For those that don't know, TCL49 (how I'm choosing to abbreviate it) is a novella about a woman by the name of Oedipa Maas, a suburban housewife, being named executor for her ex, a multimillionaire who owns all of San Narisco. She leaves for the city, has an affair, and slowly discovers a conspiracy theory dating back to medieval times regarding the US postal service and its hidden rival - Trystero. The novella is set in the 60s and feels ripe with the culture of back then - the fashion, the sleekness of postwar America's new riches, television and phones and Hollywood, a Beatles ripoff band called the Paranoids trying to make it big and singing thematically relevant numbers in the background. Take for example:

What chance has a lonely surfer boy

For the love of a surfer chick,

With all these Humbert Humbert cats

Coming on so big and sick?

For me, my baby was a woman,

For him she's just another nymphet.

References to Nabokov's Lolita are present throughout, but this one is my favourite.

Predetermination rings through, the illusion of freedom is referred to in different ways - the freedom a car promises is contrasted against the roads like 'hypothermic needles' determine its path, movies play at the perfect time and are predictable, the same story repeats in several places (plays, legal cases, urban myths), everything falls rather too perfectly in place. Oedipa is trapped in a city haunted by her former lover that owned almost every part and lords over her like a god. At the start of the book, she recalls seeing a piece by Remedios Varo that brought her to tears:


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