Currently reading: V. by Thomas Pynchon

In my spare moments over the next couple of months I'm going to work through Thomas Pynchon's novels, starting with those that I used to be very familiar with and wrote about at some length in an earlier phase of my life. I'm currently a couple of hundred pages into V., Pynchon's first novel, published in 1963, and am finding it a very strange work, coming back to it after a quarter of a century since I last read it - it's a bizarre and often perplexing story of real and imagined conspiracies, intrigue, lust, and decadence, all conveyed in a tone that seems to mingle fascination and distaste.

I'll report back in a few days when I reach the end. I must also check what I wrote about it all those years ago when I discussed it in my doctoral dissertation on the "return to myth" in modern fictional narrative.