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Gravity's Rainbow (Paperback)

by Thomas Pynchon (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Gravity's Rainbow + The Crying of Lot 49 + White Noise (Picador Books)
Price For All Three: £17.05

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A "Gravity's Rainbow" Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel

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Product details

  • Paperback: 912 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (3 Jan 1998)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099533219
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099533214
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 13 x 5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 9,378 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #2 in  Books > Fiction > Cult Authors > Pynchon, Thomas

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Product Description

Product Description

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, "Gravity's Rainbow", refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. "Gravity's Rainbow", however, doesn't follow such a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. "Gravity's Rainbow" is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes.


About the Author

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason & Dixon. He recieved the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

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Customer Reviews

25 Reviews
5 star:
 (13)
4 star:
 (6)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (4)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.9 out of 5 stars (25 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you need to know and how to say it, 15 Oct 2008
By Leo Rgn "gadfly" (Ireland west) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Gravity's Rainbow (Hardcover)
When this book was published, I was inspired to do a Master's degree studying it closely, and that was 1976. Here we are 32 years later and there is no book since published, or published before, written by one man, with the depth, range, accuracy, and pertinence to the human condition now and likely to be for the next 100 years. This book is not a novel in a coherent and completely satisfying manner, capable of being read in a matter of sitting down for a few hours at a time over a weekend, but neither is Ulysses, nor Brothers Karamazov. To approach this you must have a broad understanding and an expansive imagination, capable of responding to the world of Pynchon. I have read everything by Pynchon, before or since, and GR is his master work, no question. People will read this as long as they can read, and they will wonder, and be amazed in wonder. It is essential on the shelf of any person who reads well, even as a challenge for them at various moments in their life. To read it in a week, or read it without any break as is done at Princeton every year, is to alter the state of your mind irrevocably. Be prepared, because you will never think and feel and speak and write as you did before.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars rewarding and challenging; but certainly tough going at times!, 23 Jul 2009
The book is certainly a challenge, but enjoyable if you follow it on its own terms. My advice: start on page 1, and keep reading until the end - do not skip sections no matter how much you may be tempted!

The writing is very entertaining, engaging and hilarious at times; on other occasions it is incredibly frustrating. I found it best to just keep plugging along without trying too hard to always get the meaning.

Some of the stranger sections probably require a few readings before you get a sense of what Pynchon is saying. Don't let it bother you, however. I found that repeated readings of a particularly hard section will often bring great rewards as the piece begins to take shape as a whole, even when individual sentences are completely un-intelligible.

It is not worth getting into the plot too much in a short review, but what I will say is that this book is absolutely vast. It contains layers upon layers of detailed imagery, tangents, tangents upon tangents, and a vast amount of cultural and social references. It does require some effort to complete.

For these reasons, I fully expected that this book would be a very love/it hate affair, and the reviews so far seem to bear this out. If you are up for a bit of more challenging read than the norm, however, I think reading this novel is as good a way as any to spend (admittedly huge amounts of!) your time.
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93 of 110 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Like climbing Everest without oxygen., 26 Aug 2004
Looking at all the besotted reviews on this page makes me feel like a Philistine or irredeemably stupid, but I just cannot warm to Thomas Pynchon. I feel compelled to justify the 2-star rating by pointing out I'm not casting any aspersions on the quality of his work, just pointing out how much I did not enjoy reading it.

Gravity's Rainbow could perhaps be best described as Catch 22 meets Naked Lunch, as written by Saul Bellow. It shares a lot of the best qualities of those bright lights in American literature: it's wildly inventive, outrageously seamy, intelligently written and often wickedly funny.

Unfortunately, it also shares a lot of the flaws. It's hugely incoherent and the beautiful language meanders through mammoth sentences across a dozen ideas without ever really binding them together. You feel that if there is any sense to be had, it remains stuck in the author's head. This is in spite of the fact he seems to have poured his every wild thought onto the page as it occurred to him. It's beautifully written, but it's a mess. It's like someone gave you a box of extremely expensive chocolates but left them in the back seat of the car and they all melted together.

I had to wade through every page to the bitter end. In fact, I read half a dozen other novels in the meantime purely to provide myself with a break. It was like stopping for oxygen while climbing Mt Everest. Hey, it's nice to say you reached the top, but was it really worth the frostbite?

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Read it, if only for the wrong reasons
This had been sitting on my shelf for a long time, and being a slow (thorough!) reader anyway, i was slightly nervous of devoting half a year to a book i wouldnt enjoy. Read more
Published 16 days ago by I. Galloway

1.0 out of 5 stars Too bad
I read about 600 pages of this book before deciding on giving up. I could have finished it, but I realized that I had no desire to do so. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Diego de Soto

5.0 out of 5 stars read it all....
I can't really agree with anyone suggesting that you don't read the first section of this book, what a cop out. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Mr. Oliver Hickman

4.0 out of 5 stars Two months after finishing it...
And I'm still trying to make sense of it all. Be clear on this, it is a very complicated and dense read. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Euan Wallace

3.0 out of 5 stars Ulysses or Not?
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Read more
Published 14 months ago by D. Jackson

1.0 out of 5 stars Gave up after 500 pages
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Mike Hogan

5.0 out of 5 stars worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously
Most seem to agree that this is THE Pynchon book. Definitely not a quick,light read, but there IS a plot which picks up pace after a while. And what a plot! Read more
Published 23 months ago by Jm Leven

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful!
Maybe it's just me, but have my fellow reviewers gone mad?! How can you describe a book as great and give it 4 stars, then advise people to skip the first 215 pages as they're... Read more
Published on 25 Sep 2007 by Mike Bostock

4.0 out of 5 stars A tough start but once it gets going its great
I can understand a lot of the reviews here - a lot of beard-stroking professors have waxed lyrically about how great this and people want to get into that beard-stroking professor... Read more
Published on 27 Aug 2007 by David Hampson

4.0 out of 5 stars Love and rockets
Gravity's Rainbow is a heavy book, in many ways. It was a very slow read; I read English usually pretty swiftly, but this one took me a long time. Read more
Published on 7 Aug 2007 by Mikko Saari

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