Here are 2 books that CONSTELIS VOSS fans have personally recommended once you finish the CONSTELIS VOSS series.
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Maybe ten years ago, I first picked this book up, and like most Pynchon books, if you aren’t in the mood to read something longer, difficult, and absurd, it’s not gonna work for you. For whatever reason, that’s where I was at the time, but it felt strange to consider Pynchon my favorite author without reading everything and digesting it properly. So, I came back to this book, and I’m so happy I did.
There are definitely people who consider Pynchon impenetrable, pretentious, or worse things, but in truth, if you approach his books for what they are, you can’t miss with them. What is that, exactly? Goofy stoner mysteries with plenty of asides for you to get lost in. I let myself get lost in the absurdity this time out, and it served as a reminder of what I really love about literature.
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the…
I’m really not sure how to talk about this book sometimes. There’s a kinetic energy to it that comes from the breathless literary allusions before descending into a labyrinth of the most surreal of the greats. I mean, the title itself is derived from a work by Italo Calvino, and Calvino is perhaps, at times, a character in this book, along with Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and others.
If you’re going to not just evoke a list of great authors, but integrate them into your work, you’ve got to wield them with a deft hand, which is exactly what happens here. There’s a certain level of unease this book left me in throughout, but kept me reading and laughing, even while the protagonist’s reality frayed into the surreal and odd. Perhaps exactly because it frayed so much, I’m not sure.
Clarence St. Claire is a programmer who cherishes an orderly life. His motto: ‘work is important; people, not so much’. His determination to be The Most Serious Person on the Planet is threatened when he becomes haunted by a mysterious manuscript from his past: 300 pages of possibly random bird tracks. Risking his career and self-possession, St. Claire dares to pursue the manuscript against the opposition of hackers, the NSA, the ghosts of famous writers and doubts of his own sanity.
Lost in a maze of bird-prints and their possible meanings, St. Claire determines to summon the late writer Jorge…
