the,crying,of,lot,49

篇一：The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 is a novella by Thomas Pynchon, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon's invention. The novel is often classified as a notable example ofpostmodern fiction. Characters

Oedipa Maas – The novel's protagonist. After her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, dies and she becomes co-executor of his estate, she discovers and begins to unravel what may or may not be a worldwide conspiracy. The character Oedipus in Greek playwright Sophocles's Oedipus Rex unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. Founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud believed that all healthy boys go through an emotional stage just before entering the developmental stage he called latency in which they wish to supplant their father in their mother's affections, and Freud called this phenomenon the "Oedipus complex". (The analogous dynamic for girls, the subject of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, he called the Electra complex.)

Pierce Inverarity – Oedipa's ex-boyfriend and a wealthy real-estate tycoon. The reader never meets him directly: all encounters are presented through Oedipa's memories. At the beginning of the novel he is already dead and is said to have been extremely rich, having owned, at one time or another, a great deal of real property and holdings in California.

Wendell "Mucho" Maas – Oedipa's husband, Mucho once worked in a used-car lot but recently became a disc jockey for KCUF radio in Kinneret, California (a fictional town). Toward the end of the novel, the effects of his nascent LSD use alienate Oedipa.

The novel follows Oedipa Maas, a California housewife who becomes entangled in a convoluted historical mystery when her ex-lover dies and designates her the co-executor of his estate. The catalyst of Oedipa's adventure is a set of stamps that may have been used by a secret underground postal delivery service, the Trystero (or Tristero).

According to the historical narrative that Oedipa pieces together during her travels around Southern California, the Trystero was defeated by Thurn und Taxis – a real postal system – in the 18th century, but Trystero went underground and continued to exist into the present day (the 1960s). Its mailboxes are disguised as regular waste bins, often displaying its slogan, W.A.S.T.E. (an acronym for "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire"), and its symbol, a muted post horn. The existence and plans of this shadowy organization are revealed bit by bit; or, then again, it is possible that the Trystero does not exist at all. The novel's main character, Oedipa Maas, is buffeted back and forth between believing and not believing in it without ever finding firm proof either way. The Trystero may be a conspiracy, it may be a practical joke, or it may simply be that Oedipa is hallucinating all the arcane references to this Prominent among these references is the Trystero symbol, a muted post horn with one loop. Originally derived, supposedly, from the Thurn and Taxis coat of arms, Oedipa first finds this symbol in a bar bathroom, where it decorates a graffito advertising a group of polyamorists. It later appears among an engineer's doodles, as part of a children's sidewalk jump rope game, amidst Chinese ideograms in a shop window, and in many other places. The post horn (in either original or Trystero versions) appears on the cover art of many TCL49 editions and in artwork created by the novel's fans.

Oedipa finds herself drawn into this shadowy intrigue when an old boyfriend, the California real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, dies. Inverarity's will names her as his executor. Soon enough, she learns that although Inverarity "once lost two million dollars in his spare time [he] still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary." She leaves her comfortable home in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, a northern California village, and travels south to the fictional town of San Narciso (Spanish for "Saint Narcissus"), near Los Angeles. Exploring puzzling coincidences that she uncovers while parsing Inverarity's testament, Oedipa finds what might be

evidence for the Trystero's existence. Sinking or ascending ever more deeply into paranoia, she finds herself torn between believing in the Trystero and believing that it is all a hoax established by Inverarity himself. Near the novel's conclusion, she reflects,

He might have written the testament only to harass a one-time mistress, so cynically sure of being wiped out he could throw away all hope of anything more. Bitterness could have run that deep in him. She just didn't know. He might himself have discovered The Tristero, and encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure she'd find it. Or he might even have tried to survive death, as a paranoia; as a pure conspiracy against someone he loved

Along the way, Oedipa meets a wide range of eccentric characters. Her therapist in Kinneret, Dr. Hilarius, turns out to have done his internship in Buchenwald, working to induce insanity in captive Jews. "Liberal SS circles felt it would be more humane," he explains. In San Francisco, she meets a man who claims membership in the Inamorati Anonymous (IA), a group founded to help people avoid falling in love, "the worst addiction of all". And inBerkeley, she meets John Nefastis, an engineer who believes he has built a working version of Maxwell's Demon, a means for defeating entropy. The book ends with Oedipa attending an auction, waiting for bidding to begin on a set of rare postage stamps that she believes representatives of Trystero are trying to acquire.

篇二：《the crying of lot 49》读后感

The Crying Of Lot 49

I was worried because it was only ten days from the end of the summer vacation, but I didn?t do the assignment that reading an English fiction during summer vacation, then an idea came to me, that I could ask Erek for help. Erek, a thirty years old guy, a programmer, from America, is my friend, and we met on the internet. I told him the problem; therefore, he introduced this English novel, the crying of lot 49, to me. Because it only consists of six chapters, in other words, it is quite short.

It was written by Thomas Pynchon in 1999. Compared to other famous English fiction, it was written latter. To the beginning, I would like to point out that the word “crying” doesn?t mean “sob”, however, it means “auction”. Second, Oedipa Maas was the protagonist of this Thomas Pynchon novel.

The main content of the novel is: Oedipa lives in a world full of haphazard clues, dead ends, and meaningless signifiers. She stumbles through a bizarre string of coincidences to try to unravel what may or may not be a mystery. She cannot quite realize her condition. Oedipa struggles to draw meaning out of chaotic masses of information, and to construct a narrative out of randomness. In doing so, she begins to lose sense of her world.

As we know, every word may have many meanings. In this

novel, I knew an old new word ?will?, besides the meanings of ?is going to?, it means ?dying words?. The feature of original English novel is: there exist lots of long sentences and short sentences, and the word of and the comma is widely used in long sentences.

The novel isn?t the traditional narrative, without complete plot. It is a little difficult for me to understand it. Maybe it belongs to bizarre modernist novels. We leave Oedipa waiting. Oedipa is driven towards discovery. She chases a transcendental meaning the existence of which she cannot be certain, but she pursues. Without pursuit, there is waiting. Hers is an America of drifters and squatters, ones and zeros, speeding electricity and dead railroad cars.

2012221112240061罗艳丽

篇三：Thomas Pynchon- The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49

Pynchon Thomas

1

ONE summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million collars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work. She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two

hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she'd always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them. Was that how he'd died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

The letter was from the law firm of Warpe, Wist-full, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles, and signed by

somebody named Metzger. It said Pierce had died back in the spring, and they'd only just now found the will. Metzger was to act as co-executor and special counsel in the event of any involved litigation. Oedipa had been named also to execute the will in a codicil dated a year ago. She tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to the Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble's variorum re-cording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden, reading of book reviews in the latest Scientific American, into the layering of a lasagna,

garlicking of a bread, tearing up of romaine leaves, eventually, oven on, into the mixing of the twilight's whiskey sours against the arrival of her husband, Wendell ("Mucho") Maas from work, she wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer's deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye. It took her till the middle of Huntley and Brinkley to remember that last year at three or so one morning there had come this long-distance call, from where she would never know (unless now he'd left a diary) by a voice beginning in heavy Slavic tones as second secretary at the Transyl-vanian Consulate, looking for an escaped bat; modulated to comic-Negro, then on into hostile Pachuco dialect, full of chingas and maricones; then a Gestapo officer asking her in shrieks did she have relatives in Germany and finally his Lamont Cranston voice, the one he'd talked in all the way down to Mazatlan. "Pierce, please," she'd managed to get in, "I thought we had——"

"But Margo," earnestly, "I've just come from Commissioner Weston, and that old man in the fun house was murdered by the same blowgun that killed Professor Quackenbush," or something.

"For God's sake," she said. Mucho had rolled over and was looking at her.

"Why don't you hang up on him," Mucho suggested, sensibly.

"I heard that," Pierce said. "I think it's time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow." Silence, positive and thorough, fell. So it was the last of his voices she ever heard. Lamont Cranston. That phone line could have pointed any

direction, been any length. Its quiet ambiguity shifted over, in the months after the call, to what had been revived: memories of his face, body, things he'd given her, things she had now and then pretended not to've heard him say. It took him over, and to the verge of being forgotten. The shadow waited a year before visiting. But now there was Metzger's letter. Had Pierce called last year then to tell her about this codicil? Or had he decided on it later, somehow because of her annoyance and Mucho's in-difference? She felt exposed, finessed, put down. She had never executed a will in her life, didn't know where to begin, didn't know how to tell the law firm in L. A. that she didn't know where to begin.

"Mucho, baby," she cried, in an access of helplessness.

Mucho Maas, home, bounded through the screen door. "Today was another defeat," he began.

"Let me tell you," she also began. But let Mucho go first.

He was a disk jockey who worked further along the Peninsula and suffered regular crises of conscience out his profession. "I don't believe in any of it, Oed," he could usually get out. "I try, I truly can't," way down there, further down perhaps than

she could reach, so that such times often brought her near panic. It might have been the sight of her so about to lose control that seemed to bring him back up. "You're too sensitive." Yeah, there was so much else she ought to be saying also, but this was what came out. It was true, anyway. For a couple years he'd been a used car salesman and so hyperaware of what that profession had come to mean that working hours were

exquisite torture to him. Mucho shaved his upper lip every morning three times with, three times against the grain to remove any remotest breath of a moustache, new blades he drew blood invariably but kept at it; bought all natural-shoulder suits, then went to a tailor to have the lapels made yet more abnormally narrow, on his hair used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon to throw them further off. The sight of sawdust, even pencil shavings, made him wince, his own kind being known to use it for hushing sick transmissions, and though he dieted he could still not as Oedipa did use honey to sweeten his coffee for like all things viscous it distressed him, recalling too poignantly what is often mixed with motor oil to ooze dishonest into gaps between piston and cylinder wall. He walked out of a party one night because somebody used the word "creampuff," it seemed maliciously, in his hearing. The man was a refugee Hungarian pastry cook talking shop, but there was your Mucho: thin-skinned.

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, and there was no way of

telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of .05 or .10, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the

moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had

somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.

Oedipa couldn't understand how he could still get so upset even now. By the time he married her he'd already been two years at the station, KCUF, and the lot on the pallid, roaring arterial was far behind him, like the Second World or Korean Wars were for older husbands. Maybe, God help her, he should have been in a war, Japs in trees, Krauts in Tiger tanks, gooks with trumpets in the night he might have forgotten sooner than whatever it was about the lot that had stayed so alarmingly with him for going on five years. Five years. You comfort them when they wake pouring sweat or crying out in the language of bad dreams, yes, you hold them, they calm down, one day they lose it: she knew that. But when was Mucho going to forget? She suspected the disk jockey spot (which he'd got through his good buddy the KCUF advertising manager, who'd visited the lot once a week, the lot being a sponsor) was a way of letting the Top 200, and even the news copy that came jabbering out of the machine—all the fraudulent dream of teenage appetites—be a buffer between him and that lot.

He had believed too much in the lot, he believed not at all in the station. Yet to look at him now, in the twilit living room, gliding like a large bird in an updraft toward the sweating shakerful of booze, smiling out of his fat vortex ring's centre, you'd think all was flat calm, gold, serene.

Until he opened his mouth. "Today Funch," he told her, pouring, "had me in, wanted to talk about my image, which he doesn't like." Funch being the program director, and Mucho's great foe. "I'm too horny, now. What I should be is a young father, a big brother. These little chicks call in with requests, naked lust, to Punch's ear, throbs in every word I say. So now I'm suppose to tape all the phone talk, Funch personally will edit out anything he considers offensive, meaning all of my end of the conversation. Censorship, I told

him, 'fink,' I muttered, and fled." He and Funch went through some such routine maybe once a week.

She showed him the letter from Metzger. Mucho knew all about her and Pierce: it had ended a year before Mucho married her. He read the letter and withdrew along a shy string of eyeblinks.

"What am I going to do?" she said.

"Oh, no," said Mucho, "you got the wrong fella. Not me. I can't even make out our income tax right. Execute a will, there's nothing I can tell you, see Roseman." Their lawyer.

"Mucho. Wendell. It was over. Before he put my name on it."

"Yeah, yeah. I meant only that, Oed. I'm not capable." So next morning that's what she did, went and saw Roseman. After a half hour in front of her vanity mirror drawing and having to redraw dark lines along her eyelids that each time went ragged or wavered violently before she could take the brush away. She'd been up most of the night, after another three-in-the-morning phone call, its announcing bell clear cardiac terror, so out of nothing did it come, the instrument one second inert, the next screaming. It brought both of them instantly awake and they lay, joints unlocking, not even wanting to look at each other for the first few rings. She finally, having nothing she knew of to lose, had taken it. It was Dr Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist. But he sounded like Pierce doing a Gestapo officer.

"I didn't wake you up, did I," he began, dry. "You sound so frightened. How are the pills, not working?"

"I'm not taking them," she said.

"You feel threatened by them?"

"I don't know what's inside them."

"You don't believe that they're only tranquiliz-ers."

"Do I trust you?" She didn't, and what he said next explained why not.

"We still need a hundred-and-fourth for the bridge." Chuckled aridly. The bridge, die Brucke, being his pet name for the

experiment he was helping the community hospital run on effects of LSD-25, mesca-line, psilocybin, and related drugs on a large sample of surburban housewives. The bridge inward. "When can you let us fit you into our schedule."

"No," she said, "you have half a million others to choose from. It's three in the morning."

"We want you." Hanging in the air over her bed she now beheld the well-known portrait of Uncle that appears in front of all our post offices, his eyes gleaming unhealthily, his sunken yellow cheeks most violently rouged, his finger pointing between her eyes. I want you. She had never asked Dr Hilarius why, being afraid of all he might answer.

"I am having a hallucination now, I don't need drugs for that."

"Don't describe it," he said quickly. "Well. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about." "Did I call you?"

"I thought so," he said, "I had this feeling. Not telepathy. But rapport with a patient is a curious thing sometimes."

"Not this time." She hung up. And then couldn't get to sleep. But would be damned if she'd take the capsules he'd given her. Literally damned. She didn't want to get hooked in any way, she'd told him that. "So," he shrugged, "on me you are not hooked? Leave then. You're cured."

She didn't leave. Not that the shrink held any dark power over her. But it was easier to stay. Who'd know the day she was cured? Not him, he'd admitted that himself. "Pills are different," she pleaded. Hilarius only made a face at her, one he'd made before. He was full of these delightful lapses from orthodoxy. His theory being that a face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot, tells a story like a TAT picture, excites a response like a suggested word, so why not. He claimed to have once cured a case of hysterical blindness with his number 37, the "Fu-Manchu" (many of the faces having like German symphonies both a number and nickname), which involved slanting the eyes up with the index fingers, enlarging the nostrils with the middle fingers, pulling the mouth wide with the pinkies and protruding the tongue. On Hilarius it was truly alarming. And in fact, as Oedipa's Uncle Sam hallucination faded, it was this Fu-Manchu face that came dissolving in to replace it and stay with her for what was left of the hours before dawn. It put her in hardly any shape to see Roseman.

But Roseman had also spent a sleepless night, brooding over the Perry Mason television program the evening before, which his wife was fond of but toward which Roseman cherished a fierce ambivalence, wanting at once to be a successful trial lawyer like Perry Mason and, since this was impossible, to destroy Perry Mason by undermining him. Oedipa walked in more or less by surprise to catch her trusted family lawyer stuffing with guilty haste a wad of different-sized and colored papers into a desk drawer. She knew it was the

rough draft of The Profession v. Perry Mason, A Not-so-hypothetical Indictment, and had been in progress for as long as the TV show had been on the air. "You didn't use to look guilty, as I remember," Oedipa said. They often went to the same group therapy sessions, in a car pool with a photographer from Palo Alto who thought he was a volleyball. "That's a good sign, isn't it?"

"You might have been one of Perry Mason's spies," said Roseman. After thinking a moment he added, "Ha, ha."

"Ha, ha," said Oedipa. They looked at each other. "I have to execute a will," she said.

"Oh, go ahead then," said Roseman, "don't let me keep you."

"No," said Oedipa, and told him all.

"Why would he do a thing like that," Roseman puzzled, after reading the letter.

"You mean die?"

"No," said Roseman, "name you to help execute it."

"He was unpredictable." They went to lunch. Roseman tried to play footsie with her under the table. She was wearing boots, and couldn't feel much of anything. So, insulated, she decided not to make any fuss.

"Run away with me," said Roseman when the

coffee came.

"Where?" she asked. That shut him up.

Back in the office, he outlined what she was in for: learn intimately the books and the business, go through probate, collect all debts, inventory the assets, get an appraisal of the estate, decide what to liquidate and

what to hold on to, pay off claims, square away taxes, distribute legacies . . .

"Hey," said Oedipa, "can't I get somebody to do it forme?"

"Me," said Roseman, "some of it, sure. But aren't you even interested?"

"In what?"

"In what you might find out."

As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself; but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away. There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. When it turned out to be Pierce she'd happily pulled out the pins and curlers and down it tumbled in its whispering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass. But dauntless, perhaps using one of his many credit cards for a shim, he'd slipped the lock on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, had true guile come more naturally to him, he'd have done to begin with. But all that had then gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower. In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedies Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of

tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a

useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

2 SHE left Kinneret, then, with no idea she was moving toward anything new. Mucho Maas, enigmatic, whistling "I Want to Kiss Your Feet," a new recording by Sick Dick and the Volkswagens (an English group he was fond of at that time but did not believe in), stood with hands in pockets while she explained about going down to San Narciso for a while to look into Pierce's books and records and confer with Metzger, the co-executor. Mucho was sad to see her go, but not desperate, so after telling him to hang up if Dr Hilarius called and look after the oregano in the garden, which had contracted a. strange mold, she went.

San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance. She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to

communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other

frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. She suspected that much. She thought of Mucho, her husband, trying to believe in his job. Was it something like this he felt, looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice might be for a holy man, yet really tuned in to the voice, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by it, digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to; did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in, knowing that even if he could hear it he couldn't believe in it?

She gave it up presently, as if a cloud had approached the sun or the smog thickened, and so broken the "religious

instant," whatever it might've been; started up and proceeded at maybe 70 mph along the singing blacktop, onto a highway she thought went toward Los Angeles, into a neighborhood that was little more than the road's skinny right-of-way, lined by auto lots, escrow services, drive-ins, small office buildings and factories whose address numbers were in the 70 and then 80,000's. She had never known numbers to run so high. It seemed unnatural. To her left appeared a prolonged scatter of wide, pink buildings, surrounded by miles of fence topped with barbed wire and interrupted now and then by guard towers: soon an entrance whizzed by, two sixty-foot missiles on either side and the name YOYODYNE lettered conservatively on each nose cone. This was San Narciso's big source of employment, the Galactronics Division of Yoyodyne, Inc., one of the giants of the aerospace industry. Pierce, she happened to know, had owned a large block of shares, had been somehow involved in negotiating an understanding with the county tax assessor to lure Yoyodyne here in the first place. It was part, he explained, of being a founding father.

Barbed wire again gave way to the familiar parade of more beige, prefab, cinderblock office machine distributors, sealant makers, bottled gas works, fastener factories, warehouses, and whatever. Sunday had sent them all into silence and paralysis, all but an occasional real estate office or truck stop. Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling

landscape—it wasn't. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

Still, when she got a look at the next motel, she hesitated a second. A representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph holding a white blossom towered thirty feet into the air; the sign, lit up despite the sun, said "Echo Courts." The face of the nymph was much like Oedipa's, which didn't startle her so much as a concealed blower system that kept the nymph's gauze chiton in constant agitation, revealing enormous vermilion-tipped breasts and long pink thighs at each flap. She was smiling a lipsticked and public smile, not quite a hooker's but nowhere near that of any nymph pining away with love either. Oedipa pulled into the lot, got out and stood for a moment in the hot sun and the dead-still air, watching the artificial windstorm

篇四：《时代》100部最佳英语小说

评选人是《时代》评论家Lev Grossman和Richard Lacayo，评选时限为1923年（《时代杂志》创刊的年份）至今，范围是全世界，语种是英语。100部小说名单如下（依篇名字母排序）：

The Adventures of Augie Marchby Saul Bellow 下载pdf

All the King’s Menby Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral[美国牧歌]by Philip Roth 下载doc

An American Tragedy[美国悲剧]by Theodore Dreiser 下载pdf

Animal Farm[动物农庄]by George Orwell 下载pdf

Appointment in Samarraby John O’Hara

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaretby Judy Blume

The Assistantby Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birdsby Flann O’Brien

Atonementby Ian McEwan

Beloved[宠儿]by Toni Morrison 下载doc,pdf

The Berlin Storiesby Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep[夜长梦多]by Raymond Chandler 下载pdf

The Blind Assassin[盲人杀手]by Margaret Atwood 下载pdf

Blood Meridian[血色子午线]by Cormac McCarthy 下载pdf

Brideshead Revisitedby Evelyn Waugh

TheBridgeofSan LuisReybyThorntonWilder

Call It Sleepby Henry Roth

Catch-22[第二十二条军规]by Joseph Heller 下载doc

The Catcher in the Rye[麦田里的守望者]by J.D. Salinger 下载Ebook

A Clockwork Orange[发条橙子]by Anthony Burgess 下载pdf

The Confessions of Nat Turnerby William Styron

The Correctionsby Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49[拍卖第49号]by Thomas Pynchon下载pdf

A Dance to the Music of Timeby Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locustby Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop[大主教之死]by Willa Cather 下载doc

A Death in the Familyby James Agee

The Death of the Heartby Elizabeth Bowen

Deliveranceby James Dickey

Dog Soldiersby Robert Stone

Falconerby John Cheever

The French Lieutenant’s Womanby John Fowles在线阅读

The Golden Notebookby Doris Lessig

Go Tell it on the Mountainby James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind[飘]by Margaret Mitchell 下载pdf

The Grapes of Wrath[愤怒的葡萄]by John Steinbeck 下载pdf

Gravity’s Rainbowby Thomas Pynchon下载pdf

The Great Gatsby[了不起的盖茨比]by F. Scott Fitzgerald 下载pdf

A Handful of Dust[一掬尘土]by Evelyn Waugh 下载pdf

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter[心是孤独的猎手]by Carson McCullers 下载pdf The Heart of the Matter[事情的核心/问题的核心]by Graham Greene 下载pdf Herzogby Saul Bellow

Housekeeping[管家]by Marilynne Robinson 下载pdf

A House for Mr. Biswas[毕斯瓦思先生之屋]by V.S. Naipaul 下载pdf

I, Claudiusby Robert Graves

Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man[隐形人]by Ralph Ellison 下载pdf

Light in August[八月之光]by William Faulkner 下载Ebook

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe[女巫狮子和魔衣橱]by C.S. Lewis 下载Ebook

Lolita[洛丽塔]by Vladimir Naboko 下载pdf

Lord of the Flies[蝇王]by William Golding 下载Ebook

The Lord of the Ringsby J.R.R. Tolkein

Silmarillion下载Hobbit下载 Fellowship下载 TwoTowers下载 King下载 相关资料

Lovingby Henry Green

Lucky Jim[幸运的吉姆]by Kingsley Amis下载pdf

The Man Who Loved Childrenby Christina Stead

Midnight's Childrenby Salman Rushdie

Moneyby Martin Amis

The Moviegoerby Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway[达罗薇夫人]by Virginia Woolf 下载pdf

Naked Lunch[裸体午餐]by William Burroughs 下载pdf

Native Sonby Richard Wright

Neuromancer[神经漫游者]by William Gibson 下载pdf

Never Let Me Go[别让我走]by Kazuo Ishiguro 下载Ebook

1984[一九八四]by George Orwell 下载pdf

On the Road[在路上]by Jack Kerouac 下载pdf

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest[飞越疯人院]by Ken Kesey 下载pdf The Painted Birdby Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire[幽冥的火]by Vladimir Nabokov 下载pdf

A Passage to India[印度之行]by E.M. Forster 下载pdf

Play It As It Laysby Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaintby Philip Roth

Posessionby A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory[权力与荣耀]by Graham Greene 下载pdf The Prime of Miss Jean Brodieby Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run[兔子，跑吧]by John Updike 下载pdf

Ragtimeby E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitionsby William Gaddis

Red Harvest[红色收获]by Dashiell Hammett 下载lit

Revolutionary Roadby Richard Yates

The Sheltering Skyby Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five[第五号屠场]by Kurt Vonnegut 下载pdf Snow Crash[雪崩]by Neal Stephenson 下载pdf

The Sot-Weed Factorby John Barth

The Sound and the Fury[喧哗与骚动]by William Faulkner 下载pdf The Sportswriterby Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold[柏林谍影] by John LeCarre 下载Ebook

The Sun Also Rises[太阳照样升起]by Ernest Hemingway 下载PDF

Their Eyes Were Watching Godby Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart[瓦解/生命中不可承受之重]by Chinua Achebe下载pdf To Kill a Mockingbird[杀死一只知更鸟]by Harper Lee 下载txt To the Lighthouse[到灯塔去]by Virginia Woolf 下载pdf

Tropic of Cancer[北回归线]by Henry Miller 下载doc 在线阅读 Ubikby Philip K. Dick 下载html

Under the Netby Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcanoby Malcolm Lowrey

Watchmenby Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise[白噪音]by Don DeLillo 下载pdf

White Teeth[白色的牙齿]by Zadie Smith 下载pdf

篇五：时代评出的英文小说

评选人是《时代》评论家Lev Grossman和Richard Lacayo，评选时限为1923年（《时代杂志》创刊的年份）至今，范围是全世界，语种是英语。100部小说名单如下（依篇名字母排序）：

The Adventures of Augie Marchby Saul Bellow 下载pdf All the King’s Menby Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral[美国牧歌]by Philip Roth 下载doc An American Tragedy[美国悲剧]by Theodore Dreiser 下载pdf

Animal Farm[动物农庄]by George Orwell 下载pdf Appointment in Samarraby John O’Hara

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaretby Judy Blume The Assistantby Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birdsby Flann O’Brien

Atonementby Ian McEwan

Beloved[宠儿]by Toni Morrison 下载doc,pdf

The Berlin Storiesby Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep[夜长梦多]by Raymond Chandler 下载pdf

The Blind Assassin[盲人杀手]by Margaret Atwood 下载pdf

Blood Meridian[血色子午线]by Cormac McCarthy 下载pdf Brideshead Revisitedby Evelyn Waugh

TheBridgeofSan LuisReybyThorntonWilder

Call It Sleepby Henry Roth

Catch-22[第二十二条军规]by Joseph Heller 下载doc

The Catcher in the Rye[麦田里的守望者]by J.D. Salinger 下载Ebook

A Clockwork Orange[发条橙子]by Anthony Burgess 下载pdf

The Confessions of Nat Turnerby William Styron The Correctionsby Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49[拍卖第49号]by Thomas Pynchon下载pdf

A Dance to the Music of Timeby Anthony Powell The Day of the Locustby Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop[大主教之死]by Willa Cather 下载doc

A Death in the Familyby James Agee

The Death of the Heartby Elizabeth Bowen

Deliveranceby James Dickey

Dog Soldiersby Robert Stone

Falconerby John Cheever

The French Lieutenant’s Womanby John Fowles在线阅读 The Golden Notebookby Doris Lessig

Go Tell it on the Mountainby James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind[飘]by Margaret Mitchell 下载pdf The Grapes of Wrath[愤怒的葡萄]by John Steinbeck 下载pdf

Gravity’s Rainbowby Thomas Pynchon下载pdf

The Great Gatsby[了不起的盖茨比]by F. Scott Fitzgerald 下载pdf

(来自:www.sMHaiDa.com 海 达范文网:the,crying,of,lot,49)

A Handful of Dust[一掬尘土]by Evelyn Waugh 下载pdf

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter[心是孤独的猎手]by Carson McCullers 下载pdf

The Heart of the Matter[事情的核心/问题的核心]by Graham Greene 下载pdf

Herzogby Saul Bellow

Housekeeping[管家]by Marilynne Robinson 下载pdf

A House for Mr. Biswas[毕斯瓦思先生之屋]by V.S. Naipaul 下载pdf

I, Claudiusby Robert Graves

Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man[隐形人]by Ralph Ellison 下载pdf Light in August[八月之光]by William Faulkner 下载Ebook

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe[女巫狮子和魔衣橱]by C.S. Lewis 下载Ebook

Lolita[洛丽塔]by Vladimir Naboko 下载pdf

Lord of the Flies[蝇王]by William Golding 下载Ebook

The Lord of the Ringsby J.R.R. Tolkein

Silmarillion下载Hobbit下载 Fellowship下载

TwoTowers下载 King下载 相关资料

Lovingby Henry Green

Lucky Jim[幸运的吉姆]by Kingsley Amis下载pdf The Man Who Loved Childrenby Christina Stead Midnight's Childrenby Salman Rushdie

Moneyby Martin Amis

The Moviegoerby Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway[达罗薇夫人]by Virginia Woolf 下载pdf

Naked Lunch[裸体午餐]by William Burroughs 下载pdf Native Sonby Richard Wright

Neuromancer[神经漫游者]by William Gibson 下载pdf

Never Let Me Go[别让我走]by Kazuo Ishiguro 下载Ebook 1984[一九八四]by George Orwell 下载pdf

On the Road[在路上]by Jack Kerouac 下载pdf

字数作文