game Oedipa Maas finds herself in near the beginning of the book, and occasional humor in the satire of life in the 60s which works, but unfortunately these are few and far between. It’s pretty sad when you think Dan Brown could have helped matters. Mercifully only 152 pages.Quotes:On management:“In the early ‘60’s a Yoyodyne executive living near L.A. and located someplace in the corporate root-system above supervisor but below vice-president, found himself, at age 39, automated out of a job. Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive’s first thoughts were naturally of suicide.”On poverty:“Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust – and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives…”
    • 1/5
      I spent 7 days deciphering 150 pages and I'm pissed. I couldn't wait for this book to be over.I literally re-read every damn page 2 or 3 times, thinking I was missing something, trying to figure out why people think this book is not only worthwhile, but a modern classic. I'm pretty sure I wasn't missing anything; I just didn't care. I waited 150 pages for even the slightest 'aha' moment, suspecting all along that I wasn't going to get it. I was right. And, I'm kicking myself for not stopping on page 30 like I wanted to.I firmly believe that Pynchon's writing is just bad. It's like he formed each sentence, then deliberately mangled it, forcing you to decipher any meaning from it; like he was experimenting with the construction of convoluted sentences; like this was his attempt at a cleverly crafted literary puzzle. Dialog was interrupted by a 'he said' or 'she said' in the most awkward ways possible, usually rendering the sentences barely comprehensible and ruining any flow of the sentence or underlying thought. I admit that sometimes figuring out a difficult book is fun, but with Pynchon's Lot 49, after re-reading each sentence multiple times with little to show for it, I just didn't give a shit. If your literary tricks are too forced and there's little of substance behind them, the reader just stops caring.It would be one thing if there was some sort of pay off, some sense of accomplishment, but no. I'm not saying that I'm the type of reader who needs closure with each book, but the lack of closure in Lot 49 was just the last nail in the coffin.Lot 49's only redeeming quality is that it was short. I'd rather milk an angry badger than read 600+ pages of Gravity's Rainbow.
    • 2/5
      Oedpia Mass is to be the executor of her ex boyfriend's will. With no legal knowledge, a very shady therapist and a husband that is in his own world, Oedpia starts the task of breaking up Pierce Inverarity's massive state and discovers a postal conspiracy years in the making.Why, oh why, did I think this was a good idea? Pynchon is the king of the run on sentence. Sometimes going on for two pages! In a book that is only 152 pages, sentences like that become a problem. There is also the issue of the names. While I liked Oedpia as a name, everyone else had weird names like Dr. Hilarious and Mike Fallopian that I couldn't take seriously and had a hard time processing. This all pales to how little I liked the story. I had a really hard time following what was happening with the Trystero stuff. I'm still not entirely sure if everything about the postal system was real or not, or if it was an elaborate joke or Oedpia going crazy or what. Regardless, I have never had such a hard time finishing 150 odd pages. I was really tempted to just set it aside and never come back, but the year is still young, so hopefully I'll be able to make up for the lost week I spent staring at the stupid cover and wishing it would burst into flames, or magically turn into Harry Potter.
    • 2/5
      I read this book in college nearly 30 years ago - I really really really want to understand the coolness of this book to be part of the "in" crowd. But like "Gravity's Rainbow", I just don't get Thomas Pynchon.
    • 3/5
      Erghhhh...This book did not have a good ending. It left too many loose ends. As you likely know by now, I hate that.Not to mention it took me a week to read this short book.The story would suddenly veer off in weird directions that made me think I had skipped a page. Though I can appreciate this, the book was just not for me. I did learn what the "The Crying of Lot 49" means though. At least the book answered that.
    • 2/5
      I didn't like this. I think I understand where he was going with it but it almost put me to sleep while I was driving. I never let it finish. It's possible that I might like it better in book form. Maybe I'll try that one day. I can't guarantee that though.
    • 2/5
      Underground societies, selling of human bones and a lonely housewife. Put them together and you have Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa becomes a woman with a mystery to solve and what's really going on with the post and connection with W.A.S.T.E. the real question is, does she find all the answers?
    • 3/5
      Strange, comedic, and oddly compelling: this novel is something I might well read and reread without fully processing, but I'm glad to have read it. It was a curious ride, one exploring hope, hate, and hopelessness in a way that I haven't seen before. Pynchon takes on clear characters here, each on the hopeful side of pathetic and many striving for something more, however doubted it might be. Fictions within fictions within fictions, and each one worth reading. Entertaining, and recommended. Suggestion? Just take it as the ride it is.
    • 5/5
      This is the first Pynchon book I've ever read, and I cannot wait to get my hands on more. The Crying of Lot 49 was phenomenal - really a spectacular book. Reading it was like an extraordinarily vivid dream, all logically-ordered nonsense and utterly gripping unreal reality, resplendent with the features and culture of 60s-70s California. It is a fantastic book.
    • 3/5
      There must be something wrong with me because I just couldn't get into this book, which is weird because post-modern weirdness is often my thing. I think this is one of those books that you must read and decide for yourself.
    • 2/5
      I have to say I am puzzled, and probably missing lots of the deeper postmodern criticisms that are constructed around the book.

      I found myself variously frustrated, because the clause heavy sentence style is pretty demanding to follow, and delighted when I had managed to follow and enjoy the intricacies.

      I found myself reading it aloud to see if I could make more sense and revel in the language, and think that seemed to work.

    • 5/5
      Classic Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 involves a fictitious mail delivery system and a quest, with overtones of paranoia. A great way to get introduced to Pynchon in a short novel.
    • 3/5
      This is the first book I've read by Pynchon. I felt...underwhelmed. I'm still going to go on and read Gravity's Rainbow to make sure I'm not missing something, but overall, I felt like this was similar to a Tom Robbin's novel - which I'm also mostly over after reading a few of his. Hopefully, I just missed a lot in this novel since I was reading it on my usual work commute (bus, subway, office, reverse).
    • 3/5
      My first acquaintance with Pynchon's work. Strange. Original. Complex. Dreamlike. Schizophrenic. Did I mention strange? This is supposed to be Pynchon's most approachable work and often hailed as a great example of postmodern fiction. I don't disagree. But at the same time I know this is not a book for everyone. It is not, I think, a book one falls head over heels with. It is a book that challenges what you thought you knew about how books are supposed to be. Their coherence, their development, their structure, their denouement. There's meaning and further implications hidden beneath every sentence. There's almost too much meaning for an 80-page long novella. As if the author was anxious not to waste (w.a.s.t.e.) a single word. Every word must be suffused with an extra layer of complications, another set of meanings and ideas. Another popular culture reference that requires you to be armed with a particular kind of knowledge in order to deal with it. Jay Gould. Fu-Manchu. Perry Mason. The Shadow. Nabokov. Remedios Varo. Jack Lemmon. The Beatles. "I want to kiss your feet.", sing the imaginary Paranoids of the book. Ha. Ha. Ha. Sometimes it feels like the book purports to maintain a certain level of intelligence and knowledge amongst its intended readers. Like Pynchon is trying to somehow "weed out" the most impatient of readers, the ones not determined enough to push through his obstacles and get to the meaning, the core of the book. And for this reason he keeps making things more difficult. A Jacobean play within the book. Surreal situations. LSD. Paranoia. A conspiracy that may or may not exist. Song lyrics. An unreliable narrator. An even more unreliable shrink who's supposed to help the narrator. (Dr Hilarius, a psychopath of a shrink, if there ever was one. ) Take that, public. See if you can deal with that. And that. And that. Can you? Like the Escher paintings mentioned in the book, you either take it all in together, or not at all. It either makes sense, or it doesn't.(kind of like this Deaf-Mute ball towards the end of the book:)"Back in the hotel she found the lobby full of deaf-mute delegates in party hats, copied in crepe paper after the fur Chinese communist jobs made popular during the Korean conflict. They were every one of them drunk, and a few of the men grabbed her, thinking to bring her along to a party in the grand ballroom. She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm but was too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted horrible. They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow's head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner's lead, limp in the young mute's clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner. Jesus Arrabal would have called it an anarchist miracle. Oedipa, with no name for it, was only demoralized. She curtsied and fled."

    Book preview

    The Odyssey of Homer - William Cowper

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