Antes de emprender el viaje, es necesario pertrecharse. Se trata de un largo camino en el que te encontrarás con incontables obstáculos: múltiples personajes, continuas referencias a términos sobre ingeniería, matemáticas, química; saltos temporales constantes y cambios de escenario repentinos, casi en el mismo párrafo; una narración deslavazada, que no sabes por dónde te va a llevar; extrañas y brillantes metáforas. Pero también son de agradecer los paisajes que podrás apreciar durante el viaje: bellas y líricas descripciones, personajes atractivos de nombre carismático, erudición enciclopédica, visiones salidas de una potente imaginación, humor extravagante.

Con Pynchon no valen las medias tintas, exige el cien por cien de tu atención. La determinación es esencial, sobre todo en los pasajes más aburridos, que los hay. Una vez mentalizado de lo que te vas a encontrar durante este largo peregrinaje, empiezas a leer, emocionado pero también algo atemorizado por las dimensiones de la obra y por el autor, siempre impredecible. Pero sabes que merecerá la pena el esfuerzo.

La primera parte te reafirma en lo que ya pensabas: el libro va a ser un hueso duro de roer. Se trata de una novela excesiva en todos los sentidos. Un planteamiento en el que Pynchon te da a conocer docenas de personajes, la gran mayoría para no volver a aparecer más, pero a los que sin embargo intenta darles voz. Las escenas y argumentos crecen sin parar, ramificándose salvajemente. Terminas desorientado, ya que Pynchon no se para a explicar demasiado lo que está sucediendo. Pero bueno, es la seña de identidad de los autores posmodernos, plantear situaciones que no tendrán solución. Pynchon te da a conocer el escenario: Londres, 1944, acabando la segunda guerra mundial, con las bombas volantes V-2 cayendo desde el cielo. Conoces al que parece será el protagonista de la novela, Tyrone Slothrop, militar americano que trabaja en inteligencia y que tiene la capacidad de predecir cuándo caerá uno de estos artefactos del cielo porque se lo avisa una erección, todo ello producto de un experimento de un alemán demente, Jamf. Pero Pynchon no abunda en más explicaciones. Aun así, tienes paciencia porque hay suficientes páginas por delante para entrar en detalles. Parece que la idea es hacerse con las diversas piezas de un enorme rompecabezas, sin tener un plan claro de cómo van a encajar. Hasta aparece una sección sobre estudios paranormales aplicados al espionaje donde es posible comunicarse con los muertos. Pynchon recurre al uso de cancioncillas humorísticas y paródicas, un recurso marca de la casa. Sexo, mucho sexo y pornografía y escatología tienen su lugar en la trama, en algunas escenas realmente desagradables y obscenas. Y es que Pynchon no tiene freno, no le importa tocar temas que provoquen rechazo. Él va por libre y utiliza todos los recursos a su alcance.

Empiezas a entender el porqué de la polémica que rodea a esta novela, tanto las cosas malas que dicen sobre ella, como las buenas. Te viene a la cabeza el artículo ‘Las posibilidades perdidas de la ciencia-ficción’, de Jonathan Lethem, que se publicó en The Village Voice, en el que analiza lo que podría haber significado para la ciencia ficción el que ‘El arco iris de gravedad’ hubiese ganado el Premio Nebula de 1973, al que estaba nominado: "En 1973, El arco iris de gravedad de Thomas Pynchon recibió el Premio Nebula, el mayor galardón otorgado en el campo antes conocido como "ciencia-ficción" (un término que prácticamente ha caído en el olvido)..." ( ‘The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’)

En la segunda parte de la novela es cuando empieza a ser reconocible el Pynchon que más te gusta, el de  ‘V.’ y  ‘La subasta del lote 49’. Parece que tenías razón respecto a Slothrop, ya que éste empieza a tener más preponderancia en la historia. Entras en un escenario donde predomina el juego de máscaras y los cambios de identidad, y donde Slothrop es el blanco de todo tipo de estrategias. No es raro por tanto que S. caiga en un estado de paranoia permanente. Te introduces en un tramo donde resalta el paradigma posmoderno. Slothrop es producto de visiones y de manía persecutoria; el delirio es constante, así como la utilización y acumulación de siglas; parece que exista un enorme ente que lo controla todo; Guerra=Capitalismo. El humor está muy presente, con una serie de persecuciones dignas del mejor cine mudo. Empiezas a entender mucho más a los personajes y cómo están definidos.

Y entras en la tercera parte. Y no puedes evitar exclamar a viva voz: "¡Qué cabrón!" A lo largo de quinientas páginas, Pynchon te adentra en la Zona, en su particular visión de la Guerra y la Devastación. Te presenta, en un absoluto frenesí, un mundo dominado por descripciones de pesadilla, hiperrealistas, barrocas y bizarras, donde tienen lugar todo tipo de personajes, aparte de los ya conocidos: estafadores, traficantes, degenerados, enanos, es difícil distinguir la realidad del panorama mítico que Pynchon te propone. Parece que todo empieza a cobrar sentido. El rompecabezas del principio toma forma de espiral, de molécula con múltiples brazos, donde todo se dirige hacia un núcleo pero donde no es necesario que todas las ramificaciones tengan un final y una explicación, porque están ahí como parte del Juego, para darle sentido al Todo que es la novela. Slothrop tiene su misión personal, encontrar una explicación a su pasado, y saber qué sucede con el Cohete. Los personajes que se cruzan en su camino también tienen su propia historia: Squalidozzi, Enzian, Tchitcherin, Pökler, Greta. Así como algunos de los lugares que Pynchon te va presentando: Mittelwerke y sus túneles, Berlín o el Sudoeste de África. Todo ello te recuerda la imagen de la conspiración por antonomasia, esos tableros que aparecen en las películas de conspiraciones, esos donde un montón de hilos están atados a chinchetas que conectan entre sí cientos de fotos.

Ese afán por los saltos constantes entre tramas y cuestiones, la inmersión en los temas históricos y enciclopédicos, el sexo como arma, ese ir más allá en los géneros y estilos, convierten la lectura de ‘El arco iris de la gravedad’ en todo un reto. Pynchon parece que es como una religión. Has de tener fe y creer que te va a llevar a buen puerto. O eres creyente, o no lo eres.

"Be sick," is the advice I got on reading Gravity's Rainbow. "Be sick and bedridden and read the whole thing through with no interruptions, and when you're done, flip back to page one and do the whole thing again."

And I get it: that would indeed be a good way to understand this drunken maelstrom of a book. But I don't care enough about it to do that, and also I don't get sick very often, so I was forced to just muddle through. Have I unlocked its many secrets? I have not. I can't tell you what Gravity's Rainbow means to a Pynchon enthusiast; I can tell you what it's like for regular folks.

Here's what it's like: dicks. Dicks dicks dicks dicks dicks. Dicks in the shape of rockets; dicks in the shape of bananas; dicks in the shape of dicks; people in the shape of dicks. The main guy's superpower is that he gets a hardon whenever a rocket is headed in his direction, and what can you say about that plot? At one point a guy turns into his own dick. Even saying "This is the most dick-centric book I've ever read" feels insufficient: when it comes to dicks, this book makes Henry Miller look like Jane Austen.

Also, this is the only book I've ever read where I get the feeling that the scene - the world the author is trying to describe - is actually a cartoon.

When I read the embarrassing Bleeding Edge a while back I was pretty uncomfortable with how it dealt with race and women, and at this point we've definitely got a trend here. I don't think Pynchon thinks he's racist, but he deals with race in a Tarantino-esque way that doesn't sit well with me. I don't think he gets women at all.

So it's a tale told by a dick, full of dicks, signifying dicks. But while it was basically too much dick for me, I could kinda get into a bit of it. Just the tip of it. It's madcap and smart and it feels original. And Pynchon's the only guy I can think of who can include song lyrics in his book and they're actually cool. Look, it's probably the best 800-page book about Nazis and dicks I've ever read, and please don't make me read The Kindly Ones.

Still, though. This is my third Pynchon book; I think I get the idea, and it's not really my favorite idea. I'm not going to be sharing anyone's pus pudding just for an excuse to read it again.

Years ago, the retina of my left eye detached and I underwent major surgery. Since then, the annual eye exam has brought a certain amount of anxiety, and yes, paranoia over every flash and floater. A week ago, the eye doctor identified a hole in the macular of my left eye. If a V-2 nano-rocket hit the the retina, it might look like this macular hole:

n  n

The macular hole has an interesting effect on my vision:


n  n

Fortunately, my right eye is dominant so I can read well enough, for now. The surgery is scheduled in a couple weeks. It is an out-patient procedure under a local anesthesia, but recovery requires I spend 2 weeks with my face kept parallel to the ground.

The reason I'm bringing all this up is to to garner sympathy explain how I 'saw' Gravity's Rainbow and why I've given it only one-star and deter a skewering by Pynchon lovers who wouldn't kick a girl while she'd down—would they?

Some scenes were all too clear: S&M acts including consumption of shit and urine, the sad plight of an adolescent sex slave (enjoyed by Slothrop, a major protagonist), bad 'poetry', bizarre appearances of what could be described as slapstick or burlesque acts out of nowhere, etc. However, amidst all the drugs, sex and despair were concise and interesting nuggets of wisdom, such as:

If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Paranoia is perhaps the major theme.

No doubt, Pynchon is brilliant, and some passages were inspirational, but I felt I had to sift through lots of...sand. At times, my comprehension of an idea felt as exciting as panning for gold—if one tiny morsel sparkled, I was thrilled.

Despite the difficulty reading Gravity's Rainbow, I continued to the end in hope of pumping up my linguistic muscles and cleansing my linguistic palate. I understand that patterns in what we read or write prime us to repeat those patterns automatically in our own writing. Psycholinguists refer to this influence as structural priming or syntactic persistence. Priming occurs at the subconscious level. It is very powerful, and for that reason, I will not finish novels that strike me as poorly written.

But writing isn’t just about forming varied and understandable sentences. It is about creating syntactic delights that thrill the reader, most of whom find pleasure in encountering language that departs from what they are primed to expect. I admire writers who find new ways to employ language.

I did not enjoy Gravity's Rainbow; it deviated so much from my own priming that I often found it incomprehensible. Although I used a reader's companion guide, many of the references were unrecognizable as vocabulary--just not on my personal map. Reading GR was as frustrating as trying to read with my bad eye, through which straight lines are wavy and letters in the middle of my vision collapse into a blurry gray hole.

Not many books have ever defeated me. This one did. Like, what the fuck did I even just read?

I read my first Pynchon novel, The Crying of Lot 49, when I was a teenager. I remembered it as weird and cool and formative, to a kid who mostly grew up on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Piers Anthony and Robert Heinlein and that sort of thing.

It wasn't until many years later that I reread The Crying of Lot 49, as an adult, and found it cool and interesting but not quite as deep and mind-blowing as I did when I was a teen, and then I read Inherent Vice and thought it was rather "meh." But I still liked the ideas that bubbled up in both books, and I knew Thomas Pynchon is a Very Big Literary Deal, so I figured sooner or later I should tackle one of his big books. Hence, his so-called magnum opus, Gravity's Rainbow.

Like, what is this shit even?

Okay, first of all, I quickly realized this was not a book suitable for listening to as an audiobook. It's too immense, too sprawling, with too many tangents and characters, and I was lost.

At some point, I realized I had no idea what was going on and "cheated" by reading the Wikipedia summary of the novel.

It didn't help. I was still lost, and plowed ahead because dammit, I was going to finish this book. But I confess: it just sort of ran past me in episodic snippets that left little impression. I tried to focus on what was going on, I really did, but it seemed like every time I tuned in, it was another long tedious passage about Slothrop's penis.

Pynchon writes about penises a lot. Thomas Pynchon is very much a "dick lit" author. He is a Literary Manly Man Dude Lit Author of Penis Fiction.

No, seriously, there are orgies and cunts and descriptions of ejaculation, masturbation, cocks going anywhere and everywhere, and when Pynchon isn't writing about genitals he's writing about shit and piss and snot, and there's an early passage where Slothrop is nearly drowned in a tide of latrine effluent, graphically described as coming from a bunch of Negroes (Negroes and references to negro penises turn up with disturbing frequency)... I can understand why some of the panelists who considered Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer found it to be offensive and pornographic, because there really is a bunch of offensive pornography decorating the ideas (I can't even call it a story) that drive this book. At several points I was ready to bail because I really did not want to suffer through another passage of characters gratuitously describing bodily excretions and unnatural sex acts in some sort of literary gross-out exercise. But dammit I was going to finish this book, and dammit I did.

You'll notice I've ranted at length and haven't really talked about the plot. Well, damned if I can tell you what it was.

It's set at the end of and immediately after World War II, I guess. There's this guy, Lt. Slothrop, and this shadowy agency is tracking all his sexual encounters in London, which they figure out creates some sort of Poisson distribution on a map that predicts where the next German rocket-bomb will hit. And Slothrop goes around having sex with lots of people, which is why there are so many passages about Slothrop's penis, but there are many, many, oh so goddam many other characters, and Pynchon writes about their penises too. Except the ladies, and then Pynchon writes about their cunts, quims, pubic bushes, you get the idea.

Uh, right, the plot? Seriously, I have no fucking clue! This book was a 40-hour acid trip, a carnucopia of vulgarisms and clever, clever references (ibid) because Thomas Pynchon is such a clever, clever lad.

There's a 400+ page companion to help people get through this fucking book and make sense of it.

I had V and Mason & Dixon on my TBR list too, but honestly, I feel like I am so done with Thomas Pynchon, I don't know if I will ever muster the will to subject myself to another one of his horse-choking penis-epics.

(Har har, "horse choking penis," and you know, that might sound obscene in a way I didn't intend, except I'm pretty sure Pynchon went there too, or at least he totally would.)

This book done broke me. My brain is scarred. Gimme something light and murderous in the way of a thriller or a space blast'em up, I can't hang with this shit.

I'm not gonna lie: Thomas Pynchon's novel "Gravity's Rainbow" is not an easy book to read. I actually read this years ago, after several failed starts. The first time was in college, and if I remember correctly I couldn't even get past the first page. Thankfully, I stuck with it, because despite its apparent lack of plot or linear narrative or any semblance of a reality that we, as humans, can grasp or recognize, its a friggin' awesome book.

Set during the end of World War II, the novel follows, in Pynchon-esque style, numerous characters, many of whom are forgotten along the way, reappear much later in the book, or simply killed off abruptly and for no apparent reason.

It's not that I don't recall much from the book, it's that I recall so much stuff that it becomes a confusing jumble in my head. Reading a Pynchon novel is like having a wet dream during an acid trip in a sensory deprivation chamber. (Not that I've had one of those...)

There are, of course, psychic British spies, transvestite Nazis, perverted Jews, and lots and lots of musical numbers in this book. Seriously. Pynchon writes like a psychotic poet, and I have since tried to read everything he has written.

"Gravity's Rainbow" is one of those books that I plan on going back and re-reading, because I know that I will find plenty more crazy fun stuff that I missed the first time.

The story of rockets in a vast global conspiracy transcending international borders and alliances, The Gravity's Rainbow, sounds like a big joke. It is extensive because the book has 1100 pages, and I am joking because it defies any attempt at a summary. Let's say it's a paranoid explosion, a psychedelic experience, a literary delirium tremens, breaking free from all genre conventions; we go from temporal upheavals to spatial teleportations without any indication or the slightest clue: get by. The recurrence of symbols and motifs maintains a narrative continuity in this large, exuberant, hair-raising corpus. That's a hermetic reading, which turns out to be very dull. Floating from this apocalyptic and gladly grotesque mess (we speak of realistic grotesque to define the genre of the book if defining such a work is possible), some fantastic inventive finds and some well-barred scenes. Too little to keep the exhausted reader engaged.

I tried sixty-nine pages for the purposes of the Group Read (a Group Read of Gravity’s Rainbow on Goodreads—a GR of GR on GR, or GR3) but tentatively closed the novel thenceforth. My first thought (I am an intellectual) was WTF?! This has over twenty five-star ratings on the first page?! Then I had to concede I simply don’t like Pynchon’s writing style, period. William raised this point in his review of The Tunnel—you’re helpless against an author’s crystalline prose if you simply can’t stomach his particular talent for arranging squiggles. My problem with the first sixty-nine pages? I found his style awkwardly literary, stuffed with showboating passages of verbose insulation (as though caulking the enormous fucker)—I felt the style basically worked against the efficiency of the sentences, i.e. he seems to be taking unnecessarily circuitous routes to describe whatever acronym-riddled antics were happening (as far as I could make out, sub-Catch-22 shenanigans mixed with equally dated black humour) so the reader has to unpeel each little Pychonian prawn as though inside lies some twinkling epithet of significance. Also, the point of view shifts from the ice-cold third-person narrator to the internal states of the dozen or so interchangeable characters with equally stupid names for no particular reason I could fathom for those sixty-nine pages. I was impressed by various passages but I couldn’t commit to another 834 pages . . . there simply wasn’t enough cohering for me in the style, and books that warm up around page 467 are not my bag. I tried The Crying of Lot 49 earlier this year and found the dude such a postmodern relic. I mean, Foster Wallace can do this standing on his head but also offers a devastating emotional wallop into the bargain. William H. Gass writes funnier bawdy limericks and songs too. Anyway. I’m sure he’s brilliant but I really don’t care, I have other boyfriends.

Selections From My Mental Commentary Upon Reading Gravity's Rainbow

Difficult my ass, I know who Werner Van Braun is.......... What a fantastic name........ Errrrr...............Maybe I need to reed that again......... Third time's a charm!.......... Shit........... Okay, who/what/when/where/why/how the fuck is going on?............... Okay, I think I get what's going on here........... Never mind.............. This whole thing is absolute rubbish............... Did Dane Cook's boner write that paragraph?................. That was awesome, I have no fucking clue what Pynchon's talking about, but he baffles me in a really elegant way....................... Alright, this is out of Dane Cooke's league, I think Lou Reed's boner wrote that section.................. Obama should appoint Pynchon the "naming things and people czar"............... This whole thing is absolutely fucking awesome................. I never want to read this part ever again............. I'm going to have to immediately reread this part........... That's not even supposed to mean anything............ Finished, onto Section 2!................ u.s.w.

Over the past few years, I've tackled several supposedly difficult novels with relative ease. As soon as I encountered the Erededy waits for pot section, I devoured Infinite Jest like a bored housewife reading Sweedish torture porn. Blood Meridian may have been a struggle to get through, but only because McCarthy's prose is so dense with a kind of a savage beauty that I was fatigued after reading three pages. War and Peace didn't justify it's difficulty to me at all, unless you measure difficulty by page length. I don't want to come off as narcissistic about my cognition, but if you think I'm guilty, I would understand you. (Get it?)

And then I encountered Gravity's Rainbow* There are some websites out there who belittle the difficulty of this book. They do this to speaking directly to first time readers. I guess that's admirable, I can certainly understand the proclivity to hype up and push something you love, but it's also inaccurate. For a GR virgin, a good portion of the novel is destined to be simply befuddling. I mean, for fucks sake, a major portion of the book is about rocket science. GR is a perfect storm of difficulty: Pynchon doesn't help his reader out with the plot; the narrative weaves between time, place, central character, and/or voice with little or no warning; Pynchon throws out a plethora of references to science, history, pop culture, scatological jokes, Norse mythology, etc that you would need several PHDs in a multitude of different areas of concentration to fully grasp; the prose, while often heartbreaking or hilarious or mind-blowing is not exactly accessible and often frustrating.

Out of any other novel I've read, GR most demands a second read. I actually bought the companion book, but I found that it was not particularly helpful. It provided minutia when I would have been fine if they had just explained what it meant relating to what was happening with the narrative and it neglected some things I had question about. Also, it made for an extremely clunky and disjointed reading experience. Eventually, I found a website that had quick summaries for each episode with particular emphasis on callbacks to previous events. I read these after the corresponding episode and found it to be of great use. But I tossed the Instapaper link, so good luck with Google.

My final rating reflects a compromise of some sort. A couple hundred pages into the book I wasn't enjoying myself. The only thing that kept me from quitting was the hours put in and the understanding that if I didn't finish it then, I probably would never come back to it. I soon started getting in the flow of things, and started seeing what all the fuss is about. That's the thing about Pynchon. You'll read one section and think that people sanctify this book as a form of intellectual swagger. And then the next section will completely connect with you and leave you thinking that this is the best book of the 20th century. I certainly noticed that my reaction to the reading experience was subject to my mental state. That's true of all books, but with GR it's almost like before you start reading you should do transcendental meditation, or go to a yoga class, or snort several lines of cocaine to truly prepare yourself. You have to surrender yourself over to the text, or you're going to realize that you've been reading for the past thirty minutes and you have not understood a single thing.

The four star rating is far from conclusive. Even during the last 100 pages I wavered somewhere between 3 and 5 stars. The goodreads star system completely fails the first encounter with Gravity's Rainbow. I give it a @.^ out of 10.0. Maybe a Ω-. I just know I'm really glad it's finally out of my to read soon pile. Now the problem is I kinda can't wait to read it again.




* I bought GR years ago, and had picked it up a few times since then only to shelve it. Over the past couple years, since I've started reading serious fiction again, I've had GR on my 'to read soon pile,' and I've had a few false starts, only to put the book aside after a dozen pages with a resolution to read when I had spare time.

Thomas Pynchon is like someone who talks to himself far too much and always in blustering major chords. As such he is rather exhausting. On the other hand about half of what he says is enthralling so at the end of the day he is worth the effort. There are dozens of radiant and exhilarating vignettes in Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ve just done the English sweets scene which was splendid though there’s the obligatory slipshod lack of editing: “his tongue a hopeless holocaust” – is that “hopeless” funny or just absurd? I think maybe it’s his vision which is his problem. For starters this, like the other book of his I’ve read, is rife with paranoia. There’s always this omnipresent ominous THEY out there – and as a result we have the feeling we’re being sold the bargain bin dualities of a Jehovah’s Witness. I think another problem is, he sets out by asking us to believe that this might be one of the greatest books ever written – which it patently isn’t. Once though one has recycled these misgivings there’s masses of excitement to be derived from his writing. He’s wonderfully like a motorist who takes no notice of the roads – and what fun it is to see him ploughing in reverse gear, with the windows rolled down, through people’s Sunday afternoon flower arrangements.

GRAVITY'S RAINBOW AS HORROR

A truly terrifying novel, from it's opening nightmare with the raw language of "A SCREAMING comes across the sky", to the dark paranoia, extraordinarily violent images, murders and battles and Nazi experiments and trapped children. This is not just your regular, "They're out to get me" Paranoia, this is wild Paranoia implicating the reader, confirmed by the narration, insane, surreal paranoia. Explosions, rockets, secrets, monsters, true EVIL. Gravity's Rainbow is a truly chilling horror novel.

GRAVITY'S RAINBOW AS COMEDY

A truly hilarious novel, from its slapstick cartoon characters bashing heads to the various jokes and worldplay to the custard-pie fights between Nazi aircraft. The novel truly takes nothing seriously, anyone can jump down the toilet to swim in the sewers at any time. It's a free-wheeling drug-fueled adventure of people bumbling around, blowing things up, wandering around in pig suits, and fighting giant octopuses.

GRAVITY'S RAINBOW AS TRAGEDY

A truly heartrendingly sad novel, with its themes of lonely lyrical lost love. Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake torn apart by the vagaries of loyalty and war, great sweeping flights of narrative fancy showing us the melancholy beauty of ordinary soldiers, Slothrop numbed and overwhelmed by the news of the death of his friend, Pokler and his daughter, and always this soaring, operatic sadness, a longing for a better time glimpsed sometimes through the fog of war, allowed sometimes to breathe, before disappearing forever...

GRAVITY'S RAINBOW AS ADVENTURE

A truly exciting novel, full of wild shootouts and crazed chase scenes, and conspiracies conspiracies conspiracies, intrigue in high places, secret books, codes and ciphers, Nazis vs. Good Guys, an ol' fashioned pulp adventure, explosive and maniacally fun, a rambling, insane action-thriller as gunfight-packed as "Raiders of the Lost Ark".

Possibilities...
Gravity's Rainbow as Philosophy
Gravity's Rainbow as Politics
Gravity's Rainbow as Romance
Gravity's Rainbow as War Story
Gravity's Rainbow as Fantasy
Gravity's Rainbow as Science Fiction
Gravity's Rainbow as Art

There is no doubt that Pynchon is a brilliant writer. His ability to expound in detail on diverse and difficult topics is incredible (especially for the pre-Internet era), as is the intricacy of the plot: full of interconnecting references, allusions, metaphors on top of metaphors - Gravity’s Rainbow is truly a virtuoso performance. To read it is to be swept away on a wild ride through Pynchon’s imagination, unbridled by form or convention. The entire enterprise seems to defy the rational laws of physics – such a thing cannot maintain cohesion, and yet somehow it does, improbably, and against all expectations.

n  n    HOWEVER... n  n

Firstly, there is the seemingly endless obsession with penises and penis-related activities. I’ve compiled for your amusement a report of the number of times certain words appear in the text (please try to suppress your natural impulse to giggle uncontrollably):

Breasts – 33
Buttocks – 23
Clit/Clitoris – 25
Cock – 81
Cunt – 26
Erect/Erection – 45
Fuck/Fucking – 108
Hardon – 28
Masturbate – 14
Penis – 40
Semen – 27
Sperm – 14
Thigh – 53
Tits – 10

The point here is not to admonish Pynchon for his use of profanity (which I don’t have a problem with), but to demonstrate just how fixated the book is on the subject. By comparison, in a novel which is ostensibly about the Second World War, the word Nazi appears only 40 times (admittedly, the word rocket does appear 404 times, though I suspect several of these may be sly references to Slothrop’s own personal "rocket"). Each of these words (and these are just the most obvious examples: not included in the analysis are the multitude of more obscure and sometimes snicker-inducing slang terms – quim, jissom - which occur with less frequency individually, but are significant in aggregate) represents yet another entire passage of text devoted to the fascinating subject of Erections: How To Spot ’Em and Where To Stick ’Em. What begins as a series of amusing and risqué little sketches becomes exceedingly tedious around the time we are informed of Slothrop’s 115th Throbbing Hardon, brought to you by the fleeting presence of yet another (probably underage) young lady, who is in possession of breasts, buttocks, thighs or other features in a combination that is no doubt exceptional and noteworthy in its own uniquely individual way. I’m no prude about these things, but enough is enough. I mean, what the hell is this book actually about, anyway?

What begins quite promisingly in the early part of the novel, has utterly degenerated by the time we are thrust into The Zone. The novel loses all grip on reality and devolves into a obsessive fever dream of sex, drugs and paranoia. What are we to make of the tortuous paranoid conspiracy theories, the weird maritime pedophiliac orgies, the fantastic intercourse of every variety from the commonplace to the impossible, the seemingly random diversions that occur without rhyme or reason? Is this really anything more than titillation and cheap thrills? These absurd antics persist through most of the novel, but Pynchon - brilliant writer that he is - can be trusted to extricate himself from this quagmire, and he does so satisfactorily if somewhat anticlimactically in the final section, but he neglects to take the reader with him, leaving them to wallow in the shelled-out muck of The Zone, confused, maybe slightly aroused, and feeling like the party has gone off somewhere without them.

I do not question Pynchon’s talent, or his courage, and I do not question the magnitude of this achievement. But despite its virtuosity, despite its verbosity, I simply don’t feel like Gravity’s Rainbow has anything meaningful to say, or at least, I don't think there is enough here to justify its reputation. Where is the substance? Where is the humanity? Yes, there are genuine moments, but these appear in stark contrast with (or are perhaps inserted to justify) the rest of the novel, which is dominated by cartoonish characters in farcical situations, lacking all but the most tenuous link to the real world. Only by analysing and drawing connections between metaphors and symbols do we locate something approaching an underlying meaning (whether or not this is what the author intended). But in each case the execution appears more impressive than the substance. Sure, the novel says some things about life, and death, and war, but it says little that is really surprising or profound, and it spends vastly more time being childish, silly, and indulgent.

I can only imagine the novel’s fresh and uninhibited style found some sort of resonance in the early 1970s zeitgeist, but I don’t perceive that freshness reading it today. For a book that is widely considered one of the greatest of the last century, I was left unimpressed. Or rather: Gravity’s Rainbow impressed me, but it failed to move me. The three stars represent an ambivalent response, not an apathetic one. Never before have I read a novel that is simultaneously and in equal magnitude a work of genius, and a piece of shit.

друге перечитування+редагування+коментування+написання післямови - докладніше про роман буде в ній - цілих 55 тисяч знаків :)
вдруге вже читаєш ніби геть інший текст, коли знаєш персонажів і головні теми всієї прози Пінчона. наскільки він майстерно об'єднав у своєрідний гіпертекст усю свою творчість - фрази, образи, люди, теми вільно мандрують у його романах/оповіданнях/есеях/передмовах - ось приклад генія, який може втримати багатошарову конструкцію-айсберг з міфологічними, реліг��йними, історіософськими, науковими, філософськими, літературними контекстами+божевільна гра слів (цілі епізоди будуються заради однієї кумедної фрази)+купа кіно- і телеалюзій+специфічний гумор=можна все життя читати тільки його й не втомлюватися щоразу знаходити щось нове.
мрію, що колись він увесь буде українською - оце зараз готується третя книга (усього їх поки 9)