Ali Dehdarirad, “From Faraway Californiaˮ: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy

If postmodernism was supposed to be an era of space, as heralded by Michel Foucault in his 1967 lecture "Of Other Spaces (Des espaces autres), then we can say that this brand-new study of Thomas Pynchon's recurrent topos of California has been long overdue.Research into this author's work has gone through several phases, none of which have paid particular attention to the matter of topography as a relevant character-or plot-defining entity.The early studies of the author's sources engaged in the explorations of the natural sciences mostly incited by "Entropy, The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, certain monographs followed the elements of the sacred and the profane, some of them focused on anarchist threads in his possible worlds, on allegory in several intertextual contexts, or the fine line between sanity and paranoia.A number of authors were devoted to the fusion of the initial American paradise and predicted apocalypse, or to investigations into the political and philosophical underpinnings of this variegated oeuvre, and there is also a volume on aspects of sexual encounters and gender power play in his fiction, a trait visible since the very beginnings. 1 2 Ali Dehdarirad's study consists of four major chapters, the first laying out the scholarly methodology and the previous research on this Pynchonian matter, and the remaining three respectively discuss the so-called California novels: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Ali Dehdarirad, "From Faraway California: Thomas Pynchon's Aesthetics of Spa...