Gravity's Rainbow [Paperback]

 

 

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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.

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.

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! The most prominent theme centres on one Tyrone Slothrop, an American in England, who was raised in Germany in the decades before WWII, and was exposed in some sort of Pavlovian conditioning experiment (conducted by one Laszlo Jamf) which left him with a sensitivity to a compound which turns out to be present in the V2 rockets raining down on London. 'Pavlovian conditioning' refers (and this is very crude, I realise) to the pioneering work of Behaviourist Psychologist Pavlov(funnily enough) who studied the effect, probably long known to dog and horse trainers, whereby the subject is given a reward for some 'thing', then eventually the subject will perform the 'thing' in anticipation of the reward. It is noted by British boffins and secret service types that every time Slothrop has a sexual encounter a V2 lands not long afterwards, and he is held in a 'facility' sort of like a a Bletchley Park (where Turing et al worked to break the nazi Enigma code), dedicated to occult and psychological warfare, to determine whether he is actually anticipating the stimulus, and therefore predicting V2 strikes. 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, and whose relation to the main plot isn't made clear, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, when Slothrop escapes and heads to Germany to find Jamf (I can't remember why, to be honest), and a 'team' is sent after him to castrate him. It actually becomes quite gripping, and 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.


The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets. I have known more than a few compulsive talkers in my life, whose thoughts are always rushing ahead of them, whose every word suggests another word. Pynchon is like this, but elevated to genius; everything has ramifications, and the ramifications have ramification, some just tangential, some linked to themes which recur throughout the book, but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. It's wrong, however, to see these flights of fancy as interruptions to the plot; they are what Pynchon DOES - brilliantly - his unique talent.

And what are the overarching themes of the book? Well, what is Gravity's Rainbow? Time? Einstein's theories as the occult faith of the twentieth century? I can't remember if the phrase 'Gravity's Rainbow' actually occurs in the text[afterthought: see the Amazon reviewer; I may have missed the obvious], but it's a suitably indeterminate title for a book which seems to me, like its predecessor 'V'(a harder read, I found, and so do most people), to be essentially about highlighting the fundamentally irrational and even occult basis for much of twentieth century behaviour, something we can see clearly when we look at say the fifteenth century, but less so when it gets closer to home. But don't expect the obvious.


Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, to try and to do something more than narrative, and end up doing less; many have tried to write the Great American Novel, or the Great Successor to Ulysses; 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. A reading experience way beyond the routine; Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD! THIS, for all its faults, is the Great [late] Twentieth Century Novel!

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5.0 out of 5 stars Staggering
I'm going to keep this short as you'll need all the reading time possible for the actual book. My first impressions were: It's massive, it's confusing, it's hard work. Read more

Published 3 months ago by Simon

1.0 out of 5 stars Unreadable
I have virtually never given up on a book before - generally, I always plough on even if I'm not enjoying it too much in the hope that it will improve. Read more

Published 9 months ago by Steven Janes

4.0 out of 5 stars Gravity's Rainbow
This book is a little hard going, at first, but, I expect this from a Thomas Pynchon novel. I enjoy books that make you think, and this one certainly does that.

Published 16 months ago by Leslie A. Heaps

1.0 out of 5 stars terrible read I'm afraid
I am an avid reader. I usually give the benefit of the doubt to any book or author. I have read approximately a book a month over the past three years this is the first time I... Read more

Published 17 months ago by G. Brooks

1.0 out of 5 stars Over Hyped
The reviews that state this book is great are over rating it.... I was thoroughly disappointed. He changes viewpoints in a way that confuses the reader and nothing happens for... Read more

Published on 30 Dec 2009 by S. C. Young

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 on 27 Oct 2009 by I. Galloway

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 on 18 April 2009 by Mr. Omnibus Biscuit

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 on 24 Feb 2009 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 on 28 Aug 2008 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 on 12 Mar 2008 by Mike Hogan

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