Dryden Is Home

The Crying of Lot 49

I just finished reading "The Crying of Lot 49" - - well I finished reading it yesterday afternoon (Tuesday afternoon). Have you read Pynchon? What did you think?

Nothing is Illuminated

(ed note: This post was about 60% done when electricity on the 1900 block of Slaterville Road went out. You have an abbreviated rant here.)

I just finished reading "Everything is Illuminated" (by just I mean 5 hours, 1 bowl of fried sweet potatoes, a crossword puzzle, a cryptoquip, a suduko, a reconstructed compost pile, a cleaned up garden space, a cleaned set of gutters on the shed in the backyard and a review of all of my emails from the weekend ago). I want to be the first to say that in my case eveything is not illuminated. I did read the book late at night and then got up and read it in the morning and I might have missed something. I don't really know exactly how to explain or understand what was missing, but I definitely have some questions.

Is the book good? Yes, read it - and then explain the ending to me. I know it is now hip to have something strange happen at the end of books, but I like mysteries to be solved. Again, this may have been solved, but in my reading from slumber I missed it, or because I don't have the intellectual capacity to put Jonathan's book together, I am left in a bewildered state.

I definitely feel a connection, having just returned from a Makar family thanksgiving with my sister, brother-in-law and the aunts, uncles, cousins and grandmother on my dad's side of the family. The Ukrainian side of the family. The side of the family that was displaced by train from the Ukraine to work in work camps and then live in Germany until around 1949 (when my dad was 3, my uncle was 4, my aunt was 6 and my grandmother was 29 and my grandfather was 27).  They arrived in Boston (or NYC, I need these details resolved) and then made their way to Woonsocket, Rhode Island where other Ukrainians were making a new home. I wonder why Safran Foer didn't mention where he was living in the United States in the book, it was just "America." (Again, there's a chance he mentioned it, though in the course of the month I was reading the book late at night I missed it).

Maybe, if nothing else this book will push me a little harder to interview my grandmother on a digital recording device and find out some answers and then make my own way to the Ukraine to find out if her Trachimbrod exists.