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W.A.S.T.E.
We Awaiting Silent Trystero Empire
Oedipa Maas, a young housewife, is entrusted with the role of executor by her ex-boyfriend, the mysterious billionaire Pierce Inveriarity, who has just passed away. Guiding our heroine through a hippie and strung-out California, brimming with ambiguous characters (for example, the musical group The Paranoids, almost a paper version of the Residents) is the actor/lawyer Metzger.
The heart of Oedipa's perdition is lot 49, or rather a collection of "authentic" counterfeit stamps that will hurl her into a lysergic labyrinth of conspiracies, temptations, and inexplicable murders. All in the name of the silent Trystero's empire, an alternative postal network that fights the governmental and federal system, sinking its claws into the Middle Ages of the Holy Roman Empire.
By staging a decentralized vortex, without beginning or end, Pynchon whirls both the protagonists and the antagonists in a spiral of events that chew each other over, making the finale a useless prerogative for the complete understanding of a work of fiction.
A paranoid tension that leads to the loss of contact points between reality and the symbol of the real, between international conspiracy and anti-historicist verdict, in an America dethroned by the gunshots of Lee Harvey Oswald just two years earlier.
In a balance between metanovel and crime plot, "The Crying of Lot 49" reinterprets conspiracy literature, infusing it with irony and disillusionment for an era that intentionally chewed the peyote of convention at the expense of a healthy, concrete, salvific paranoia.
The Crying of Lot 49
1965 Novel; Einaudi-Stile Libero 2005; pag. 178; Isbn 88-06-17858-X
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