So the first chapter's a little strange...

Not going to lie, I had to read the first two pages of this book three times. Reasons behind the confusing context of this book are the sentence structure and word/name choice. For example, the whole first page is practically one sentence. It begins with "One summer" and ends at "honorary" 8 lines later. In addition, the names I suppose are references, but most of them are odd. The main woman is named Oedipa, which may be a reference to Oedipus, who married his mother and shot his father. Also, Oedpia's husband is called "Mucho Mass", which is Spanish for "much more". I'm not sure what this means yet, but it all will probably have some kind of comical significance in the story. Another confusing thing is that there are many ambiguous references. For example, the deceased Pierce fellow says that Wendall Mass (Mucho Maas!) needs a visit from "The Shadow". This "shadow" is referenced to again on the next page. It says, "The shadow waited a year before visiting (12)." What does that mean?
The thing I enjoyed most about this first chapter was reading about Mucho Maas and his crazy insecurities about jobs. The way he describes the used cars he used to buy from people at the lot is poetic. For instance, Pynchon writes that maybe if he had worked in a junkyard, Mucho could have stood it because "the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous." The passion with which Mucho hates the lot is so extreme, it makes me wonder why Oedipa married him...but then again, maybe he's her son.