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.

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.

It has been more than a month since I bunged Slothrop’s world of paranoia. Yet, the very mention of Gravity’s Rainbow sends an agonizing quiver through my spine. With a half-burnt Marlboro dangling in between my lips to preserve my sanity, I am geared up to shred Slothrop and the psychoanalytical puzzle of a disgruntled civilization.

Pynchon is a badass! He knows the poise of unbalancing the sanctuary of one’s mind. Just when you get composed with the narration, a bombshell laced with mystifying lexis splatters your brain cells into a neurotic mirage of bewilderment. Akin to an Archimedean Spiral this manuscript propels you into a hypnotic daze making you yearn for rehabilitation sessions with Freud. Pynchon in this fierce literary opus skillfully crafts a jagged brainteaser, dexterously moving through every character modulating strains of fright, convoluted psyches by means of sardonic humor; overwhelmed by the cosmic premeditated aggression of the World War II and tentative military technology. Analogous to an amoeboid action, the labyrinthine plot propels into a sinister reverie engulfing the most impenetrable enigma –Tyrone Slothrop into a mammoth annihilation of sanity and perseverance.

Is Slothrop a military covert operative? Is he an experimental specimen or a mythopoetic hero? To me, Slothrop is a frightening model of entropy. A quintessence of degradation trying to decipher the flippant conducts of war-conspiracies and inevitability of death, finally fading into a collective zilch. An American agent who is allegedly being monitored by the Allies in London during WWII ,Slothrop comes across as the "anti-hero" with his shady misdemeanors, sexual orgies and his ever so volatile penis which equates Slothrop’s copulations with frequent bombing targets (Pavlovian sexual conditioning). However, as the script unfolds amid the admission of numerous secondary characters, Slothrop metamorphoses into a justifiable representation of humanist dogma heaving with extreme paranoia and hallucinatory raptures. His European sojourn involving fatal information on the V-2 Rocket mechanism and sinister elucidations of the Government conspiracies delineates the fine line that sustains the parameters of life and mortality eventually decomposing in the calamity of rockets and bombs.

"All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we would have h the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilian? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology ,deify it if it will make you feel less responsible-but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are."

Underneath the astrological parameters and laws of thermodynamics, Pynchon employs each building block of the universe to impart us the knowledge of irrevocability of death and its unethical exploitation through inhumane power-mongers.

Festooned with an astounding color palette, the rainbow is a nature’s charming bequest after a treacherous storm. Conversely, Pynchon in the course of Slothrop cautions us about the prevalence of a man-made scientific marvel – a mock arc (rocket) that looms on our tomblike unawareness and may unpredictably descend on to the earth patterning a “rainbow” of blood and gore of humanity. A baffling sarcasm, isn’t it?

Can you imagine what an experience this was for Pynchon’s editor. I’ve read The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Bleeding Edge, the latter written decades later, yet was wholly unprepared by them for the onslaught of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. It was recommended to me by my Dad, who read it in the 1970s while under the influence of various substances. That was certainly his excuse when I commented upon its vicissitudes. While the shorter Pynchon novels of my experience certainly had the same turgid and labyrinthine quality, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ intensified this in length and depth to the point of burying the reader. I only became capable of reading more than a handful of pages at a time once I gave in to this and allowed shovelfuls of baffling and arcane tangents to be heaped upon my head. Initial attempts to discern plot, characterisation, and themes were futile. I did not quite resort to the approach of treating the whole thing as poetry rather than prose, but at times got close to it. It is always indicative when a novel has no description of what its about on the cover at all, just reviewer quotes equating it with other notoriously long and opaque tomes (Ulysses and Moby-Dick or, the Whale). The blurb writer may have thrown up their hands in despair, but I shall attempt what they would not: ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ illustrates the paranoia and sexual perversion incited in men by rockets.

The novel’s form is a sequence of scenes and digressions tangled together like so many strings of fairy lights. It apparently begins in London at the very end of the Second World War and proceeds chaotically across occupied Europe (referred to as The Zone) beyond VE day. In the final twenty or so pages, the reader suddenly finds themself in the 1970s apparently listening to Pynchon make excuses for what they have just read, in addition to intimations of time travel via a lengthy tarot card reading. The other 740 pages follow a handful of protagonists through the chaos of Western Europe in 1945. Said protagonists have distinctive names (perhaps my favourite element of Pynchon’s work), yet appear to all be exactly the same man. Or rather, they all behave in the same reactive, horny, chaotic fashion while fleeing, fighting, fucking, falling off things, and contracting food poisoning across hundreds of pages. One of them is American, but this makes surprisingly little difference. As in Vineland, paranoia and conspiracy are so heavily featured as to become meaningless and absurd, another thing I appreciate about Pynchon. An ever-capitalised ‘They’ are referred to constantly, and specifically associated with multinational industry, without being personified or clearly explained. The absence of catharsis about this is oddly satisfactory, given that the world is in fact a conspiracy insofar as no single person could possibly understand all the interests, organisations, and technologies involved. We just blunder around using simplified theoretical frameworks in order to function.

Of course, I am projecting this from the vantage point of 2020. It could just as easily be that Pynchon won a bet that he could get a full bingo card of sexual perversions to be considered serious literary fiction. I was disconcerted, to put it mildly, by quite how much weird sex there was. I like to think I’m not too prudish, but Pynchon leaves De Sade in the dust with the number of heavy kinks his characters engage in. Bestiality, incest, paedophilia, rape, whipping, piss and shit consumption, orgies, and interruption by an owl are especially notable. I was surprised, in fact, by the absence of necrophilia, as there was one scene that seemed to be going that way then did not. Death is certainly sexualised throughout, although no-one actually fucks a corpse. (Spoilers?) This is the kind of thing that one might be tempted to label problematic, were it not so mulched into the novel’s word-compost as to be absolutely lacking in titillation. The combination of incest and paedophilia is extremely creepy, though. Something entirely absent from all sexual scenes, I noticed, are condoms. From this I infer that every character has many STDs. Late stage syphilis would certainly explain some of their bizarre behaviour.

Since I added ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ to my to-read list, goodreads has once or twice recommended me a companion volume which allegedly explains all the references. I believe life is too short for me to read that. The references I did pick up on were disorientating, as nearly all were to later fiction. Page 539 contains major spoilers for the Magnus Archives podcast, for example. That reflects upon my familiarities, of course, and presumably Pynchon’s conscious or subconscious influence on later writers. There are also a great many terrible puns and enough songs that I wondered if the novel could be made into a musical. “Ha ha!” thought I, “Who would turn an incredibly long and digressive literary novel into a Broadway musical!” And then, “Oh shit, Les Misérables”. I doubt such a project could make it to Broadway, but reckon someone could get an Edinburgh Fringe show out of it. If they have not already.

My tone may suggest that I suffered through ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ purely for the satisfaction of having achieved something during lockdown and being able to hold my head high when finally able to return my library books. To a point, this is true. Still, there is something curiously compulsive about it once one accepts its fundamental incomprehensibility. On many occasions while reading literary fiction, I have reflected that I am merely lacking the appropriate training and knowledge to fully appreciate the text. In this case, I refuse to concede that even esteemed Emeritus Professors of English Literature could entirely explain things. What of the robot crabs? The chapter from the perspective of a lightbulb? The Toilet Ship? The Argentine submarine? The pig costume? The banana-based breakfasts? The sexy polymer? The monkey orchestra? The mistaken identity castration? The hot air balloon custard pie skirmish? Yet behind the relentless onslaught of vividly surreal details can be found brief glimpses of reality: concentration camps, refugees, weapons of unprecedented destructive capacity. The book is animated by a sense of constant movement, as all characters seem to be running away from the horrific aftermath of WWII both physically (on boats, planes, cars, and foot) and mentally (via drugs and sex). Reducing it to that stolid description removes everything weird and distinctive, albeit often unpleasantly so, about the reading experience, of course.

I am of the opinion that lockdown was the right time to read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. Its sense of time as erratic, fungible, and meaningless reflects current experience. I found it slow to read and could not manage more than a hundred pages at a time. The narrative is so loose and sloshy that even in the final fifty pages I found myself wondering who the fuck Roger was and checking back for his surname. Not that this knowledge clarified anything, as the male protagonists were essentially indistinguishable. Yet that sense of being engulfed by the dense bafflement of Pynchon was surprisingly calming. I wondered what the hell I was reading, while being glad it wasn’t more articles about the death toll and long-term health effects of coronavirus. I did not think of the pandemic at all; my brain was wholly transported from one fucked-up reality to another. At least in the world of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, I have the luxury of being able to make sardonic remarks from a distance rather than being stuck there whether I like it or not. Sometimes I think that’s the main appeal of long novels. Whether every paragraph, page, or chapter is necessary to the book becomes irrelevant (perhaps never more so than in this case) as the sheer weight of it all submerges the reader.

Amid the freewheeling mayhem and flatulence, there emerge occasional moments of pointed insight and sometimes unsettling prescience. These are all the more disconcerting for their arbitrary contexts. For instance, this occurs in a vast communal toilet:

”Do you find it a little schizoid,” aloud now to all the Achtfaden fronts and backs, “breaking a flight profile up into little segments of responsibility? It was half bullet, half arrow. It demanded this, we didn’t. So. Perhaps you used a rifle, a radio, a typewriter. Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to. You are either alone absolutely, alone with your own death, or you take part in the larger enterprise, and you share in the deaths of others. Are we not all one? Which is your choice,” Fahringer now, buzzing and flat through the filters of memory, “the little cart or the great one?”

I was also very taken with the comparison of Jormungandr the world serpent and capitalism, which as far as I can tell occurs within a memory within a dream:

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holdings its own tail in its mouth, the daydreaming serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity – most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.

That paragraph is followed by an extended metaphor of a bus, which had less appeal, then a comparison of Jormungandr and the atomic structure of benzene. In moments like this, it feels like the character (and possibly the writer) is briefly coming down from their trip and realising what they got high to hide from.

Reading a more normal, less Pynchon novel will require some mental readjustment. I thought to alternate ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ with a sci-fi thriller, Spin State, but found this impossible. Once in the Pynchon Zone, my brain found a plot-led narrative outlandish and could not concentrate upon it. One might almost suppose that reading this manner of writing employs different synaptic connections to most fiction; a paranoid thought worthy of a Pynchon protagonist. Would I recommend ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’? No. Was it worth reading? Yes. Would I read it again? No. Will I read another, even longer Pynchon novel? Yes, in a few years 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.

This book is hard to really talk about because I bet I would get something different from it every time I read it. This time around, what stuck out to me the most were the relationship between Roger and Jessica, the candy tasting with Darlene and Mrs. Quoad, the Pavlovian Pudding guy, Katje/Slothrop, and other things that would be spoilers.

I think what I loved the most is how Pynchon is able to describe things - they end up beautiful and terrifying at the same time. War and sex are all of the sudden the same. I remember the moment it occured to me what the title was referring to - I still get a little shiver.

A few of the quotations I marked:

"But he wanted to believe it too, the same way he loved her, past all words - believe that no matter how bad the time, nothing was fixed, everything could be changed and she could always deny the dark sea at his back, love it away." (how Roger felt about Jessica)

"You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible...."

"Whatever it is with her, he's catching it. Out in the ruins he sees darkness now at the edges of all the broken shapes, showing from behind them."

ETA: Review after second reading in 2015

When I last read this book in 2008, I knew I wasn't catching everything. I zeroed in on the relationship between Roger and Jessica because it connected the most to where I was that year and kind of blissfully ignored the rest. Even though R&J are more like bookends in this massive novel about many many things.

I pledged that the next time I read it, I would only do so with A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel and maybe a group of people. This was selected for one of my book clubs and a few people actually made it to the end, but with a little less actual discussion than I would have liked.

That is partly a fault of the book. You could read it looking for many things - commentary on war, control, identity; the layers of mythology and Kabbalah and tarot; symbols and pop culture references. It's all there. I got more of it by looking at the companion but I'm not sure that added as much as just getting to read it again did.

Truth be told I was feeling more smug about finishing it last time, and this time just wanted to get it over with. I probably should have read a hundred books about war before coming back to this one - I still haven't read Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five, although I did read the Pulitzer Prize winner during my reading of this (same war, completely different story.)

Because that is what the novel was about to me this time around. I felt like all the commentary on mythology did was in service of the overarching god of WAR. How it controls us, how the people making the decisions aren't the people suffering the consequences of them, what it does to families and relationships, and how massive weapons of annihilation can end up seeming more like an equation, a button, a blueprint.

So I'll leave you with this:
“So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is death.”

Disclaimer 1) I am skeptical of disclaimers because I am a painfully aware of self-as-persona, authorial presence.
Disclaimer 2) I willingly admit that I have no idea what the hell I just read.
Disclaimer 3) I did not read this with a companion text, [if that's totally prerequisite for enjoyment then, really?] though I did find myself occasionally using the Pynchon Wiki, and googTranslate.
Disclaimer 4) This was my first read and a re-read has already been scheduled. Will probably Vineland and loop back before Mason & Dixon. Truth be told, I'm itching to get to Against the Day, but smart people have reminded me not to wish away time.

<<'We have to talk in some kind of code, naturally,' continues the Manager. 'We always have. But none of the codes is that hard to break. Opponents have accused us, for just that reason, of contempt for the people. But really we do it all in the spirit of fair play. We're not monsters. We know we have to give them some chance. We can't take hope away from them, can we?'>> (756)

So, my thing is that this feels Modernist because he's doing some things with form that fly in the face of conventional, well, reading. You understand each word, but often by the end of the sentence you have no idea what you just read. Or you read clear, lucid prose which progresses across originary syntax in such a way that you're doubting your previous dubeity of grasp. You're reading a book that "takes place" in and around WWII, but has little to do with the actual war. You're reading about the machinations of nation-states as organizational blueprints for power cabals, as necessary for civil society over against distributions entropic [wave-function-perceived-as-arbitrary-therefore-meaningless].

<<'I wonder if you people aren't a bit too--well, strong, on the virtues of analysis. I mean, once you've taken it all apart, fine, I'll be the first to applaud your industry. But other than a lot of bits and pieces lying about, what have you said?'>> (88)

So there's the obvious objections: a) what the nuts? b) he's totally screwing with me? c) even working hard, this is inscrutable? d) I heard this was a Paul Bryant one-star?

Well, we can level those at most modern, post-modern and whatever-the-hell-we're-in-now, art. But it is neither productive nor interesting since R. Mutt. There's no way out of the argumentative loop because the opponents function with different aesthetic first premises. And within some people, the battle will be one of a Divided-Self, the anti-paranoid [he hu sez he like it und he get it] and the paranoid [he who, married to reason, thinks that he's being intellectually cockholded {sic}]. That being said, this book is not for everybody.

"If there is something comforting--religious, if you want--about paranoia, there is also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long...Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here." (434)

So here's my attempt to articulate the one thing that I either came away with, or fabricated as a natural coping mechanism as against my own inadequacy as an understander:

Using the conventional notion of paranoid, the reader thinks "I should be getting something from this, but I'm not getting what I think I should be, so I bet this is just one long pisstake on all those egg-head intellectuals: you put any piece of shit out there and they will not only swallow, they will savor it [here's lookin' atchu Pudding]." But Pynchon shows us that paranoia actually requires a network that's REALLY THERE, either physically or psychosomatically. Either you merely think They are out to get you, or They actually are out to get you. Both prongs of the disjunction elicit the same response, vis Pascal's wager, so there is no positive distinction to be made. The reader's disconnection notice, insofar as it engenders Pynchonian anti-paranoia, is turning the sock inside out: the very charge of illogicality requires a logical framework. Both a self-deconstruction and a self-destruction, both aware of themselves as such.

"What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of..." (257)

So where does this leave us? Strap on rocket 00000. Don't worry if Tyrone Slothrop is meant to be an anagram for Thomas Pynchon [not by a back-of-the-envelope calculation {B-but what if it is a partial, or suggestive of a partial, anagram?}] or that every-man-is-a-lazy [slothful=slothropian?!?] Fool. Just stop that [and I'll stop worrying about the faulty parallelism in the previous sentence]. Sit back in your brand new Imipolex robe and enjoy the ride. Leave the thinking for the 00001 and all subsequent rocket rides.

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.

It's not like it's rocket ~#@?"" no wait, it IS rocket science, and built into those thrusters are myriad plosives of hinky characters, 'edgey' situations, sex acts of every shape/form, ying-yang realities, WW2 nominal scenarios galore, paranoia/parabolas/gravitational parable all splattered willy-nilly Pollack'd cover art of "Gravity's Rainbow" book. 'Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch,' aka, don't fuck with the Rocketman - (you hear that Herr (hair) Rump? you gonna get bunches of peeps vap'd - them, us & whole lot of bystanders - who knows but WW111). Was ist los, Jackson? (Jackson used colloquially 14 times in "GR" - book published in '73 - Pynchon married Melanie Jackson '90 - had a son also named Jackson). That tidbit squares with the circularity of revolving door characters' use in many of his novels - what he likes keeps on showing up.

There are some decent reviews of this book [here on gr's] both adulatory and derogatory - they are equally relevant in my opinion - the book is itself a zeroing out parable of equilibrium, a stasis of annihilation. This was my second reading about four years apart - first time through was an act of blind tribulation, a suffering through as penance for sins of hubristic reaching - wanted to read the unreadable - same as "Finnegan's" and less so "Ulysses" which also took two reads to assemble meaning. Anyway, I get it, this book disturbs while it dazzles, dances and drubs, deracinates, degrades, deadens nerve endings so much so that, by the fulmination of culmination I'm done in. Pynch you is one crazy hepcat Joyce'd be jiggered wit. Five star fungibles.

Bitcoin=V2?!

[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...

It's difficult to believe that a novel this strange, complicated, and subversive was ever penned, or published, or devoured by a large (cult) audience, but thankfully, for the sake of sheer literary chutzpah, all of this is so. 'Crazy,' 'exhilarating,' 'disgusting,' 'chilling' and a thousand other adjectives would be necessary in order to fully describe it, and there is a tremendous amount of intelligence on display in the intricacies of its storytelling, its thematic layerings, and its range of knowledge spanning God only knows how many different subjects and fields. For 700-odd pages Pynchon's prose darts teasingly between the comic and the tragic, the lucid and the abstruse, the surreal and the mundane, the sacred and the profane, offering a stratospheric view of a war-ravaged, phallocentric, disorienting world wherein the human race, spurred on by its burgeoning technology and insatiable bloodlust, is launching itself perilously closer to extinction. Paranoia, suffering and death abound.

Oh, and I should probably mention that the book can be really silly and wacky, too. And that you won't be able to look at a missile, a vapor trail, a toilet, an octopus, or a light bulb the same way ever again after reading it.

Prologue

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."

Genesis

In the beginning was the earth, and above the earth was the sky.

The earth consisted of land and water. The sky consisted of air, the moon, the sun and the stars in the heavens.

The land consisted of rock. Water was everywhere, but still precious.

The sky was light by day and dark by night. By day, the light came from the sun and sometimes the moon. At night, a lesser light came from the stars and the moon.

On the land, things were still, but then they began to change.

The sun made rock hot by day and the night made it cold, and the rock became stone, and the stone soon became soil.

The Creation of Life

In time, the soil and the water came together with the air and the sunlight to form life.

The life was green and did cling to the soil.

The air and the heavens were the realm of gravity.

Everything on earth was made to fall and to disperse and to dissipate as time goes by.

To rise was to challenge the laws of nature. Nothing could rise, except one thing, invisibly, vapors.

Water mixed with the heat of the sun and became a vapor, and the vapor ascended to the sky and became clouds. At night and sometimes by day, the clouds became rain, and the rain fell and spilled water onto the earth.

Some water remained on the land in rivers and streams and lakes. Other water, sliding and falling and dropping across the land, found its way to the oceans.

The Life of Fruit

In time, life conspired to defy gravity little by little.

Life combined with the soil and the water and the air and the light to make trees and shrubs (some bearing bananas or mangoes or pawpaws), and these plants reached skyward to the sun.

But these plants could not be severed from the soil, because their roots sought nourishment there. Any plant severed from the soil would fall to the earth, obedient to gravity.

In time, many plants were severed from the earth and covered by soil and water and became hard and part of the rock. Beneath the surface of the earth, dead plants formed coal, and sometimes oil and gas.

The Origin of Man

After much time, other forms of life were born, including animals that did grow heads and arms and legs and tails and eat the plants.

Some animals became humans, some male, some female, all of whom wished to walk on two legs and become higher than other animals and plants.

Men were not always bigger and stronger than other animals and so sought refuge in holes in the ground and caves.

The caves were darker than night and men grew frightened of the dark, not knowing what was out there, until they discovered fire, which they used for light and heat.

Sometimes, men used fire to warm the flesh of other beasts and they grew stronger.

Life was good, and men tended to live within and surrounded by nature as one.

Man on the Move

Men began to move across the earth in search of food and learned how to construct homes of rock and stone and bricks made of soil and water.

Their homes grew taller than trees and animals and began to defy gravity.

Then men learned how to make machines that could move across the land and water at speeds faster than men or horses could walk or run.

And they consumed coal and oil and gas, so that they were not dependent on horse power.

Man Turns the Power Switch On

Men learned how to make electricity and switches that would turn the power on and off.

Men made glass bulbs that turned darkness into light.

Men had finally become enlightened.

Men looked at the sky for beauty and meaning and portents of the future.

They wondered what lived in the heavens and whether they had been created by gods.

They made drawings and pictures of what surrounded them. One day they would make photographs and moving pictures and shiny silver discs.

Men observed what occurred in nature and, over a great duration, started to learn about cause and effect.

Man Dominates Himself

Then men created gods in their own image.

They invented religions and superstitions and sometimes it was difficult to tell them apart, men and their gods, religions and superstitions.

Men used their religions to explain what they could and couldn’t do.

Then they created churches and holy men and scriptures to dictate to them what they must and must not do, and the holy men and their gods punished them if they did not do what they must do, or did what they must not do.

Man Discovers Matters of Life and Death

Men observed decay and destruction and death around them, and wondered whether they too would die one day.

Men didn’t like this prospect and decided that they alone amongst the plants and animals had a soul and, after death, would live in eternity.

Except that, if they disobeyed the commandments of their holy men and gods and scriptures, they would be punished by eternal damnation and made to live in hell. Which was not meant to be a good thing.

Some scientists conducted experiments and tests on dogs and other animals and learned how they were governed by stimulus and response.

Men wondered whether their souls and their capacity for reason elevated them above the animals.

They did not recognise that, even with their gods, men would do evil things to each other that animals would never do.

Man Engages in Some Empire State Building

Men built their homes in cities and formed nations. They conquered other cities and nations and established empires.

They established workforces and armies.

They organised men and their possessions into rows and columns, and they made men and women wear uniforms, so that they might look and think and do alike.

They developed systems to punish those who would dissent and they used force to hold their empires together.

They looked down upon any man or woman who would not conform or wear a uniform.

Those that they did not incarcerate or hang or inject with life-sapping solutions or electricity, they cast off into the wilderness, where they would disperse or die of thirst.

We Men are Scientists

So men acquired knowledge and wisdom, and accumulated science and technology beyond the wildest dreams of their predecessors.

They converted their knowledge and wisdom into zeroes and ones, so that they might store them on silver discs.

Some men wondered whether there was more to life than zeroes and ones, and was there anything beyond zero or between zero and one, and they were scorned.

Man Defies Gravity

Slowly, man’s dreams became more ambitious.

Some men dreamed about how they might fly like a bird, and one day men learned how to make flying machines.

Men did not always live happily with other men, and they made tools and machines that would maim and kill their enemies.

Men used their aeroplanes to drop bombs on other men, and the planes and the bombs grew bigger, and the maiming and the killing grew more widespread and efficient.

At the same time, men learned how to make bigger and taller buildings that reached higher and appeared to touch the sky.

Many men lived and worked in these skyscrapers.

In Case of War

Then there were two wars between many nations of the world.

In the first war, many men died in trenches dug into the soil of their farms.

In the second war, it was not necessary to get into a trench to die. Many people died in their homes and their buildings. It was easier to kill more quickly in the cities that housed large numbers of people.

Men made new bombs that were meant to end the wars, but when they continued, men invented rockets that could maim and kill even greater numbers of people.

Some rockets made a sound that warned people that they were coming.

If you heard the sound, you might be able to escape to safety.

When they did not end the war, scientists invented more and better ways to kill more and better people. They built rockets that made no noise and could kill you before you heard them coming.

They were the perfect machinery of death, because nowhere was safe and you could not escape them.

These rockets defied both gravity and the imagination.

While nobody had been looking or thinking about it, man’s buildings and vehicles and aeroplanes and rockets and bombs had made the earth dark again.

A Voice in the Wilderness

Well, maybe not nobody. A man called Slothrop had been watching.

Every time a rocket was launched, Slothrop was blessed with a hard-on, an erection.

He would look at the rockets and he would be turned off.

At the same time, he would look at the rockets and he would be turned on.

Slothrop’s hard on was a hard one for the scientists to explain.

What the Fuck?

Somewhere in Europe, scientists were erecting buildings, platforms, rockets that could bring death to people like Slothrop.

Slothrop suspected that the best use of an erection was not to build an edifice, but to fill an orifice.

Slothrop wondered, why had men become obsessed by Death, when they should have been preoccupied with Life?

Surely, there is no life without sex, no progress without congress, no creation without procreation?

“Make love, fuck the war.”

“Fuck war, fuck each other.”

How do you convince everybody else that this is the solution?

“Fucked if I know,” sez Slothrop.

The Prophet Debunked

Slothrop is cast out of the mainstream and sets out across Europe in pursuit of love, sex, and rockets (and those who would launch any one or more of them at him).

Still, even equipped with his hard on, Slothrop prefers bananas to buildings and rockets, he is bent but never straight.

He is the ultimate non-conformist, hedonist and sybarite, who gives pleasure to himself and to many women, Katje, Margherita, Bianca, three of the foremost amongst them.

Slothrop’s skepticism and excess threaten the System, Religion and Culture. He is an anarchist Counter-Force to Binary Code, Mono-theism, Uniformity and Over-the-Counter Culture.

He is the unwitting counter-cultural Prophet who threatens the methodical, ordered and conformist backbone of Mainstream Society.

He is a spanner in the works. He is a virus that must be eliminated. Like Trotsky, he is a Prophet that must be netted.

They, the powers that be, with their uniforms and their weapons and their switches, chase Slothrop through Europe, but he remains free.

Misanslothropy

In time, people came to doubt whether Slothrop ever actually existed at all.

Some would ask, “Slothrop? What kind of name for a prophet is that?”

Still They did not stop their pursuit, even when They were certain that he must be dead. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

If you can’t see him or hear him, deprive him of oxygen. Wipe out his disciples. Stifle his message. Prevent it from reaching any children. If the medium is the message, remove his medium. That way the prophet and his prophecy will cease to exist.

Revelations? What Revelations?

Was Slothrop a fabrication? A ghost in the machine? A shadow in the light of day? A figment of someone’s imagination? A fiction? Just a character in a novel? Just a story in a holy book?

As Slothrop would say, “I’m fucked if I know.”

Outside the novel, the world continues as before, only more so. Buildings reach higher. Rockets and aeroplanes fly further. Wars drone on. Civilians die. Men line up in rows and columns and uniforms. Power perpetuates itself eternally. Evil perpetrates itself on people via people. Darkness masquerades as light.

The sky is silent. We can no longer hear the screaming. It’s all theatre, even within our homes.





Group Read

I re-read this as part of a group read started by Stephen M:

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/6...

Reading Notes

I kept my reading notes in My Writings:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...



A Letter from Vlad the Impaler of Butterflies Dated April, 1973

Dear Tom,

Vera and I very much appreciated your gift of a signed first edition of your novel.

It actually caused a little friction in the Nabokov household.

I don't mean to be ungrateful or vulgar, but we both wished you had given us one copy each. (I guess we could purchase one, but we were too keen to read it.)

Naturally, I started it first, immediately it arrived, but quickly found I couldn't put it down.

The reason being that, every time I did, Vera picked it up and commenced reading.

Initially, our respective lepidopteran bookmarks were quite far apart, but when she passed my place, she asserted her right to be the dominant reader, and I had to wait until she had devoured the entire offering, which she did by the time of Maundy Thursday.

Fortunately, this left me Easter to finish it, so we were able to compare notes by Easter Monday, appropriately with a sense of renewed faith in literature.

I am convinced "Gravity's Rainbow" is one of the finest works of modern fiction.

It is very much an artistic and logical extension of "V.", which as you know we also enjoyed greatly.

If your first novel was a pursuit of "V", then "Gravity's Rainbow" is a pursuit of V, too.

In fact, it is a pursuit of both V1 and V2.

Vera was bold enough to suggest that V1 and V2 might connote Vlad and Vera, though we were unable to reach consensus on who might be noisy and who might be silent.

We did, however, hypothesise that Slothrop could be a reversal of Humbert.

To put it bluntly (these are Vera's words, not mine), Humbert, European in origin, fucks his way around the New World, more or less.

Slothrop, on the other hand, American to his bootstraps, fucks his way around the Old World.

I admire the way you, even more so than Slothrop, carried off Bianca.

It is some of the most delicious erotic writing I have read.

Bianca echoes Dolores nicely.

Even the sound of her name...Bi-an-ca.

The way it rolls off your tongue, it reminds me of, forgive me for citing myself, "Lo-lee-ta".

It's also close enough to the German acronym B.N.K. (which even a faint-hearted German reader or patient would appreciate stands for the "Bundesverband Niedergelassener Kardiologen", cross my heart and hope not to die).

Vera was the first to detect how you reversed the reader's response to this relationship.

Humbert knew damned well how old Lolita was. It was crucial to his enterprise.

On the other hand, Slothrop "believed" Bianca was a minor of barely 11 or 12, but when you work through the arithmetic of your puzzle, you realise that in reality (and therefore fiction) she was 16 (or was it 17?) and consequently of age.

So, what Slothrop did was legitimate, but what the reader (who was as yet unaware of this detail) did was not.

In "Lolita", I allowed readers to believe they were jurors with a legitimate interest in the proceedings, whereas in "Gravity's Rainbow" they are complicit in a crime that the protagonist did not actually commit.

The reader's voyeurism comes at a cost, at least metaphorically.

Only time will tell whether America and the world is ready to be confronted with their culpability.

Even if they are not, I hope your novel receives the acclaim it deserves.

So, well done, Tom, Richard would have been proud.

I would have been proud to call you my pupil, too (Pupil 2?), if only you had enrolled in one of my classes.

Perhaps you learned more and better from my example?

In the hope that you might continue to do so, I have asked my Publisher to send you a copy of my "Strong Opinions".

I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed expressing them.

Yours, with all my admiration,

V.




Slothropod De-Feets Cephalopod, Dutch Girl Almost Pops Her Clogs

Slothrop, octopus
And Katje Borgesius
We were meant to meet.



The Thoughts of An Erotic Clausewitz

Fuck Death, Fuck Rockets,
Says Erotic Clausewitz,
Make Love, Fuck the War.



Jim Carroll Watches the Earth Recede

How can I propel
My missile 'gainst the pull of
Wicked Gravity?



Slothrop's Dewy Glans

Slothrop's cock, un-cropped
Slots into sweet spot, then, spent,
Flops soft in wet spot.



Summit Meeting

Who knows what worldly wisdom I might find
When I discover myself at the peak,
Gravity-defiant, all nickels spent,
Trying to work out what it could have meant,
And you're already there, reposed, asleep,
Your trousers down and crimson phallus bent,
And scattered on the snow are streaks
Of your rocket-powered ejaculate
That have fallen moist, arc-like to the earth,
Still rainbow-coloured and immaculate.

So I read 200 sullen words worth
Of the dry wit and onanistic mirth
That appeal so much to the daisy chain
Of acolytes standing at your rear.
As one who's usually come before,
They call you a poet and a seer.
It's sad we only see your back side,
Though we're the ones forever left behind
By all your avant garde sorcery and
The flaccid disquisitions of your mind.



Soundtrack:

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Babe You Turn Me On

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=153eVr...