Pretty much essential if you want to tackle this particular novel.

Five pages or so into Gravity's Rainbow, I had no idea what was going on. This companion was essential to making any kind of sense of Pynchon's... what's the word... masterpiece? At times, this book provided crucial insight or context to illuminate an otherwise incomprehensible passage in GR. At other times, though, the book seemed bloated. Do I really need an annotation for every reference in GR to weather, telling me whether or not it really rained on such-and-such a day in England in 1945? I do not. Gravity's Rainbow is in the neighborhood of 800 pages; the least a companion could do is be concise.

Hard to say whether I liked it or not... extremely useful, though, if you're writing a paper.

This definitely helped me out a lot in reading the book. Where this kinda thrived was in some of the more complicated sections just kinda letting you know about some more important themes to look for and also just more important meanings behind the episodes. I preferred this to actual summaries because I felt like some of the episode summaries on the internet where just wrong and mistaking what was actually happening or also just some of the characters meanings and intentions. The thing I didn’t love about it was that it was incredibly specific and had a lot that I didn’t really think was to necessary and just ignored a lot of things that happened as it mainly just dig deep into obscure references and gave overall meaning.

27. A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel, 2nd Edition by Steven Weisenburger
published: originally 1988, 2nd edition is from 2006
format: 400 page paperback
acquired: March 20 to help with GR
read: Apr 1 - May 22
rating: **** stars

There are other sources for help with GR, but I liked this one because it was crazy detailed, translated almost every foreign language bit and tried to decipher the meaning under every name and it just made me feel more comfortable. It also has little mini-summaries of each episode. I would read these before reading the episode (!)—even as I know they didn't really always capture what really happens in those episodes. This just helped reduce my stress of trying to figure out what was going on as I read.

The book suffers a bit on the big picture. I had to go to wikipedia to understand some critical plot elements. GR is abstruse, but Weisenburger doesn't capture everything and occasionally doesn't make any comment on major things. But, still, this is an impressive compilation. I was very happy to have it.

Помічна книга. Дає зрозуміти напрямок руху подій в кожному епізоді веселки. 345 сторінок приміток в якості додаткового навантаження до 848. Шкодую що придбав старе видання, а не оновлене, де Вайзенбургер накопав ще 80 сторінок енциклопедичної аналітики.

Somewhat helpful but perhaps also diversionary. Am interested in Fowler's guide

You don’t really read this book as much as have it next to you as a reference while reading GR.

I picked up the 1988 version of this at a book sale. Both hilarious and aggravating, I discovered that duplicated pages 21-52 are in place of missing pages 53-84! Presumably the new edition corrected that.

Still, this is a most helpful resource even for his summaries of each section, which I often needed in order to follow what was going on in the text.

Weisenburger is fond of “analepsis” as much as Pynchon loves the word “preterite.”

So, I have mixed thoughts about using guides. I've read books filled with end notes and/or footnotes, which tend to both enhance the reader's understanding and appreciation of a given work, but at the same time slow down the pace of the reading and distract the reader from the flow of the narrative. This was the first time that I've purchased a separate reader's guide for a work. I read the first 200 pages or so of Pynchon's novel without Weisenburger's 300+ page guide, but when one participant in my book group described the guide as "essential" to developing an understanding of Pynchon's multi-layered magnum opus -- packed full of puns, allusions, jokes, abstruse knowledge, and what not -- I decided to pick it up.

Prior to buying the guide I did not feel like I was picking up every reference, nor did I feel that everything in this book was making sense, but I felt like I had a sufficient enough understanding so that I didn't feel "lost." Yet, after beginning the guide I realized that there was a great deal that I was missing -- the significance of certain dates, the astrological references and their significance to the narrative, the ridiculously detailed and superfluous plot detours made simply in order to make one little pun.

But as with many guides, much of what the author focuses on -- and especially so with a book such as this -- is mere conjecture and is presented in a way to support his specific reading of the text. I didn't spend much time comparing and contrasting different guides, but apparently Weisenburger's reading does differ in some significant ways from other GR guides out there.

There were also certain references that I would have expected to have found notes on, but to my surprise I found no elucidation from Weisenburger. And then there were other points that I felt needed no clarification that Weisenburger felt a need to explain further -- for example explanations of who Bugs Bunny is or who Laurel and Hardy were (though perhaps this "rascally rabbit" and famous comedy duo are more familiar in American culture than is the case abroad).

The guide definitely slowed me down and certainly distracted my reading of Pynchon, but it also was very helpful, especially insomuch as mythology, scientific matters and Kabbalism/occultism were concerned and regarding the significance of certain dates and the overall structure of the novel. If I ever read Gravity's Rainbow again -- not anytime soon -- I think that I would read it without a guide, just to appreciate the novel for the great big messy patchwork that it is.

Although Weisenberger gives readers at the onset instructions on how the guide can be used, and though I only read the guide notes after reading a given episode, it still is a bit of a disruption. And as much as I felt the guide helped me better understand Pynchon's work, it felt sometimes like a chore to read it. Like medicine, I realize that reading the guide was "good for me" and very helpful overall (it was extremely informative and gave me a greater appreciation of Pynchon's style), but there was more pleasure in reading the actual novel than in reading about all of the different sources and contexts contained therein.

I found this book to be very helpful in navigating Gravity's Rainbow.

This book was an endless help in reading Gravity's Rainbow. However, I would save it for a re-reading of the book. Just plow through Gravity's Rainbow and THEN come back to this book for a reference.

I found this to be an essential companion in reading Gravity's Rainbow.