Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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88 of 103 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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5 of 5 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
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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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously, 15 Dec 2007
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. The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets - but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. For the first half, or even two thirds, of the book the focus shifts between different characters and locations who, at first, seem to have no connection but WWII, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, and it actually becomes quite gripping. For a finale, he brings all the characters together in a scene so hilarious and brilliant it's the only time I've ever felt like giving a book a round of applause. That scene is obviously his homage to James Joyce, being very reminiscent of the famous chapter in Ulysses where Joyce introduces a series of disparate characters going about their business, apparently unconnected, and then ties them all together by having a character take a coach trip through Dublin and encounter them all. Pynchon does it with a slapstick balloon chase.
Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner; most seem contrived and pointless,without any real reason to be, but Pynchon is a real original, inspired and authentic - also a bit awe-inspiring. Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD!
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