caotico... il re dei romanzi postmoderni, la vetta assoluta, l'alfa e l'omega, colui che fu che è e che sarà, nei secoli dei secoli Amen,

Pasqua, Natale, Ascensione, Pentecoste osanna nell'alto dei cieli, i razzi ascendono nei cieli e dopo cadono portando morte e distruzioni

Edit, 14 Sep. 2012: So. I've been thinking and talking about this book literally all year now while my Pynchonian love has been growing exponentially. Four stars it is for this maddening, wonderful, frustrating and surprising masterpiece of American literature because it has done nothing but endear itself to me the more I dwell on it. I'm leaving my review as I wrote it in January because I'm fucking lazy, okay? the vast majority of it is still true.

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Holy crap, y'all. This book. This book! Thomas Pynchon's brain is a national treasure (albeit a kooky one), as it takes some mad skill to combine a smorgasbord of seemingly unrelated components -- among them: a giant adenoid, a metric butt-ton of intersecting conspiracies, applied physics (complete with equations that made me feel like a dimwit!), cannibalism, World War II, entropy, Plasticman, the occult, Pavlovian experiments, Mickey Rooney, light-bulb legacies, obscure '40s cultural references, disgusting English candies (is that redundant?), characters breaking into goofy songs with a frequency befitting musical theatre -- and throw them all together with a staggeringly cohesive and coherent result that's also a language-lover's dream.

My previous encounters with Pynchon are limited to one of his shortest works ("The Crying of Lot 49"), his newest offering ("Inherent Vice"), and a handful of short stories from a long-ago college lit class. I'll admit, while I've always enjoyed hanging out with the brainchildren of literature's most enigmatic figure, I was motivated to conquer "Gravity's Rainbow" for purely egotistical reasons: Many tackle the daunting tome but few reach the finish line, and I wanted to rank among the few who can count this post-modern insanity among their bookish conquests. I owe the Pynchon Wiki a great many thanks for deciphering some of the more arcane allusions tossed into the mix, otherwise I wouldn't've known what the hell was going on in more than a few instances and would have most likely abandoned the effort.

The two months I spent wading through "Gravity's Rainbow" were, indeed, punctuated by bouts of confusion and frustration. I can't remember the last time I did this much research on a book that wasn't required reading for a class. Nor can I recall a time when a work of fiction had me rereading passages and pages two or three times to make sure I knew which way was up. If not for perusing reviews by veteran Pynchon enthusiasts who offered assurances that one is not supposed to understand every nuance of this book the first time around, I probably would have thrown the novel across many rooms at various points. I came into this adventure thinking that it couldn't be that difficult and was thoroughly humbled within 20 pages.

But damn if this didn't return every drop of my hard work with a truly rewarding reading experience. Sure, I was consulting a dictionary or some kind of wikipedia every couple pages, and the breakneck discursiveness of the narrative did have me running in circles every so often. But! The inherent difficulty of this reading experience forced me to pay attention to every single word in the almost-800-page book. Demanding that kind of effort and focus absolutely made it easier for me to appreciate the kind of unusual talent that birthed this terrible and unconventional beauty. And you know what? I felt brilliant every time I understood an off-the-cuff historical reference (why, yes, I DO know why Prince Edward abdicated!) or genuinely laughed hysterically over one of the countless clever turns of phrase that made every "Just what the hell is going on here!?" moment worth the headdesking.

Pynchon's wordsmithing prowess is on full-force here (and is why I feel a little dirty giving this a paltry three stars), which is what kept me hurdling headfirst through the more-than-sometimes murky depths of his magnum opus. His penchant for veering completely off the topic did mean that I've forgotten more details than I've retained, but Pynchon's ability to polish a sentence to the point of making it seem effortlessly constructed more than compensated for that. Besides, I don't feel too badly about my inability to retain every excruciatingly minute detail because, from what I understand, half the joy of this book comes from the reread, which is partly why I couldn't justify slapping four stars on it after our first tango, especially when so much escaped my notice. Anyway. Any book that can be chock-full of made-up songs, hidden poetry and some of the most laboriously set up puns ever written appeases my inner language nerd enough to forgive any (fleetingly, in this case) less-than-enthusiastic feelings that cropped up during our long-term acquaintance. The exhaustive scope of the vocabulary Pynchon has at his command is on par with that of both his general knowledge and this book's terrain. Hell, even the nature of my readerly reactions -- outright laughter, near tears, gagging fits -- ran the gamut of physical responses.

While the stream-of-consciousness approach definitely got a little burdensome at points, it really did add so much to the story. Watching where some of these characters' minds wandered to made them seem so human and believable, which kept me caring about what was going on even when I didn't know what was going on. Pynchon does tell the story from lots of vantage points, often allowing one character to draw conclusions about another, but he also lets the reader in on what's really happening with the hundreds of people populating the story. The way that the choir of voices weaves dozens of individual plot threads into a rich tapestry of intersecting madness justifies every instance of wandering narrative.

Finally (because I'm getting tired of writing and want to go back to reading), the humor with which Pynchon writes is an absolute treat. I've never seen a writer get so much comical mileage from a well-placed "Really?" There are some flat-out ridiculous directions that the plot takes but it's really the writing itself that tickled my deranged sense of humor the hardest. I did get a serious kick out of Pynchon's preoccupation with kazoos, harmonicas and bananas, too. It made me want to start a marching kazoo band of my own, mostly because I've got a soft spot for making my own magically obscure allusions. (I'll settle for an adequate photo of the MST3K cereal novel, though.)

~~

I don’t know why exactly you folks out there read, or why you feel compelled to then seek out a community in which you might share your thoughts, impressions, reactions etc. about the books you’ve read… But me myself, I read for many reasons - among them the opportunity to transcend the narrow window of my own point of view; the chance to learn by a leap, however minimally, over the subjective walls of my own stupid existence; also and especially to inhabit for a few moments the warm pulse of aesthetic bliss and recognition that waves over me whenever a certain sentence or passage hits just so…; at a basic level, to increase my appreciation and understanding of Life, and those artists and thinkers out there striving to contribute to the meaning of human experience, those attempting to bring some beauty or order into the entropic universe and make a little sense out of this mess of a reality we’re stuck in for the duration. And if they can’t find order or beauty, at least to make the muck sing out in some delightful way... There is also that moment where something unnameable (but now somehow named...) clicks into place while reading, and something akin to deja vu blooms inside - the This is the proper expression of the thing I’ve always had in mind but have never been able to express so rightly... The closest thing I get to what is typically described as a feeling of “spirituality” (I who sincerely believe I do not experience spirituality in any degree), are these moments when I come upon this expression of something intensely meaningful and resonant with me and my personal experiences outside of myself, encountering something that seems of me but not by me... these are elusive moments, rare, but when they occur I feel struck by something close to what Nabokov wrote about his experience of Love :

”When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”

Which is why, of course, I then tend to seek out a community with which to share my emotion, my experience, to know that others too might be aware that such experiences are not only possible, but are out there for us, somewhere, waiting to be found hidden among the vast mundane plowing of life… and the comforting idea that others have generously spent many of their precious hours alive in creating works of art that contain their own such revelations, because they understand the importance of keeping this type of transmission alive through history, that this type of uncovering and finding is an essential component of being human ...

CUE SONG ~~ Take a look! It’s in a book! A reading rainbow... ~~

So, here I am, putting it out there to this broad community of Good Readers, wanting to tell you, Gravity’s Rainbow, for me, was one such experience, one such “finding”, a book I’ve been waiting for all my reading life… And with it, and my readings of Mason & Dixon and Against The Day, I am more certain of my notion that Pynchon is the peak of American postmodernism, alongside the works of William Gaddis - that these two have set the goal for what the encyclopedic novel might accomplish on this side of the Atlantic, in this American English… I consider having the opportunity to read both Gravity’s Rainbow and Gaddis’ J R in the same year a great privilege...

But Pynchon’s book itself is practically impossible to review, impossible to summarize or condense, worthless to categorize or constrain by exegesis - because of all it contains, the enormity of what it holds within its pages, the hundreds of characters and mad proliferation of ideas and allusions, all those words! hundreds of thousands of words that somehow leave so much unsaid, but unsaid in perfect ways (left to drift into audience dreams) - because it projects countless tentacles wrapping its world and reaching out into space-time, some of which return full of Story and the Known to feed the octopus body center of narrative, and some which purposefully throw Story and the Known out into the careening forces of the expanding universe, to be forever unresolved and scattered to cosmic coldness and star-distances - because of the density of the fragmentation of the world it has created, (but which is no more fragmented than any human consciousness encountering existence on any given day)...

So allow me only to give you a small cenotaph or a monument - (an obelisk?)- to the impossible review of Gravity’s Rainbow ::

Like a great movie, all of its themes are present in each scene, and yet the individual occurrences and set pieces here seem infinitely varied and inexhaustible. It is the macro-microcosm unity of the mandala. I believe, at a certain level, it contains the elemental forces of existence, the things that make Time rotate, Jackson, but that are only allowed to be seen by Pynchon writing around them... he knows that naming would fix them and so render them invisible… These are parallax visions : The explosion/implosion, the ascent/descent, of a rocket or the archangels or a human destiny, the fatal arc of gravity’s pull on an accelerating object, as if it ever had a choice of the path it would take; the dialectic, the synthesis of opposites, the white and the black, the yin the yang, and the Tarot tower with a king in mid-fall; the parabola path of ejaculate soaring from penis head to trembling body or mouth, or the journey of the whip to flesh and a memory of feeling anything as clearly as we feel pain, or the need to inflict pain; (-the cuticle of the fingernail inscribed by its own half-moon- the body has its own parabolas-); Faust retold in tar-dark comedy; Rossini’s Tancredi performed in the deepest depths of an LSD trip; an orchestral kazoo piece titled “What Is The Nature of Control?”; and the freedom of the individual within the extrinsic objective needs of the Conspiracy; the wave that dips below the zero but is not extinguished and re-emerges over London mouthing a millionhuman scream; the manymirror worlds that were born alongside ours in the forge of the Big Bang but went into dimensional retreat, that can now only be accessed by occult practices; the scuttling amid the transportation networks of the necropoli, where ghosts take luxurious elevators through their ruined places; the poles of the Earth and the Heavens aligning, right there a Brocken Spectre fingering a destroyed city’s maw; the procession of the conjured and the vanished, and the parallel worlds and possible universes we rub up against each time we peel a banana… the voices of the dead in constant song (which is the Music of the Spheres, listen for them in the silence of the Shadow of the Sun, if it ever finds you) and all the bending light sent in Morse code to us by Them from the pinpoint stars, which Those In The Know know are powerful film projectors, enumerating to us the Lies We Must Believe So That We Play Out Our Part In Their Game, and all the chemical formulations of all Their hallucinogens and all their lost dogs and all Time unfolding at once Everybody now… in an encyclopedia of human culture accommodating all things lowbrow to high- a schizophrenic Moby-Dick of the nuclear age… Our Great Paranoid Epic: Slothrop’s Progress Through The Military-Industrial Raketen-Stadt subtitled The Kenosha Kid and The Dear Ol’ Death Drive… where we find Orpheus’s lyre unstrung and discarded, but still plucked by the dry wind… or a lost harmonica found years later in the cold flow of a distant river and the bluegreen water-notes it mournfully plays, the water through the individual soundholes making of the river a sound-rainbow… the Rainbow Promise, ages old, taken back by the one who swore it… I tell ya it makes one helluva good movie! (complete with a Looney Tunes short...)

A-and of course, that “the act of sex and the act of death are one”, yes, at first this might seem simple, but it is really a complicated notion, one which might require infinite time and depths for us poor humans to come to terms with, if we ever do… but luckily film reels run in circles!

(...next up, cutting room floor tidbits from the poet laureate of the Lüneburg Heath and his critically acclaimed Sonics to Orifice... relevant previews of poems to come...)

Tree arising! O pure ascendance!
Orpheus Sings! Towering tree within the ear!
Everywhere stillness, yet in this abeyance:
seeds of change and new beginnings near...

Hail the force sublime
uniting we who live in signs.
The clock's steps only mime
the ticking of a truer time.

Devoid of actual perception,
antenna to antenna we posit,
by main force of intuition,
what emptiness transmits. . .

Do you hear the future
adrone and athrob, Sir?
Extolling its power,
comes a messenger...

Look at the machine:
how it turns and destroys.
vengefully twisting us like toys...

And though you fade from earthly sight,
declare to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water say: I am.

The Good:
This could have been so awesome. Instead it is post-modern. I nearly gave this one star, but there was just too much I admired about it. There are some great ideas in this story - something of a paranormal thriller set in Europe at the tail end and aftermath of WWII. The setting is marvellous and the prose utterly brilliant.

The Bad:
The prose really pissed me off by the end. Can’t you just let me read the story without waving all this other crap in my face? The story was obscured by sidebars to the point where I’m not even sure there was a resolution. And unless you have some very specific hobbies (mid-20th century ideas in physics, for one) then most of the references will be too obscure, and you’ll feel like you’re on the outside of an in-joke. Plus there were far too many characters.

'Friends' character the protagonist is most like:
Tyrone Slothrop might be Phoebe. Or he might not. He might be a character from a completely different show. Though one still played by Lisa Kudrow. Or more likely a Lisa Kudrow impersonator with an addiction to experimental antidepressants.

“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”
-WERNHER VON BRAUN
The novel begins with this quote from von Braun, the father of the V-2 rocket. If you believe in a soul, knowing that energy cannot be created or destroyed and that the entropy of the universe increases over time, at death the soul will be released into the universe as energy, albeit more disorganized. Near the end of the novel there is this description of breaking free of the earth’s orbit and finding freedom.
“This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape….”

The V-2 rocket streaks across the sky and by the time you are aware of it, it is simply too late. The rocket has stuck its target already, the decoupling of cause and effect. This fear brings on a paranoia of being targeted and a distrust in those in charge.
“Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”

I found Gravity’s Rainbow quite a difficult read, even with additional aids. This novel also forced me to reconsider the scientific principles I learned earlier as a student.
“…a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond….That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life….Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities…how he came to love that clarity….”
Hilarious. Needless to say, this book was easily one of my favorite reads of the year.



From The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher-
“Gravity’s Rainbow was almost titled Mindless Pleasures.”


From Vanishing Point by David Markson-
“I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:
In contemplation of experiments with a new soporific drug, we would appreciate your procuring for us a number of women.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I dallied with the idea of writing a very short review, saying pithy things like:

"I'm glad that's over."

or:

"Fuck."

OR should I go more eloquent: "I'm going to set this day as an anniversary to commemorate why I'll never read this book again."

But I think I'll just state that I think I just got post-moderned in the ass.


Or I could say some wonderful things about the novel, too, of which there are many, many wonderful things, such a great and funny commentary on WAR, Operant Conditioning, Drug Fiends, Erections, Scatophagy, Porn, Dirty Limericks, Porn, the Physics of rocketry and drug making, Porn, Orgasmo, Porn, and a great scene near the beginning that brought to mind Pink Floyd's The Wall movie with the buttcheeks over London mixed with a sampling of the BLOB and Bananas.

Do you think this was an easy book to read? You might think so with all the Porn. But no. It's a drug-trip with funny scenes that's very smart and it goes way beyond my tolerance level for being smug. Maybe all this 60's and 70's thing about making sure every penis and vagina is getting it on to shock the straights just isn't for me. I'd like a little story with my porn. Fortunately, there's a lot of story hidden right beneath the surface, here. It might be hiding right beneath all the SS or a few more Nazis or just behind that other Nazi, or is it behind this one?

Golly, it's kinda hard to find it. I know it's there. But at least there's yet another erection and girls everywhere are flocking to this inexplicable sex symbol... but wait! Yeah... I have to admit the nasal erection bit was funny as hell.

*sigh*

I've read better bricks. I've even had better bricks slam across my head.

Alas, this one was not a solid gold brick with a slice of lemon wrapped around it, but it *might* be just as crazy. (Thank you, Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blaster. I need you so bad right now.)

This was the ninth time I’ve read this book since 1993, quite a few more than any other. I was in high school, head brimming with acid and the inheritance of a hippie counterculture not my own, and Pynchon’s name kept popping up in these funky period pieces with names like The Anatomy of Psychedelicvm Gnostica Terribellum that, for whatever reason, my high school library was a repository for. The section on mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs alone would probably form the cornerstone of a semi-respectable drug-witch’s rare and profane, if variable, chrestomathy.

The same round library at school (literally; 360°) had, 28-summers ago, an original Viking edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. I remember circling it (concentrically, given the architectural fundament of the building), imagining it as some sort of skeleton key that would reveal and, more importantly, clarify all the contrasting distortions that had, til then, been fucking with me since the advent of LSD. I was 15: I was unformed clay: but I was not uninformed: from beginning, as was the wont of my generation, with King, and the spring boarding fountain-wise from there: Lovecraft and Poe (‘cause: Metal Up Your Ass); Hesse; Lao-Tzu; Castaneda; Hemingway; Steinbeck; Burroughs; Kerouac; Ginsberg; Roth; Brautigan; ‘Gonzo’; Rimbaud…and on and on. Add in an even more constant, constant flow and current of new music—the likes of which I’d never thought possible in their synergies of beauty and noise—and I had a lot of shit rattling around in my head. Least of which was all that acid.

The point, if there is one, is that this book brought it all together then, and it still does now. Of course I labored like a field hand through that first reading, and I’m sure the second was just as over my head. But I knew, the minute I hit upon the rhythms of Gravity’s Rainbow, that I’d found the poly-idealist syncopation that matched the poundings of my own heart. Over time, what once seemed difficult is now pure enjoyment, naturally, but that’s what a lifetime of active reading gifts you. This single work has gifted more than anything: it gifted me MY writer, the one that I can swear allegiance to and feel I’m on the side of Good (while rejecting all that is truly dark). The one that wrote, here, “They are in love. Fuck the war,” which I proceeded to scrawl on my backpack. Fuck the war, always and indeed.

I believe that a goodly amount of our better traits as citizens of my country, though disappearing quickly, are quintessentially embodied in Tyrone Slothrop. He is the American dipshit, quite legitimately dumb, that possesses a brilliance of compassion. He holds no personal realty for nonsense like honor; he is concerned with the immediacy of love, friendship, conviviality, and, sure, carnality. Who isn’t? He is the product of an American-German system that literally engineered him from childhood, making him the New Man of the Atomic Age—he cums just before the bombs. But his bearing is unspoiled; his flame is true.

And there is always this in Slothrop, and it has never failed, in 28-years, to make me cry in its humor, soppy humanity, and absolute tragedy. I hope that this bodes well for my soul:

Trees, now—Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. “That’s really insane.” He shakes his head. “There’s insanity in my family.” He looks up. The trees are still. They know he’s there. They probably also know what he’s thinking. “I’m sorry,” he tells them. “I can’t do anything about those people, they’re all out of my reach. What can I do?” A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, “Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That’s what you can do.”

Now everybody…

A repulsive smut-ridden story... wait what am I even talking about, there’s barely even a comprehensible story here, it’s 750+ pages of random thoughts, repulsively senseless ultra-graphic obsessive sexual references and a stream-of-consciousness loosely regarding a World War II missile.

It had a good premise that was entirely undone by the author trying to make some kind of post modernist art statement through wildly crass imagery. It’s like trying to read a WWII novel while standing next to a person with coprolalia and a megaphone (a form of Tourette syndrome where a person continuously utters involuntary socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks and obscenities). Actually that person might be less crass than this terrible book. I truly HATE this book.

ITS ABOUT A SECRET ROCKET PROJECT IN WW II BUT I THINK SOME OF IT IS A DREAM BECAUSE IT DOESNT MAKE SENSE. THE AUTHOR IS VERY CLEVER.

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