I think reading and reviewing this book requires taking on some extra baggage because it...well, I don't actually need to explain why or else Gravity’s Rainbow wouldn't have this baggage in the first place. It's Gravity's Rainbow, and that makes me feel like I need to read it, preferably without thinking too much about why exactly I feel this way. But at the same time I feel like I should avoid it so I don't look like a damn hairdo, which I'm told is British slang for someone who “tries too hard” (to look cool, hip, intellectual, etc). Anyway, I decided that the draws of the former outweighed the risks of the latter, and I read it. But first I had to be mentally prepared. Because unless you possess a level of genius utterly alien to me, approaching this book requires that you take a moment to assess your reading goals. Specifically, you need to ask yourself some fundamental questions about the ways in which you are capable of deriving pleasure. The whole idea of a pleasurable reading experience is so subjectively malleable as to be rendered almost meaningless. For some, pleasurable means sticking to a plot structure, character ensemble, and prose style that's well within one's own capabilities, while also being offered thrills that lie on a primarily primitive and visceral level. For some it means making your brain sweat, drawing a little blood, grasping outside of your intellectual reach, and building up some serious (but less overt) tension to provide for powerful releases and enduring satisfactions. And for most of us, it usually means doing a little (or a lot) of both, occasionally in the same novel, depending on x number of mitigating factors in our non-reading lives. Sometimes we want to push ourselves and sometimes we just want to casually, facilely enjoy ourselves.

At the moment, I'm at a place in my reading life where it seems like the more I give in blood, tears, and neuronal overheating, the more pleasure I'm capable of deriving from literature (assuming all this work is actually worth it on the other end). Now I know a passing personal fad when I see one, and even if certain not-too-far-off responsibilities weren't looming, I don't think I could find the energy, desire, time, heart, balls, chutzpah, whatever to continue tackling books like this for any extended period of time. So I'm trying to harness the obsession that's currently ruling my free time and put that cruel Blicero-esque master to work.

So anyway, despite the baggage, I went into reading this with pretty realistic and tempered expectations. I recently read Pynchon’s startlingly mediocre early short stories and was also beginning to question my initial infatuation with The Crying of Lot 49. In truth, I was hoping I wouldn't love it too much or hate it (I more or less succeeded here). Reasons: I didn’t like the idea of being a full-on contrarian with claims of overwrought suckiness (while making sure to prove in my review that this opinion wasn't due to blatant comprehension inabilities), but I also couldn't make this a gushing splooge-fest for reasons nicely summed up by Goodreads Jessica: "Guys who are really into GR are like those overly-earnest guys who're way too into Tom Waits. It's this weird, jealous, intense kind of passion that can seem pretty incongruous with its object, and can make you (or me, anyway) not want to participate in this creepy cultishness." Now, simply admitting that I was concerned about all of this is likely betraying a repulsive and frightening narcissism that this website seems intent on drawing out. Yes, Goodreads is messing with me…and reading a long book about paranoia sure doesn’t help.

Another general issue Gravity’s Rainbow has me mulling over is: how legitimate is it to construct a book that includes hundreds of allusions the vast majority of well-read, well-educated people will be unable to grasp without a serious study of the text and outside sources? To be honest, I'm not really sure where that line is, if there even is one, or if (assuming it's there) Pynchon crossed it. Thankfully, grasping all (or even most) of the allusions doesn't appear to be necessary to enjoy the hell out of the book and have a good idea of what's transpiring. And for this reason, I'm leaning toward a belief that Pynchon did not cross the line (if it exists). For what's better than a book you can enjoy the first time through and perhaps even more (or better yet, for new and different reasons) on subsequent reads?

Initially, the difficulty of reading Gravity’s Rainbow centers on the disorienting nature of character and plot introductions, as Pynchon places you into scenes and conversations with no instructions or compass. After the first section, this disorientation (almost certainly intentional) starts to melt away, but I can imagine that most aborted reading attempts justifiably occur long before the 200 page mark. More than with any other book I've read, this one appears to have been designed for rereading. I know authors and critics throw this concept around quite a bit, with many people claiming, like Nabokov, that reading only begins with rereading. Ah, to have the luxury. But in this case, I think it's true. If I were to go back to the beginning armed with a solid grasp of the convoluted characters and plot, I'd think I'd be able to piece together aspects to which I was nakedly subjected the first time around.

Pynchon's ability to create an evocative setting with an infectious mood is pretty amazing. The decimated 1945 London he cooks up is mesmerizing and provides the perfect backdrop for Roger and Jessica’s passionate, doomed love affair. He flawlessly balances feelings of reality and bizarreness here and there’s also this great just-at-the-edges-of-my-mind-but-out-of-reach-familiarity thing going on. Kind of like when you get nostalgia for something you've never experienced (but have studied or heard about or whatever). These were the things that kept me plowing through the early stages of the book. Well, in addition to all of the references (6!) to my favorite actor, Cary Grant, who’s even impeccably impersonated by Slothrop via Pynchon’s perfectly placed commas.

The first section is both the easiest and hardest to navigate. Pynchon seems intent on having the readers experience the dislocation of the characters, many of whom don’t really understand the whats or whys of the situations in which they find themselves. At the beginning of a book, I expect to be a little lost when dealing with the many character introductions, new setting, etc., so this is easier to take. Later on, when we move away from major characters for the umpteenth time to meet someone new and tangentially-related, this can be a little more taxing. I’m used to having information in a novel presented in certain ways, even in the most unconventional books I’ve read, but Pynchon seems hell-bent on blazing his own narrative path. One early 20-page stretch delivered the wildest emotional rollercoaster ride I’ve ever experienced in fiction: first I was thoroughly disturbed by the S&M re-telling of Hansel and Gretel, then moved by the lushness and sorrow of the dodo slaughtering, and finally laughing hysterically (on the T, embarrassing) during the “Disgusting English Candy Drill”, in which Slothrop is subjected to various horrible British ‘candies’ by a little old lady. Seriously, the dodo-bird scene is one of the greatest pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered and it also sets up one of GR’s major themes: the Elect vs. the Preterite, a concept which surfaces throughout the book to signify the powerful vs. the powerless; those ‘passed over’ vs. those killed in war; the Man vs. the Counterforce; et al. Strangely, I am unsure whether this book itself is Elect or Preterite—was Modern Library right to exclude it from top 100 books of 20th century? Or is the quote from The New Republic on the back cover correct? The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II. This question of what is lasting and remembered literature, hinted at with subtle brilliance in 2666, is something I find fascinating.

One practice that sets Pynchon apart from other writers is his incorporation of metaphors from nearly every branch of science—often very difficult ones (referring here to metaphors and branches of science). Since he doesn’t do much in the way of explaining, this can be a significant source of frustration. But it allows us science geeks to finally justify the hours spent studying organic chemistry. Actually, justify is much too strong a word. But I really enjoyed seeing Tchitcherine’s penchant for attracting counterrevolutionaries described in terms of molecular bonding capability, or seeing Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle used to describe the relationship between analgesia and addiction. Only from Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. I was also delighted, to my surprise, by much of the postmodern winking—from the few but potent direct addresses to “you” (the reader), to a discussion of difficult avant-gardism vs. pleasing simplicity that, although couched in a musical argument, was undoubtedly a direct commentary on the merits of Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon also can’t help himself from summarizing and distilling GR within other stories, such as that of Byron the immortal light bulb (whose experiences mirror Slothrop’s) and the plot to a drug-induced film entitled “Doper’s Greed”. There are probably many more commentaries on the book that I have either missed or forgotten—another rereading bonus, I’d bet. Perhaps most effectively, Pynchon plays around with the concepts of Pavlovian stimuli, and he relishes eliciting responses (especially sexual arousal) that will inevitably be accompanied by ethical unease, disgust, or shame. This writer-to-reader flirtation with the “ultraparadoxical phase”, wherein positive stimuli become inhibitory and vice versa, is one of the most brilliant aspects of the book.

Before tackling GR, one of my main concerns about Pynchon was what I perceived to be a lack of personal human insights to balance all the other stuff—philosophical and scientific allusions, gorgeous prose, compelling metaphysics…basically everything else I need or want in a book. Gravity’s Rainbow does deliver some of this, most prominently with the Pökler storyline, but these truly human and revealing moments are rather few and far between. For me, this is where the one star deduction comes in. Telling us many times that Slothrop was sad to lose Tantivy or Katje isn’t the same thing as making us feel it. Isn’t that writing 101? I have no doubt that Pynchon can (and occasionally does) aim for character insight and evocation, but for whatever reason he frequently chooses not to. Our loss. Still, I’ve developed a bit of a Pynchon addiction and it's weird because the buzz isn't that great, but I compulsively take another hit anyway. Actually, let me rephrase that—the buzz is occasionally fantastic but usually short-lived, and frequently the let down/hangover is rather rough and nauseating. But outside of my favorite Modernists, I've never read anyone who can zing me quite the way he does on occasion.

While technically the ending presents us with the ultimate climax, the last bit of the book felt appropriately anti-climactic. In the final 100 pages or so, Slothrop starts to disappear (literally?) and the “plot” sort of peters out after reaching a high point of coherence and intrigue part way through the 3rd section, which also contains some of the craziest shit I’ve ever read. Indeed, Gravity’s Rainbow makes Infinite Jest and 2666, to compare it to other postmodern monsters on which it had no small amount of influence, look conventional by comparison. How can we be expected to piece it all together? One of the least sympathetic characters in the book, Pointsman, is obsessed with Pavlovian cause-and-effect and therefore is searching for something that the more likeable stand-in Roger Mexico rejects in his analysis of events that he determines to be pattern-less and Poisson-distributed. Extrapolating from this, is Pynchon suggesting that we shouldn’t try to make too much sense out of this entropic book, which may simply be filled with random happenings rather than any connected or logical series of events? Or is that just a red herring, a false trail to divert us from some greater meaning?

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.

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.

While all of Pynchon's novels are a mystification of the aftermath of SF/Berkeley in the late 1960s, 'the Man' of late hippie culture inflated to mythic proportions (and demystified in Inherent Vice), GR is perhaps the clearest version of this dramatic conflict in Pynchon's work, where the psychodrama of 'individual freedom' versus 'They' / 'the Man' is presented in an especially epic sort of Wagnerian / Mahlerian / Marx Brothers orchestration.

The problem with GR is simple; plotting as such is like 4/10, characterization is 0/10, but the prose is 9/10 and the symbolic-thematic structure (which reaches an almost scriptural hermeneutic depth) is 10/10. So your reaction to the novel will depend on how much you value each of these elements; I’m fine with plot-less books and even character-less books as long as the ideas/prose are impressive enough, with some exceptions, so for this reader it’s worth the stretch. (As always, I agree with Lee Klein's perspective, but I personally rate the symbolic/thematic density and prose high enough that it pushes the entire book into 4.5-star-ish territory.)

While there are many other connections that could be made with twentieth-century literature, GR is perhaps most similar to Joyce's FW in that it is (1) pitilessly, mercilessly opaque and dense, and (2) there are not anything even resembling characters or character development. I spent 760 pages reading a book that is largely about a single man, Tyrone Slothrop, and if you were to ask me, "so what did Slothrop learn?" or "How did his character develop over the course of the story?," it's like you're asking me to explain what the color green smells like. The question is absurd, meaningless, impossible; similar to HCE or Shem (in Joyce), I never once, for a single moment, thought of Tyrone Slothrop as a human being.

Supposedly the humorous bits are meant to serve as oases that enable the reader to trudge through the austere desert of Pynchon's beautiful prose, but just as Joyce's puns in FW become tedious by roughly page 7 or 8 (as Ezra Pound and all of Joyce's friends gently pointed out), Pynchon's tediously manic slapstick humor is often deeply unfunny. To be sure, it works sometimes; there are some truly amusing scenes here and there (the opening few sections of Part 2, with the casino/octopus, some of the Rocketman set pieces, various over-the-top fanciful nonsense in the final stretch of Part 4) but more often than not I would just squint at the book, bemused rather than amused, vaguely disgusted and bored by Pynchon's scatological humor. I kept thinking of Beckett's line about Proust (and kept writing it in the margins of GR): "It is a tiring style, but it does not tire the mind. One's fatigue is a fatigue of the heart, a blood fatigue. One is exhausted and angry after an hour, submerged, dominated by the crest and break of metaphor after metaphor." (Crest and break of dick jokes and slapstick comedy, in this case.)

And then also, to use a Pynchonian word, the vibes of GR are just . . . bad, seriously bad vibes. It's the end of the 1960s dream, the post-1968 Nixonian hangover (the bulk of the novel was written after 1968); one long, bad acid trip, spiraling into depression and paranoia. GR has a very particular early 1970s black-pilled dystopian queasiness that you can only find in novels written at that time; it's the apotheosis of what William Gibson called the "pre-punk 70s doldrums" (see also Dhalgren and Ballard's work in this period).

In GR, the paranoia is directed at 'Them' / 'The Firm' / 'The Man' / 'The War' in an on-the-nose and mostly historically accurate critique of the industrial cartels during WW2, where IG Farben and Standard Oil, et al., formed the nucleus and precursor of what Eisenhower would, a decade later, describe as the military-industrial complex. (WW2 itself did not interrupt these partnerships; just as we see today, the Blob / the Cathedral does not care about nation-states.) The villain of GR, Blicero, not only metaphorically represents Nixon, but (as described obliquely at the end of the novel) quite literally escapes Germany and goes into the world of "presidential advisors, token intellectuals, successful academics" (p. 749) in the United States, i.e., Blicero personally ends up crushing the dreams of Pynchon and his Berkeley friends in 1968. While the thematic depth of GR is seriously impressive, this is, unfortunately, the narrow and limited moral vision of the book; Pynchon exiting his late twenties, a bleary-eyed and bitter ex-hippie, shaking his fist at the Man . . . an adolescent romanticism, vaguely embarrassing, imperious, preachy.

The Adenoid and Rilke's Harmonica

So okay -- then why am I recommending this novel, if it's so tedious and difficult? As briefly noted above, the answer is simple: (1) ridiculously good prose and (2) some of the most impressive lexical / semantic / associative / symbolic / thematic richness and depth that I have ever seen in a work of fiction.

I've never quite bought into the idea of a clear succession of 'big modernist-postmodernist novels' that critics invented in later decades, where you can supposedly find a clear through-line from Moby Dick to Ulysses to Recognitions to GR to Underworld or Infinite Jest or whichever. This is always post-hoc and never works precisely -- e.g., Gaddis never read Ulysses, as we learn from his letters, and I doubt that Pynchon had read Gaddis, though he does make sure to name-check Joyce, Borges, and Proust in GR (pp. 262, 264, 675) -- but in this case I really did find myself thinking, at least once per chapter, that GR is the clear successor to Ulysses and Recognitions purely in the sense of the seriousness and denseness of the prose/themes/symbolism. (Ulysses, as always, outstrips all of its later imitators in advance; Joyce has the symbolic depth of GR along with characters/plot -- and why not!)

As with Infinite Jest, where its greatness maybe isn't clear at first, the key rhetorical step to understand the impressiveness of GR is to compare it to its peers. What work by an American author is better than GR in the 1970s? To ask the question is just hilarious. Coover? Roth? Barth? Mailer? Barthelme? Are you ****ing kidding me lol. GR has its problems, but even the idea that some sort of navel-gazing masturbatory lit-professor bullshit like Barth's Letters or Coover's Public Burning are comparable to GR is an insult not only to Pynchon but to literature itself. Don't get me wrong, GR isn't as good as Recognitions or Ulysses, but he's the only one in the 1960s or 1970s who is even in the conversation.

Throughout GR you can clearly see that Pynchon was trying his absolute hardest, pouring his heart and mind and soul into the book, you can see the strain (and his occasional buckling under the strain); the prose is the most unabashedly poetic of his career, the themes and seriousness (despite the dark comedy) represent his most self-consciously 'high art'-ish attempt at literature, he risks pretentiousness constantly, and accordingly GR is a massive step beyond V / Lot 49, but not nearly as apparently effortless as M&D or ATD.

(Incidentally, for anyone who likes Pynchon but couldn't get through GR, Against the Day is the non-bad-acid trip version of GR -- buoyant, subtle, fun, with characters that are charmingly archetypal rather than GR's cardboard non-characters -- that combines all the best qualities of all Pynchon's other books, written by a laid-back old man in full command of his powers, rather than the intensely uneven and volatile genius of GR, though the latter is more appealing in some ways.)

* * *

So okay, what do I mean by symbolism and thematic richness? What precisely comprises the poetic interweaving of themes and prose and concepts in GR? Let's start with the massive slime monster (the Adenoid) described on pp. 14-16, the first digressive hallucinatory passage in the book; the Adenoid is destroying London, absorbing people and vehicles into its impressive gelatinous mass, and over the course of three pages Pynchon mentions (randomly, offhand) various buildings that the monster is crashing through. It's a funny scene! But when you get out a map of London in 1945 and trace the slime monster's path, it turns out that the Adenoid is moving in a perfect circle; a mandala. Why a mandala?

As Weisenberger points out, the Adenoid introduces the key motif of the novel, which isn’t mentioned explicitly for another few hundred pages; the mandala, the four quadrants of which have dozens of associative symbols throughout the book (the colors of white / black / purple / yellow, the mandala shape of the rocket fins surrounded by the circle of Rocket 00000 / 00001, etc.). The most subtle use of the mandala is the novel's unfolding according to a circular design across the novel's four parts, where historical events intersect precisely with the Christian liturgical calendar (none of which is ever mentioned by Pynchon), e.g.:

— The firing of Rocket 00000, the sacrifice of Gottfried ('God's peace') takes place at noon on Easter Sunday in 1945, which -- as occurs only a couple times per century -- also happens to be April Fool's Day that year (as we will see below, Slothrop is 'the Fool' of the Tarot deck, and thus metaphysically associated with Rocket 00000)

— Similarly, the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in our historical reality, as well as in GR, took place on the Feast of the Transfiguration (Sunday, August 6, 1945), which is similarly equivocal in its being both redemptive and destructive (Christ's transfiguration = a blaze of illumination followed by a white cloud; the bomb at Hiroshima = a blaze of illumination followed by a white cloud)

— Enzian's firing of Rocket 00001 (a repetition and counterpart to Rocket 00000, as one to zero, autumn to spring, black to white), takes place on September 14, 1945, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which itself aligns with a whole network of symbolism and language having to do with the Hereros, etc.

The convergence and ironic interconnection between the cult of the Rocket (European paganism / death cults / etc., with Blicero and Katje et al.) and the Christian liturgical calendar, comedically incarnated by Slothrop, create a hidden mandala. The fact that Pynchon has hidden this thematically aligns, in a meta sense, with the nature of the mandala itself; in the novel we only see the arch/rainbow symbolism, which he places everywhere. (Similarly, rainbows themselves are actually circles, where their circular nature is typically hidden from our earthly perspective.) This also aligns with the constantly reinforced theme of the arch/bow shape as degeneration, versus the mandala as completion and perfection; the rocket (the arc of which is gravity's rainbow) is destruction, the mandala is life. The tension of pagan and Christian symbolism is also found in all the references to Slothrop as a holy fool, both in the Christian sense and as the eighth incarnation of Vishnu (the trickster, Krishna); Weissman is the sacrificial Lamb (dying in his Imoplex-G shroud in Rocket 00000, on Easter Sunday), but is also symbolically associated with Kalki, the tenth avatar of Vishnu, a final transformation of material being back into its divine potentiality, pure light (Weissman = white man), and similar Kabbalistic themes. We see this as well with Frau Erdmann as avatar of the White Goddess and also the Shekinah of Kabbalistic myth, Katje as the angel of death and Rilke's tenth-elegy angel, etc. etc.

Speaking of Rilke, we read in Locke's NYT review:

Totally adrift in the mountains of Europe, strung out too far on his paranoid quest for the secret rocket ever to reassemble an identity, Slothrop reaches down into a purling mountain stream to find the same harmonica [from hundreds of pages earlier], the water flowing freshly through its mouth holes, bending blue notes of water, and he thinks -- or rather Pynchon inserts -- the last peaceful pastoral lines of Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus." Then Slothrop sees the Rainbow linking earth and sky and stands crying, at peace, with nothing in his head, "just feeling natural." He has completely dropped out. This use of Rilke and the Rainbow is deliberately opposed to the Rilke and Rainbow of Blicero's rocket. Such symmetry is dazzling.

This is indeed dazzling! But the depth of symbolism in this throwaway passage goes even deeper. See Weisenberger:

The narrative here recalls his miraculous recovery of the long-lost blues harp, which fell down the toilet (in a vision) at Boston's Roseland Ballroom in 1939. Slothrop's harmonica must be a Hohner because the company holds a virtual lock on the market . . . Slothrop's blues harp, like any other, would have been manufactured at the company's Black Forest factory in Trossingen, north of Zurich. (Indeed, this must be the "harmonica factory" where Squalidozzi and Gerhardt von Goll plan the filming of Martin Fierro on p. 384). In addition, Slothrop's Hohner is a sign of his identity with Orpheus, the mythic harp player and dismembered holy fool. . . . yet another of the novel's etymological puns: the German verb Hohnen means "to deride or ridicule"; thus we have a Hohner, one who sneers or derides, a figure in satire. The Hohner blues harp thus emerges as an instrument of Slothrop's satirically transformed preterition. . . . Finally, the Hohner sound holes, numbered ten through one, high through low, recall the significance of ten in Kabbalistic myths and of the rocket with its countdown from ten. With its rainbow of notes, the Hohner blues harp may thus be read as a narrative counterpart to the rocket.

How precisely does Slothrop symbolically represent the holy fool, the 'null' of the tarot deck? It turns out that Pynchon has worked out the astrology very carefully; on p. 624, in a random tangent, Pynchon writes: "Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them . . ." If you do the math; that day was August 6, 1945, and thus Slothrop's birthday would fall on March 21, 1918. Weisbenberger explains:

Slothrop will have been born on 'the great cusp', the 'green equinox’. The young ram of Aries is characterized by the assertion of individual being, the 'I am.' This would correspond with the great care Pynchon has taken over the Pisces/Aries cusp and explain why he also highlighted the birthdays of Wernher von Braun and Stanley Livingstone (p. 588). . . . For Slothrop's natal horoscope, we can use noon and the coordinates of Lennox, Massachusetts, as a basis for computing his sidereal time of birth. The sun entered Aries at exactly 12:03 p.m., or noon, on March 21, 1918. This means that the Medium Coelum or midheaven of Slothrop's chart would be a perfect zero degrees of Aries; the celestial equator would be directly overhead at birth, the sun's declination at zero. . . . in sum, Slothrop's horoscope would demonstrate the motif of opposites held in equipoise that readers have noted in others of the novel's mandala images. Like the Fool, the null card in the Tarot deck, Slothrop is astrologically zeroed out.

This underscores Slothrop's symbolic association with Rocket 00000 (the launch of which counts down to zero, and was fired at noon, in alignment with his horoscope), etc., etc.

* * *

I could go on, but at this point I want to emphasize to the reader that these brief passages about a massive slime monster, or Slothrop picking up a harmonica in a stream, or the facetious passage about ten thousand Slothrops, are random throwaway lines in a 338,390-word novel, where Pynchon gives zero indication in the text of the depth of their symbolic significance. Without poring over a map of London in 1945 you would not know that the slime monster moved in a mandala shape; without a calendar of Catholic feast days in 1945 you would not know how the novel's key events align thematically with these feast days; without knowing the history of harmonica production in Western Europe (and the precise ten-note structure of the harmonica itself, which is never mentioned by Pynchon) you would not know the full significance of the Hohner; without literally carrying out an astrological reading of Tyrone Slothrop's birth chart (?!?) you would never know that he was astrologically zeroed out . . . and this is not even to mention the overt beauty/symbolism/poetry that is clear from a superficial reading of GR, all of which is equally impressive. This handful of examples that I've mentioned are just scratching the surface of the hidden symbolism/depth in GR, which, again, can be found in just a few random lines of text, roughly 0.01% of the novel.

The historical research involved in the novel is equally mind-boggling. Similar to Ulysses, where you can track the passage of a particular cloud across Dublin in different chapters to see precisely what time it is (as Kenner points out, Joyce carefully tracked this based on the actual wind patterns in Dublin on June 16, 1904), in GR every random detail about the moon, the weather, songs playing on the radio, movies playing in theaters, etc., are all completely historically accurate and enable us to pinpoint the action down to the hour or occasionally the minute (Pynchon's main source was the Times of London). Similarly, you can't really give Pynchon credit for this precisely, but the surreal historical coincidences in terms of Pynchon's own biography are kind of bananas; e.g., Pynchon’s direct ancestor, William Pynchon, not only founded the Roxbury suburb in the famous ghetto scene (on p. 62), but was also assigned the task of supervising the initial purchasing of weapons for the American colonists in 1629, which was the beginning, in its most rudimentary form, of the American military-industrial complex -- i.e., the villain of GR.

[REVIEW IS COMPLETED AS FIRST COMMENT! SORRY LOL]

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"¿Qué tienen de malo las drogas y las mujeres? ¿Debemos alegrarnos de que el mundo se haya vuelto loco y la información termine siendo el único medio verdadero de intercambio?"

Es difícil resumir en una reseña una novela como "El Arcoíris de gravedad" porque sí que se puede decir que es una de los textos más complejos con los que me he cruzado en mi camino, así que sin profundizar demasiado en la novela, intentaré exponer algunos detalles que me ha transmitido su lectura.

"Pero de pronto, cae un cohete.
[...]
Quedan inmóviles como los perros pintados que cuelgan de la pared, silenciosos en una extraña imposibilidad de seguir tocándose. La muerte ha entrado por la puerta de la despensa: los contempla, dura y paciente, diciéndoles con la mirada: -A mí no me vengaís con cosquillas-."

"El arcoíris de gravedad" está ambientada en el final de la 2ª Guerra Mundial en torno a una serie de personajes ingleses y americanos que mayormente forman parte de la inteligencia de sus respectivos paises, y que contrarreloj intentan averiguar el secreto de los misiles V-2 alemanes que continuamente atacan Londres. Se podría decir que entre la coralidad de personajes que van apareciendo hay uno que destaca como protagonista, Tyrone Slothrop, teniente del ejército americano, en el cual se podría conjugar parte del secreto de estos ataques alemanes porque este bombardeo continuo del cohete coincide prácticamente con el mapa de las frecuentes relaciones sexuales de Slothrop.

"Más o menos en la misma época, Tantivy comenzó a comprender el alcance del aislamiento de Slothrop. Parecía no tener a nadie más en Londres con quien hablar de cualquier cosa, salvo una multitud de muchachas a las que rara vez volvía a ver tras el primer encuentro."

Cuando comienza la novela se vive una situación desesperada intentando vaticinar dónde caerán esos cohetes, asi que la inteligencia de ambos paises tiene en su centro de miras a Slothrop dado que el ataque del V-2 estará directamente relacionado con su comportamiento sexual. Un simbolismo sexual reincidente a lo largo de la novela y es la forma en que Pynchon explota la sexualidad masculina relacionándola con las armas de destrucción masiva, gamberrismo pynchoniano en torno a la autocomplacencia del hombre mientras participan de su propia destrucción a través de estas armas.

"Estamos en 1945. Todavía es pronto, aún reina la inocencia... Bueno, en algunas partes."

Visto lo visto el argumento de esta novela es prácticamente imposible de explicar por la cantidad de lineas narrativas, personajes, referencias, flashbacks e incluso canciones que forman parte de conglomerado narrativo que a veces el lector tiene la impresión de que va a estallar en mil pedazos por lo caótico, y sin embargo, poco a poco nos iremos percatando de que Pynchon lo tiene todo bien milimetrado. La dificultad de una novela como ésta quizá no esté en el argumento gamberro e irreverente, continuamente sorprendiendo por la mezcla de géneros y por una parodia continua de la sinrazón de las guerras, sino en la manipulación que hace Pynchon del lenguaje ajustándolo a la época y a los diferentes registros de los personajes, de tal forma que hay momentos en que aborda un humor enfermizo, retorcido e incluso sórdido, cruzando límites continuamente. Este humor exagerado en momentos que incluso adquieren tintes hiperexagerados cuando aborda las escenas sexuales, puede cambiar de registro en escenas determinadas y nos sorprende con escenas maravillosamente estilizadas en la linea del más puro estilo de cine negro americano: la historia de amor en pleno bombardeo entre Roger y Jessica, la aparición de Katje Borgesius como femme fatale con el rastro que deja su cigarrillo al desaparecer ella, la caza del pájaro dodo en Africa, los momentos en torno al arco del pasado de Tchiterine y así continuamente a lo largo de toda la novela:

"Señales de Katje, y además por partida doble. Una noche, Slothrop se sentó en el cuarto de los niños de una propiedad abandonada, y encendió fuego con el pelo de una muñeca rubia con ojos de lapislázuli. Conservó aquellos ojos."

[...]

"Pierde algo más que a la simple Jessica; pierde toda una extensión de vida. Ahora volverá al invierno, a retirarse de nuevo en su cascarón.
[...]
Roger no se imaginó que lloraría cuando ella se marchase. Pero lloró. Después, cada vez que su pie izquierdo diera en el suelo al andar, sentiría una sacudida de dolor a través de medio cráneo."

[...]

"Uno puede desearla, pero nunca debe dar señales de ello, ni con la mirada ni con gesto alguno, pues no haría sino aumentar su tenuidad hasta el punto de hacerla desaparecer por completo, como humo en el desierto, y ya no quedaría ninguna otra oportunidad."

[...]

"... y en el cenicero un cigarrillo apagado prematuramente en forma de desesperado garfio... Ella nunca desperdiciaba cigarrillos... Debe de haberse sentado, fumando, a mirarlo mientras dormía... hasta que algo, nunca le preguntará qué, disparó su actividad, hizo que le fuera imposible quedarse hasta el final del cigarrillo. Él se incorpora, lo endereza y lo termina."

No es una novela fácil, y sin embargo, creo que el secreto está en dejarse llevar sin hacerse demasiadas preguntas de hacia dónde nos conduce Pynchon porque el placer está en ese “viaje” casi a ciegas en el que nos sumerge su autor. La novela está repleta de juegos de lenguaje, teorías cientificas y viajes al pasado casi sin venir a cuento, solo por el simple placer de sacarnos de la historia para introducirnos dentro de otras pequeñas historias, como en esas cajas rusas, y si fuera película, quizás esta novela sería un musical porque Pynchon con su irreverencia marcada la sazona de canciones tontorrronas y de mal gusto en medio de una escena, un anticlimax que Pychon controla porque es su manera de hacer sentir al lector la paranoia de los tiempos que viven los personajes de esta novela. La locura y la desesperación de los tiempos se refleja en esa fragmentación continua de la estructura de la novela de forma que de alguna manera el lector pueda conectar con los personajes y la paranoia que los rodea.

"Así sigue avanzando la gente, poblaciones enteras, a través de la abierta pradera, cojeando, arrastrando los pies, llevados, arrastrados, empujados, a tirones, a través de los escombros de un orden burgués y europeo cuya destrucción definitiva ignoran todavía."

Y dentro de este microcosmos de personajes y experiencias durante la guerra, lo que a mi parecer mejor consigue esta novela es retratar la atmósfera de desesperación de la Europa de finales de la guerra y de la posguerra, el movimiento es vida, y esto es lo que refleja con enorme talento Pynchon usando el lenguaje como herramienta principal. "El arcoíris de gravedad" es una sátira del mundo en que vivimos, de la guerra como negocio y de como los seres humanos no dejan de ser otra cosa que meros instrumentos para este negocio. Una novela a la que le tendré que dar otra vuelta en un futuro.

"No debe olvidarse que el verdadero negocio de la Guerra es comprar y vender."

Help! I feel like I’ve been trapped in a Marx Brothers movie for three months, only one with a lot of gross scatology, arcane cosmology, sexual perversions, rocket science and engineering, chemistry, digressions about the lives of light bulbs, and every other sort of weird subplot one could think of. Somebody let me out of here! With all due respect to the people, many of them very smart, who love this book, I did not like this book. And I read every word. But if appreciating this book depends on understanding every obscure reference in it and, as so many have said, on re-reading it, well, that is never, ever going to happen.

On a sentence level, there were some impressive constructs, but that’s a given. I expected that (this is not my first, or even my fourth, Pynchon rodeo). The prose will twist and soar and vault and slither and lay on the page in such marvelous sentences, and often a paragraph would leave me feeling that there was a ghost of a deep and important concept that I could almost grasp. The promise of an idea was there, but usually would not crystallize in a way that I could really get hold of, which fits nicely with the themes of mysterious forces just beyond our ken, knowledge always just outside our vision. However . . . there wasn’t even enough coherence, comprehension or, yes, communication, for me to feel this use of the deliberately obtuse and obscure was justified. I don’t want to slander the man, but it might be that Mr. P was himself under the influence of a few (or quite a few) of the substances he’s so fond of writing about while penning this tome. My question is, where were the editors? Oh, wait, it was 1973. Never mind.

I enjoyed Vineland and Inherent Vice, and I dearly love The Crying Lot 49 (which I’ve read six or seven times) and Bleeding Edge, which I will certainly read again. But GR, despite probably hundreds of brilliant sentences, the fun stories and digressions, wacky characters, glimmers of thematic ideas that might be profound (but who the hell knows with so much bloat to slice through), seemed more like something spewed than crafted. It didn’t hold together or form a coherent whole in a way that warrants a work a “masterpiece,” or even “good.” Art needs discipline, structure, selectivity, and purpose.

And that leads me to a few words on a common response to this kind of “difficult” book, and to the argument about “Pynchon light” versus the “serious Pynchon.” I am not an adherent of the philosophy, “It’s incomprehensible; therefore, it must be genius.” It might be, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. It’s a writer’s job to communicate. That’s not to say everyone will “get” every book or that some books cannot be better understood on subsequent readings; most of the best ones have richness that expands on re-reading. But this one, I believe, was just one hot mess and a half. The all-over-the-placeness and incomprehensibility are minuses, not pluses. The Crying of Lot 49 is a better book, at less than one-fifth the word-count.

There are parts of this I appreciated. In addition to the prose, I know many people are charmed by the sheer iconoclastic wackiness, and that can be fun in certain judicious doses: nobody does slapstick better. But for me, the book as a whole felt beyond bloated, out of control, and purposeless, and even setting aside the parts I found offensive (priggish little me), I’m baffled by its reputation. (I did like the songs though.)

I will continue to read Pynchon: V and Mason Dixon are on my reading list for the next couple of years. And Against the Day . . . well, we’ll have to see how it goes.

What just happened to me . . .

I feel like reviewing this could be dangerous. There are many who have strong feelings about this book. Also, as my status updates for this were hitting Twitter, I was getting several likes from random Pynchon fans, so I feel like this could be under more of a microscope than usual.

So . . . here is how I am going to do this review. The first paragraph will be my experience with the book and my star review. This is strictly my experience and does not reflect on how I feel others should feel about this book. If it triggers anyone, that is not my intention . . . but nothing surprises me anymore. After that I will have just a few bullet point observations that are not necessarily pros or cons, but just things that went through my mind while reading.

Here goes!

Overall . . . I am giving this book 3 stars. At times I felt like I was at 1 star and ready to give up. At other times I was at 5 stars and what I was reading was creative genius. So, it only seems fair to average things out around 3. It was not an easy book to read, follow, or stay interested in. I often found my mind wandering and had to go back several times to recap. But, when a section stuck with me, it really stuck with me and, overall, it is a book I will not forget.

Now . . . random Gravity’s Rainbow thoughts . . .

-tIf David Foster Wallace was not partially inspired by this book to write Infinite Jest, I would be very surprised. There is such a similar feel between the two.
-tThroughout the book I also kept thinking this felt at times like Catch-22 (released 12 years before this book), so I feel like Pynchon must have had some inspiration from that classic.
-tI heard that this book won the Pulitzer, but they retracted the award because of the extreme nature of the content. After reading the book, I am not saying it is right that they did it, but I can say that I am not surprised.
-tIf you are sensitive or easily offended (and blush easily), this may not be the book for you. It has been a long time since I have been this shocked about things that were put down on the page. Also, proceed with caution when reading my next bullet point.
-tIf there was a book about The History of the Penis, it would refer to penises less than this book does. To be blunt, I think penises (and ejaculation) came up so much in this book as a symbolism of rockets, their trajectory, and the force of a launch.
-tThis is a book I feel you might need online resources to help you get through/understand it. It has so much bizarre stream of conscious imagery and so many outlandish plot points that a little extra help won’t hurt.

I am going to stop there for now, but this book was so long and led to so many thoughts while I was on my journey that I may come back later to add additional bullet points as I think of/remember them.

Do I recommend this book? Did you like Catch-22 and Infinite Jest? Do you like very epic, very bizarre stories that will likely make your head hurt but also might blow your mind? Are you trying to complete a list of recommended books? Then yes! But otherwise . . . no or proceed with extreme caution.

‘What is the real nature of control?’

tFrom the first sentence of Pynchon’s National Book Award winning novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, the Reader is transplanted into a threatening world where death strikes first, the cause second. It is a world of frightening realism and comic absurdity, all fueled through drug induced hallucinations, paranoid ramblings, and psychological investigations that is not all that unlike our own reality once you remove yourself to view it from afar as if it were some painting in a gallery. This is the Zone, and Pynchon is your field guide through the wasteland of paranoids, preterits and pornographers. The novel is stylistically staggering and so carefully researched that the line between fact and fiction blurs and is not always easy to deduce. It is carefully plotted out with extreme precision, aligning the events with actual weather detail from the days played out and in keeping with a metaphoric representation of the zodiac signs through the passing months. While this novel can be demanding, it is also extremely rewarding for those who make it through this wild rocket ride of literature.t

A first time Reader should be cautioned that Part 1 of this mammoth text is exceedingly difficult. Pynchon seemingly takes great joy in pummeling the Reader with a labyrinthine structure of characters and plot lines, each accruing through dramatic left turns in the narrative. The effect is pure disorientation, obfuscation and outright frustration. It feels just like spinning plates. It is, in a sense, Pynchon’s boot camp for the real war awaiting across minefields of prose; it is where he must break you down and reconstruct you as he sees fit. While the Reader must keep their head down and gut through, soaking up as much of the swirling stories as they can, Pynchon lays out the groundwork for the larger themes to come. Many of the ideas expressed early on won’t seem particularly meaningful, but by the end of the novel the Reader will realize it was all right there in their faces from the start. As characters will come and go like ghosts, with only minimal dimension and reference to them, the Reader will begin to realize that the coming tribulations are not there for the growth of the characters, but for the Reader themselves. The Reader must come out the other side changed in order for the novel to be a success. They must let go of their notions of story and plot, for Pynchon views even the smallest plot structure as comfort, they must let go, give in, and submit to Pynchon. He demands it, and he will fire off heady diatribes against your intellect with philosophy, theology, conspiracies and actual rocket science.

tThe novel takes off running once the gun sounds the start of Part 2 when, dropped from foggy London town, the Reader finds themselves in the Zone. Early on is a discussion of Pointsman and Mexico, Pointsman being crafted as the ultimate embodiment of Pavlov’s cause-and-effect conditioning and Mexico being considered as ‘the Antipointsman’.

’The young statistician is devoted to number and method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something. Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between…. to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one – the middle Pointsman has excluded from his persuasion – the probabilities.’

Much of this novel deals with these two major perspectives. Pynchon often establishes structure, the Pointsman method, merely to deconstruct it and show the faults that lie within. By showing two specific points, in this instance excluding those inbetween points, Pynchon is able to demonstrate moments of symmetry, which he will then reverse. Normally a rocket would be heard before it explodes in a ball of death, but with the V2, now we have the death before sound (reversals also play a large key to the novel, from the countdown before a launch, to hypnotic imagery of English explorers sailing backwards to home).

tThese two specific points are also expressed as binary differences, such as black and white, life and death, good and evil, preterition and the chosen few. These binaries are clear-cut sides, direct opposites of forces in keeping with the theory of entropy which rules the novel, sides that we clamor to reach in order to have a firm ground to stand on and a cut-and-dry vision of who is friend and who is foe. But Mexico, and Pynchon, rejects these binaries. Mexico acknowledges the space between zero and one, which is a wild, lawless no-man’s land (recall the McCarthy-esk western vision of Slothrops where there is one of everything – a endlessly compounding ‘one’ that creates an asymptote never actually reaching 1) where everything and anything is possible. It is a place more dream than reality, and the hallucinogenic nature of Pynchon’s spiraling prose and plots do well to express the ambiguities inherent in such a Zone. However, the novel never fully subscribes to one theory and can be interpreted as a cautionary tale for those who wander into this territory. Plot, laws and binaries are structures that keep our minds at ease and provide comfort and safety, so when we enter into the infinite freedom of the decimal we open ourselves to forces that may scatter us, kill us, and rub us out into oblivion.

tPynchon himself will try to scatter and thwart the Reader in consequence of stepping into his Zone. He acknowledges you are in his territory, and will speak as he chooses, often with what seems an intention of belittling your own intelligence. He only occasionally makes concessions to the reader when he realizes at least a slight bridge must be made in setting a scene such as saying ‘you will want cause and effect. All right’, which, considering the rejection of such an idea in this novel, also serves to mock the reader for scrambling to grasp the reassuring ledge of the pool in the deep end he has thrown us. To swallow this novel on a first read, a reader must attack it somewhat like middle school mathematical story problems – find the important information in the bloated paragraph, divide and conquer. There is a plethora of information to choose from as he will offer a vast variety of the same symbols and metaphors (the symbolic us of the letter S, for example, shows up as the SS, the shape of the bomb factory tunnels, people spooning, the symbol for entropy, etc. There is a death/life metaphor on practically every page) Yet, Pynchon seems hell-bent on keeping you on your toes and disoriented. He will allow the Reader to slide into a groove of strong forward velocity, and then deliver a scene so grotesquely funny or vilely disgusting to shock the readers mind and scatter their thoughts and perceptions from decoding this vast network of ideas and then tries to evade us in a web of looping plots, obtuse anecdotes and countless characters (some of which come and go with hundreds of pages between mention). The maze of a plot that must be navigated is acknowledged as being similar to the course of events Slothrop encounters on the way, which he compares to the Boston public transit (MBTA):

‘by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he’s headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom.’

There must be a sense of trust that eventually, if you keep gutting through, there will be a conclusion to satisfy a journey of such magnitude. Honesty, this is successful and not only did I feel a massive sense of accomplishment for finishing this beast, but also felt satisfied intellectually and narrative-wise.

tThere is a constant paranoia overwhelming each printed word, a paranoia that the Reader must assimilate by proxy in order to fully appreciate the madness at hand. Yet paranoia itself must be a sort of comfort as well. While there is a fear of the Invisible Hand at play, pushing us through psychological nods in the right way, it is still a comfort that we are part of Their greater plan. For the preterits, this They is the only sense of God they will ever feel, as they are looked over by God himself. This whole novel is the interaction of such Preterits, from the self-proclaimed fetishists to the colony of escaped concentration camp members, and the Reader must become a member of these second sheep as they must lose their selves along with Slothrop. The Reader is dragged through the mud and muck of a smattering of various theories, and to keep their sanity, they attempt to assign meaning to these elusive threads flashing about them in order to keep going.

But perhaps this is just what Pynchon wants us to do, assigning Him the role of the They, and the Reader will begin to feel paranoid that this is all in jest, that Pynchon is simply pulling the world over their eyes and will begin to question even their own powers of deduction. We have learned that all that is comforting must be released (not yet knowing at these points in the novel that there is only a void awaiting with total freedom), and even the paranoid ponderings are only a comfort for us in Pynchon’s world.

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. Well right now, Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky’

First, note the reversals in this, then swoon at the powerful prose in the second half. Now, assign meaning to this quote – but Slap, no! – Pynchon says there is no meaning. But then feel yourself become transparent and weightless, fading into oblivion with no reference to the world around you. This is the ultimate dilemma we are faced with in the Zone.

It is no surprise the Reader is made to feel so paranoid in a novel rife with corporate conspiracy, much of which is highly researched and forms an impressive historical fiction aspect to this novel. If those rambling through the Zone are the preterits moved by the They, than these corporations are one of the highest tangible link to the They we can see. They decide who lives and dies, who is rich and from who wealth is gatekept, what we want to consume and how we consume it (‘consumers need to feel a sense of sin’) and They exist in a realm where the War is simply a shuffling of power.

‘This war was never political at all, the politics was all theater, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology….by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques’

Throughout the course of Gravity’s Rainbow, we have endless looks into mans thirst for technology, which in itself is a thirst for death based on the nature of the technology, even when it is also a life-giving force such as is the case of Pokler who had no life until the Rocket, and how this goes beyond the War itself. Even the White Visitation simply uses the War as a reason for more funding. Mans role in technology is at the heart of every idea in this book. Entropy is a measuring stick which this novel employs (in a book that sets out to dissolve all rules, having a rule that is upheld highlights its importance), and all events and ideas serve to counterbalance each other in keeping with the conservation of energy with the preterits being the heat burned off. As a quick aside, if I may, many of these preterits, Mexico and Jessica’s romance or the concentration camp members (‘their liberation was a banishment’) for example, are directly tied to the war and become a casualty of peace – the budding romance (there are some tearjerker lines, Pynchon really shows his soft side with them) being the ‘waste heat’ in a chemical reaction. The Rockets, being the focal point of the book, are both life and death images as well as phallic metaphors while many of the literal phalluses in the book being used as metaphors for rockets. Film plays another large role, with much of the book containing constant allusion to pop culture, and Der Springer believes he can reshape reality through film.

tThis struggle of life and death is something that must be embraced as two parts of a whole in this novel, much like man and machine become one with Gottfried and the 00000 Rocket. Life and death are found strung together all throughout the novel, yet, as critic Harold Bloom points out in his essays on Rainbow, in Pynchon's book so focused on the idea of Death, the Reader never actually experiences or witnesses one - not one in all of the 800 pages. Many deaths are spoken of, some ambiguous like Tantivity’s, and others referred to plainly such as Pudding’s (note that ‘shit’ is spoken of as a metaphor for death, ‘shit is the presence of death’, and he is made to ingest it during – for him, not us – a sexual peak as another way life and death bind together in the novel), but the camera of the prose, if you will, always cuts right before the Reader must be an active participant in the death. Like Gottfried again, we know he dies, but because the com-link is only one way, we never can know the precise moment. Even Peter’s clubbing to the head cuts before the club can land. In this way, the novel is shown actually as a celebration of life, all the moments moving from 1:life to 0:death but never getting to the zero. We are forever in the Zone, for better or for worse. But with the final words of the novel, nay, the final two words, he pulls us from oblivion back to the whole. We escape death by existing in the moments between 1 and 0, and, ironically, in a book bent on annihilating structure and group alignment, he calls us all back into one large group: humanity.

tGravity’s Rainbow is a massive novel that takes quite a bit of decoding and deboning in order to devour. But this is precisely what Pynchon wants and requires of us. This is a book that more or less requires a second reading just to grasp all that it has to say, the first is just a test of survival. The agglomeration of ideas are too much to chew and savor on one trip, and there is so much ambiguity present that, like Joyce’s Ulysses, he intends to scholars to dissect and analyze this novel for years and years to come. In the novel, the Zone members gather to become Kabbalists of the Rocket, ‘to be scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop’. This book is Pynchon’s Rocket, ‘our Torah…our darkness’, which he cast forth into the 1970’s literary scene as a harbinger of destruction to all preconceived notions of literature. Pynchon in this way is not all that unlike the Rocket launchers, hidden far away out of sight in his reclusiveness, avoiding photographic surveillance, sending his Rocket into a brave new world. We, the Readers, are Gottfried strapped inside with ‘fire beneath our feet’ as Pynchon, as Blicero, hurls us forth into the irreversible future.

Now everybody-

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'Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone'

roll credits

t
I would also HIGHLY recommend the A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel to any readers of this novel. It was a huge help, especially with the pop culture allusions. Just be wary that it does occasionally give away plot elements and devices, sometimes long before they appear in the novel, and will practically double your time reading the actual book because there is so much information.

Also, I have to thank Stephen M's wonderful group read for inspiring me to read the book, while doubling as a support group to get us all through this tome! The discussions and links there are extremely helpful and insightful.

Last, but certainly not least, I'd like to direct you to the amazing reviews of my reading buddies on this strange ride, Steve, Ian, Jenn, Mark,Shan, Sean,  Paquita, and many more to come!

Quando ero piccolo giocavo spesso con le biglie, non ne avevo molte, ma una quindicina circa sì e la mia biglia preferita era quella che troviamo qui in copertina in primo piano. Ricordo che la guardavo così da vicino che quasi quasi mi girava la testa e avevo un senso di disorientamento, ecco questa sensazione l'ho avuta per tutta la durata di questo romanzone, un libro davvero fuori di testa.
Ora immaginiamo di essere davanti al calderone di Panoramix, quello dove il druido preparava la mitica pozione magica per Asterix e i suoi amici. Ecco ora prepariamo la pozione magica di questo libro: partiamo con una bella mestolata di Storia, poi seguita da una cucchiaiata di Matematica ed una di Fisica e Chimica e mescoliamo un po', ora è il momento di una dose generosa di surrealità, grottesco e ironia nera e riprendiamo a mescolare, quando il tutto sta per bollire, ci aggiungiamo dell'erotismo flambè (quanto basta, molto direi) ed infine una vagonata di scrittura stupefacente. Eccoci qui il capolavoro è servito, bevetene tutti!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouhYm...

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.

Usually mentioned in the same bracket as Infinite Jest this is another one of those books deemed hard to penetrate or unreadable. I read this in half the time it took me to read Infinite Jest but it was way more challenging.

I read many reviews and articles prior to starting Gravity's Rainbow so i was prepared for the absolute mind fuck i was presented with. If you had no idea of what you were getting into then i can easily understand why people would give up because it is all over the place. There is a plot but it's kind of hidden beneath other sub plots, schemes, bizarre conversations and parts that may or may not be paranoid dreams/delusions so disciplined concentration is required. I did pretty well for parts 1-3 and was just about holding on and following the books many events but part 4 just goes all out crazy as many of the characters descend into madness, which is reflected in the writing. To fully appreciate and understand this unique book i will have to read it at least once more, which i've promised myself i will do.

Despite the difficulty i enjoyed it and at times found Thomas Pynchon's writing masterful. I wasn't expecting to have my hand held by the author and even when the narrative confused me i still took pleasure in the writing. I originally scored this 4 stars but after writing this review i realise i miss reading this book. It's going up to 5! A true masterpiece.

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.