Gravity's Rainbow is a rocket launched into the zenith of the literary sky…
Gravity's Rainbow is picaresque, enigmatic, obscene and labyrinthine. It is all things postmodern tumbled in the huge motley heap.
They say that amongst the more than four hundred of characters in the novel there is no protagonist. Well, there is a protagonist: it is the ominous SG-00000 rocket – an epicenter of evil, a mysterious artifact Tyrone Slothrop is looking for, but it hides from us until the end of the book.

…after a heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…

In this cosmic way, the Earth gets fertilized to be pregnant with the future…

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences.

History is a canvas painted by lunatics…

Hundreds of unimportant characters, dozens of instances of pedophilia, unending passages that ramble on and on with no actions or information of consequence, drug and sexual organ obsessions, and fecal matter galore! If all of these sound like what you enjoy in literature, then this is the book for you. While a great master of vocabulary, Pynchon just doesn't know when to quit. It seems that any time there is any hint that the story might be progressing, Pynchon has to go off on a barely related tangent for ten or twenty pages, rarely returning to or referencing this material again. While Laurance Sterne (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) managed to employ "the tangent" with aplomb, Pynchon takes them to such excess that I can't help but say he is a literary glutton, prone to verbose over-indulgence.

When I start a book, I finish it. It has taken me over a year and a half to get through this book because every time I read a little bit, I dislike it so much that I end up picking up another book to read instead. I'm well aware that I am bucking the trend by not liking this book, but it seems that the high ratings are in part due to pseudo-intellectuals reveling in the knowledge that they 'get it' and the rest of us just don't. While I do admit that Pynchon managed to write a very dense (as in "packed to the brim with information"), cryptic, and nigh unfathomable tome, those attributes are overwhelmed by the plodding narrative, explicit perversion (I know, that is a personal, rather than technical, fault), and lack of character development (I didn't learn enough about the hordes of characters to care about any single one of them). The intelligentsia may turn up their noses at my [obviously] inferior taste and comprehension, but nonetheless, I stand by my opinion. Gravity's Rainbow is quite possibly the worst book I've ever read.

Video Review

My friends sez this book is best book, so, natürlich, I had to read it.

It's mostly a collection of silly sex scenes and witty toilet humour that didn't strike me as much as it does everyone else.

Too big to finish to give 1*.
Far too funny to give 2*.
Too tedious to give 4*.
Too silly to give 5*.
Before reading I thought coprophagia was a weak reason to prevent this from being a Nobel Prize nominee, but having read the way in which it and other obscenities are presented, I'm surprised this won the National Book Award.

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This is the second Pynchon novel I have read and for some reason his writing style doesn't engage me, I can't empathize or understand his characters. It's in the syntax and his choice of emphasizing external settings or actions over any internal thoughts or feelings in the present moment. Yes, I don't see some of his references, but those I do pick up aren't mindblowingly interesting to me. I laughed a lot, but I also got stuck on scenes with characters I neither could remember nor care about. I liked Mexico and Pointsman at the beginning, but then had to wait about 500+ pages till I really got to see them again? The mathematical poetic analogies are the best written parts, the chemisty and psychology parts were interesting but not as intellectually satisfying for me. That said, I found it really hard to keep track of the plot. For me the book shows that a joke loses its power by being too long or wittier than it has to be. I've read long books at the slow pace I do before effectively, but for this it just doesn't work, you have to speed-read it to enjoy it.

Video review
Reading project

Shit Happens (... For A Reason???)

I know history is rarely kind to harsh criticisms about super nebulous or "difficult" authors , but dig this --

This book is horrible. After reading The Crying of Lot 49, Slow Learner and now this, I'm convinced that Thomas Pynchon is a hack, and the reason we don't hear from him is because he has nothing to say and knows that if we gave him a microphone and fifteen minutes he'd be found out.

90% of the people who pick up this novel won't finish it, and 90% of those who do won't like it. But 100% of them will pretend they do because Pynchon has the rare reputation of being one of those authors you "have to read". We're all convinced Pynchon is the possessor of some private, hidden genius -- that buried somewhere between the rambling nonsensical plot and the long winded, super cerebral, jargon riddled diatribes on "the Rocket" and the sexual implications of its trajectory and its relation to the symphonic form is a message of some import.

But for all the hype, someone please point to a passage in this novel that overreaches or couldn't be approximated by the efforts of anyone else who lived a super reclusive, hermetic lifestyle, owned a library card, and was given nearly a decade (the length of time between the publication of this novel and the author's previous one), and around 900 pages to do it in.

Seriously though, don't read this book. Aside from the small flutter of accomplishment I feel at actually finishing it, I've found it to be little more than a super frustrating and ultimately hateful reading experience.

This might be my favorite novel. I read it over the course of around three months, on my fourth attempt, when I was living in Tallinn, Estonia. Something about residence in a very small European country heightens one's sense of the absurd. I would bring it to lunch at the bars where I dined and start crying into my club sandwich when the book was sad and laughing into my kebabs when it was funny (which is nearly always) and there are a lot of bartenders who probably thought I was crazy.

The first rule of Gravity's Rainbow is you do not talk about Gravity's Rainbow. Just read it and don't worry about all the things you don't get. You could spend the rest of your life in graduate school of various sorts and not be as smart as Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, so don't sweat it.

There are swaths of this book that I definitely don't get. Pointsman, the psychologist? Didn't get it. Tchitcherine? Didn't get him, as a character, didn't understand why he did what he did, almost ever. But hidden inside all the dross is literature of unparalleled terror and beauty: the chapter in the very middle of the book about Pokler and his daughter, which left me literally bawling in public, the only time I can think of I've ever done that. Oddly, the description of U-boat latrines. The dejected Slothrop wandering Germany in a pig suit. Pirate Prentice's romance. The overgrown adenoid that invades London. The dogs grown intelligent. The sad allusions to Webern's death. The notorious scat sequence that people get all worked up over. The Proverbs for Paranoids interspersed throughout ("You will not touch the Master, but you may tickle his creatures..."). Blicero's carnival of torture, better than anything Gonzalez could devise, and more honest, too.

Gravity's Rainbow is a quick guide to all the ways you could have lived your life but did not; all the injustices you have not had to face; all the ridiculous theories of the afterlife you can't bear to accept. It teaches you how to read itself. It's been copied relentlessly, by Trainspotting and Kurt Cobain and reading it means there's a certain voice that will inhabit your brain forever. It's like going on Samhain vacation from reality with nothing but a crate of bananas and a load of S&M. Caveat emptor.

Las imposibilidades expresivas del lenguaje se presentan en todo momento. El más engorroso de estos, creo yo, es a la hora de tratar de expresar lo que uno siente y que el otro logre comprender este sentimiento. ¿Cómo puedo poner en palabras lo que causó en mi interior este libro a lo largo de 6 meses de lectura para que tú, hipotético lector, logres comprender una parte de lo que significa para mi persona esta obra? Este será un intento de, y no una reseña como plantea el formato.
La llegada de Pynchon a mi vida supuso un cambio. Un cambio a mi forma de leer, a mi percepción de la literatura y sus posibilidades. A las posibilidades de la narrativa se suma otra: la del lenguaje. Así también, una parte de mi visión sobre el mundo también cambió. ¿Qué tendrá más poder para transformar la percepción que el arte?

Ahora, ¿de qué trata este libro? Trata sobre toda la segunda mitad del siglo XX y nuestros días. Pynchon escribe una obra inmensa, soberbia e inclasificable. Una novela que llega al mundo durante la era Nixon. Una Norte América post Vietnam, post asesinado de Kennedy desorientada, donde la paranoia toma un nuevo rumbo en las vidas de los ciudadanos, porque luego de este hecho se disparó un pico de teorías conspirativas que buscaban darle un sentido a este hecho catastrófico que fue el asesinato de un presidente. Pero la novela no trata explicitamente sobre Kennedy (a pesar de que se hace mención de él, ya que el protagonista, Tyrone Slothrop fue compañero de clases en Harvard durante la estadía de Kennedy en Inglaterra ya que su padre, Joseph P. Kennedy, fue embajador de Estados Unidos en Londres), sino que plantea mucho más de lo que voy a poder abarcar en un pequeño post.

"Esto significa que esta guerra jamás fue política. Las políticas son un teatro para distraer a la gente de las necesidades de los mercados y la tecnología." La revelación del funcionamiento de la maquinaria termina de destrozar a uno de los centenares de personajes que componen la novela. Porque la guerra no fue más que eso: una pantomima para ocultar la Máquina que nos consume.
Pynchon no entra en de lleno en discusiones sobre nazismo, sino que discute el colonialismo europeo durante los siglos. En este caso, toca la historia de la etnia de los Hereros y su genocidio en manos del comandante alemán Lothar von Trotha durante el año 1904 en la África Alemana. Y acá logra algo que es muy singular: el autor no se apropia de las voces de los masacrados, sino que nos presenta la historia como meros espectadores de la matanza. Este hecho tendrá sus consecuencias a futuro en la obra, pero sigamos adelante.
En un mundo desolado, más cercano al apocalipsis que al paraíso, destrozado por la Primera y Segunda Guerra Mundial, viviendo el trauma de la pérdida de Vietnam y la muerte de la imagen que de alguna forma da esperanzas a un pueblo, la paranoia se convierte en el Dios del siglo XX. Una tierra donde las Corporaciones son el verdadero enemigo, y han dejado de ser formadas por hombres para ser un Ente con autonomía de nuestro accionar. Las corporaciones y el Mercado nos han consumido y no las podremos combatir porque ellas son nuestros nuevos Dioses.
Y en este contexto de destrucción y confusión absoluta es donde logra florecer la paranoia con la que intentamos darle un sentido a lo inexplicable, a lo inhumano. ¿Pero esta incertidumbre tiene una respuesta? Eso lo dejaré a tu entender, lector. Porque Pynchon plantea las dudas y da muchas respuestas ambiguas para que uno interprete. Eso sí, no considero ninguna de las respuestas posibles como satisfactoria. Y eso es lo que le da más vida al texto.

¿Qué más decir? La novela es infinita y habla sobre colonialismo, sexualidad, ciencia, la naturaleza de la historia y nuestra percepción de esta. Habla sobre una infinidad de temas que siguen siendo relevantes casi 50 años después de su publicación. La novela es infinita.

Y la gran pregunta de todos. ¿Es difícil de leer? Bueno, sí, bastante. Pero no ilegible como plantean varios. Pynchon requiere concentración, esfuerzo y la predisposición a no entender todo lo que vas a leer. Es un autor que se beneficia de la relectura y tomar esta (y sus otras obras extensas) como una culminación que tiene un camino para llegar a este lugar. Primero recomendaría leer V y The Crying of Lot 49, luego uno está más preparado para afrontar la inmensidad de esta obra maximalista al extremo.

[August 2020] Rereading this now in my Pulitzer quest. Wow, as amazingly confusing as the first time around!
This is of course the Pynchon pinnacle, the summit of his fame, the cornerstone of his work. So much so that he fell silent for about 14 years after writing it (leading me to wonder if DeLillo was spoofing him in Mao II). It is an amazing book and the first Pynchon I ever read. It is a rude introduction to his style though as it is thoroughly post-modern in narration, in the manipulation of time and reality, and the proliferation of characters. There are moments of pure genius, but also of repulsion (leading him to lose the Pulitzer the year it was published), but even those moments are perfectly in harmony with the characters they are associated with, the massive condemnation of anti-Semitism and Nazism (I have to believe that despite his silence, Pynchon has to be anti-Trump) and all forms of repression and censorship. It is the story of a journey across a no-mans land (like many of Cormac McCarthy's books) full of violence and anarchy as the war is over but boundaries and frontiers (between countries, reality, and non-reality, good and evil, acceptable and reprehensible) are blurred and the hero must make this journey with or without a conclusion. I will stick to my no spoilers policy and avoid discussing the plot, but highly recommend this masterpiece, but perhaps one should start with an "easier" Pynchon like Inherent Vice or The Crying of Lot 49 to get their feet wet first, because I would hate to see you missing out of this from feeling out of your depth if you can't find your pace in it.


The political message of the book is still relevant: war is fucking hell and the aftermath is just as bad. History as written by the winners obfuscates the suffering of the losers. And not the losers as actors on the scene of history who are typically unscrupulous leaders who in large part escape responsibility and aftereffects of the ensuing disasters, but rather the “rank and file” who are treated as no more than pawns on history’s chessboard.

Pynchon is a complex writer who pulls no punches: GR has a non-linear plot with an elliptical writing style and a myriad of complex characters, sometimes finely described in vividly lit detail like in a painting of Ingres but sometimes barely evoked out of the darkness like a self-portrait of Rembrandt. Reading GR is a voyage through chaos itself - the chaos of a destroyed Germany and the chaos of human depravity more often than not unpersuaded by a dream of redemption, a terrifying voyage into the darkest depths of the human soul.

In a nutshell, Slothrop (!), our protagonist, seems to attract falling bombs at each location where he has sex in London and goes off on a quixotian quest across Europe for the secret to his birth. Meanwhile, the war ends and Europe is in chaos. Against this background, we meet insane Germans, freaky peasants, abandoned aristocrats in seaside resorts, spies, murderers, holocaust survivors and holocaust perpetrators...it is a symphony of entropy.

It is also a book that you can re-read and discover things you may have missed the first time around - in particular the elliptical structure which explains the word "rainbow" in the title. It is grotesque and raw and superbly written. I have been told in the comments that the Companion by Weisenburger is excellent - I'll use it when I reread GR! The site Gravity's Rainbow on the Pynchon Wiki is an excellent and practical guide as well.

Fino's Pynchon Reviews:
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n  n: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
n  n: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

CNP C. etc Gravitons & Rainbovitons


super nebulous or "difficult" authors , but dig this --
my right eye is dominant so I can read well enough
dozens of instances of pedophilia
telepathic elves who ride wolves
a lightbulb, randomly intersect
jargon-filled defenses of this book
if only we knew the melody
Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
the mark of a literary genius
A girl I dated in college said it was her
I quit reading at the coprophagia scene
a person with ADHD having an acid trip
the masterpiece literary snobs think it is
supposed to be one of the best books of the 20th century and all
I found myself laughing out loud as I progressed
waving his arms and shouting "look at me"
that I feel about David Lynch
Swaths of obscurity
But it was just annoying
the Pulitzer Board had difficulty with its coprophilic focus
nonchalance toward many a co-conspirator's favorite author
and throw it harder the second time
what I'd have for me tea
the brain of an untreated ADHD patient
the main reason a lot of people love this book
obsession with phallic objects
in their 20's while smoking clove cigarettes and drinking some PBR
as there's a later scene of coprophilia
I'd worry about you
it in its stupid ass
I ever read
the parts that were uncomfortably and pervertedly sexual
favorite
literary milestone that people seem to think it is
the writer's extreme hubris manages to shine through the written garbage
were on LSD the whole time
you feel as if you've been raped and torn to pieces
the myriad two page paragraphs filled with run on sentences that overwelm
also considered to be difficult
they fail to create the necessary feeling
LSD induced hallucinations, poor humor, anti-prose
Fuck his erections, fuck the rocket, fuck the S&M and shit eating and the fucking bananas
arsenic sauce represents pedophilia and/or
be rambling and incoherent
the mess appears some sense and cohesion
overblown, ridiculously difficult, wandering and fails
I'm a prude and lacking humor
banana pancakes
many loosely connected character developments
beauty in language
and it's author for having written it
a guidebook to help me understand it
bedazzled by the literary pyrotechnics
the rambling, self-impressed noodling
comic means smiling wryly every 100 pages or so
I reached a pedophilic sex-scene
...e poi e poi e poi?
taking the piss almost
misunderstood is to be thought great by critics
impenetrable - impenetrable and not worth reading
take drugs
unreadable
a long swim through a sewer makes me stupid
love this book or you don't get it
as complete gibberish
disjointed and uninteresting
take no more
writers that you love or you hate
shit
getting a boner
the company of a pretentious hipster
Just
filled stream-of-conscious writing
non stop stream of conscious bullshit
get it
grâce à de fulgurantes érections
kill me for what I am going to
doing some very serious drug
deserved a smack upside the head for abusing his readers
the assumption that his work is worth following
understand without tedious pretension
Han dynasty Chinese poetry in the original
so good ones or pretentious ones; esoteric ones and erudite ones
of contrived "postmodern literature"
show off his scientific prowess
thank God I did not
'literary classic' sometimes has to mean it is written in impenetrable
carry me along
sound your barberic yawp
have actually finished it
over-the-top theatrical fluff
"unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene"
brutal
definitely a lost cause
flip open to random pages
one of the "great" authors
this insufferable book even without those people
get throug hthe whole thing
get through the first one hundred pages
literature at its best
guy goes down the toilet
great awards
morally outraged
Something about a banana breakfast
12 year old children and their math teacher
Sucked
a genius
bizarrely juvenile sex-obsession and dubious racial politics
realize this is supposed to be a classic
supposed to like this
war machine and scatophagia
picked for the 1974 Pulitzer
summers reading challenge
waste
getting this
negative stars aren't available
Pretentious!
a mechanical engineering textbook
Get off my lawn
Impenetrable
failed
about S/M, depravity
a graphing calculator
call this tome
Wordy author
didn't see any reason
Obscene pretentious assprat
impenetrable
Life's too short
Readability is a good thing
my worst enemy
Un-readable
finished in college
still wondering what
life's too short
understand what
The word "pretentious"
get into it
thirty years
painful
about T. Pynchon's nob
only person
dreck
En pausa hasta nueva orden
want to
0 stars
lightshow
age well
small coffee table of an epic
Not
Horrible
Hate

Ένας μήνας ανάγνωσης.. 1002 σελίδες... 64 κεφάλαια... Περίπου 90 χαρακτήρες(τόσους κατάφερα να μετρήσω).. Πολλή φαντασία.. Πααααααρα πολλή παράνοια.
Αυτά είναι κάποια από τα στατιστικά μου πάνω στο gravity's rainbow, η αλλιώς ένα από τα so called πιο δύσκολα βιβλια που φιγουράρουν σε αντίστοιχες λίστες με James Joyce κλπ... Καταρχάς, να πω για την ιστορία, ότι πήρα την απόφαση να διαβάσω το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο, που γενικά το είχα σε λίστα με βιβλία που θα διαβάσω στο μακρινό μέλλον, όταν είδα μέσα στο 2020 ότι το μέλλον είναι πολύ αβέβαιο και καλό θα ήταν να μικρύνει όσο γίνεται αυτή η λίστα.

Gravity's Rainbow often tops lists of challenging books, but it was a lot more accessible than I expected. Sure it's long and there are sections that are hard to pull meaning from (if they have any meaning at all), but it has a narrative, it's often hilarious, and the ideas are just so interesting. I think Pynchon wants you to get what he's doing; he's on your side. If he hides anything, he's hiding it for you, not from you. But there are just so many layers to this book. It's seemingly impossible to get it all on the first read and without some kind of supplemental material. Even then, people are still talking about what Gravity's Rainbow means, so I guess you never fully get it.

Paranoia is a central theme. There are systems of power and secret societies controlling everything. Even when you think something is revolutionary or countercultural, in the end, you'll find it's in the pocket of these shadowy systems. If someone starts out against the powers behind everything, they'll eventually be corrupted by those powers and end up in their service. After all, "everyone you least suspect is in on it." Or maybe that's not the way things work. Maybe you're just paranoid. But if things really do work that way, you have to be paranoid to see it. And if you're paranoid, maybe you're seeing things that aren't really there.

Gravity's Rainbow takes place during the last few months of World War 2. But it really seems to be about the 1960's. Pynchon is exploring the established culture and the emerging counterculture's reaction to it. Is this movement really a liberating one? What happens if you take its ideas to their extremes? Is it an essential change or just a change of degrees; are they building something new or just drawing the lines in different places?

Those are things I picked up on, but there's so much more to Gravity's Rainbow. Even if I don't know much I know enough to know how much I missed.

One interesting fact about the book: In 1974, Gravity's Rainbow was up for the Pulitzer Prize. The jury for fiction voted for it unanimously. But the Pulitzer Advisory Board overruled them, and instead of forcing them to choose another book, they decided not to award the prize for fiction that year! Gravity's Rainbow was so controversial that the Pulitzer Prize board decided that not awarding a prize in 1974 was better than awarding it to Gravity's Rainbow. And I mean, I kinda get it. It's dark, it's vulgar, it's offensive, and unrelenting in those aspects. But it also couldn't be a better reaction to Gravity's Rainbow. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the kind of reception Pynchon would have hoped for if it wasn't such an unreasonable hope.

Read this in the Seventies.. This was the edition I read, mass market paper, almost as thick as it was tall. I'd read tiny Crying of Lot 49, which I loved, that paranoid universe--where everything is a clue--or is it? I read V, which I didn't much care for as I recall, then plunged into Gravity's Rainbow like diving into Niagara Falls. I did nothing for three weeks but read Gravity's Rainbow, which I suggest is the best way to read this book. As it is the quintessence of the paranoid universe, everyone and everything you see will recur and recur and recur, so it's helpful to remember as much as you can. It was "about" the German rocket program at the end of WW2, about as much as Ulysses was 'about' a Dublin ad salesman's marital problems. It's a novel in which the mind-set of the apocalyptic, conspiracy-prone early 1970s collides with the genius that is Pynchon for 800 pages of white hot literary madness. Wacky, wild, a literary 3 ring circus and Pynchon's greatest novel. I would definitely, read it again. There's always a rollicking quality to Pynchon which distinguishes his art from DeLillo, Dick, DF Wallace, a ripping humor that is rocket-fueled.