"What Is It About?"

During my weekend I was asked about the book that I was reading, and this was my dialogue:

Silvia (a friend of mine) looked at my book and asked, “What are you reading?”
I stopped reading and I told her, “It is an assignment for my english class, The Crying Of Lot 49”
She was as confused as before, so she asked me, “What is it about?”
I looked at the book, and I realized that is was 15 pages away from finishing it and I still didn’t really know what was it about… I was blank. I said, “I’m not sure, it is a bunch of inside jokes making fun of things”
Silvia looked puzzled and kept on asking me, “But… what is the author making fun of?” And I was blank again! I felt so stupid, I had been reading a book for about two weeks and I really didn’t know what it was about. So I told her, “Things like, the society, the commercialists, the ordinary things that are daily but stupid.” Still not clear she asked me, “But… why is it called The Crying of Lot 47? What does that mean?” That, I actually had no clue, “I don’t have a clue” I think she surrendered asking me about the book, so she simply kept on reading her magazine about fashion.

I kept on thinking, The Crying Of Lot 49 is just a book that describes, it doesn’t explain anything. There is no way to answer what the book is about. The novel, if it can really be called a novel, is about nothing! I think that the story of Oedipa and the death of Pierce is just an excuse to write about nonsense, just make fun of life. The none significance of life.

“But like the thought that someday she would have to die, Oedipa had been steadfastly refusing to look at that possibility directly, or in any but the most accidental of lights. “No,” she said, “that’s ridiculous.’” (pg.138) This quote, kind of says it all. If she was going to die someday then, why bother to care about ANYTHING that she had been bothering about?!

In a hypothetical case that Silvia asked me again, “What is the book about?” I would answer, “Nothing”