Besides using the Alphabetical Index and the page-by-page annotation, you can also take a look at Gravity's Rainbow covers , read the reviews , or entertain some theories on the source of the title.
Review of Weisenburger's 2nd ed. Read it Read his bio, as well a pictures of Marc, his wife, and some of his watercolors from the s. There are two major ways to use this wiki. The first is the Gravity's Rainbow Alphabetical Index , used to keep track of the myriad characters, real and imagined, as well as events, arcana, and lots of other stuff.
The second is the Spoiler-Free Annotations by Page , which allows the reader to look up and contribute allusions and references while reading the book, in a convenient and spoiler-free manner. These two sections are so far almost entirely different, but we're working on integrating them. Click here for help with editing and creating pages. More than any other living writer, including Norman Mailer, he has caught the inward movements of our time in outward manifestations of art and technology so that in being historical he must also be marvelously exorbitant.
It is probable that he would not like being called "historical. Brown proposed in Life Against Death -- seen as a form of neurosis, a record of the progressive attempt to impose the human will upon the movements of time. Even the very recording of history is such an effort. History-making man is Faustian man. But while this book offers such Faustian types as a rocket genius named Captain Blicero and a Pavlovian behaviorist named Edward Pointsman, it is evident that they are slaves to the systems they think they master.
Because when faced with death, the natural response is life, and the natural precursor is procreation, and the natural instigator is, what? Some call it love. Others call it lust.
And perhaps it would be that clean if you ignored all that social indoctrination, all those millennia of cultural bonds and civilized underpinnings, the conformation of the animal to a world of new materials, new ideas, new awareness of pain and terror in the face of an overall useless existence.
If you force a creature to like something and live with it from day one, and then keep to the beat their descendants forever on, you better be ready for a blending of the biological instinct and the cultural indoctrination. You better be ready for the fetish, those inexplicable psychological bonds between a whole range of objects and ideologies, all linked up to the evolutionary instinct, the need to fuck.
And when you put these individuals, who have adapted to strictly controlled world in ways that would put Casanova to shame, into a pressure cooker of death and destruction and technology specifically calibrated to rend bodies in a grotesquely unbelievable artistry, a World War that made the previous paltry and has not yet been surpassed?
Furthermore, when you get Them, who sense all of this, in addition to sensing how society readily acquiesces to stories of violent rape and yet frowns on the consensual sexual relations that happen to deviate from the norm?
That calls the former an inevitability brought upon by the victims themselves, and the latter a perversion, a deviation, a thing of disgust and shame? Then, dear Reader, you have the conspiracy of the millennia, where War drives sex drives shame drives settling under the thumb of Them who caters to your secret erotic delight.
Who drives the War. For what? Money, of course. Ah ha, you say, of course. That excuses everything. Regardless, seems a bit wonky, no? Seems a bit, well, conducive to discussion of how civilization chooses to harness the biological drive, how it silently condones rape and loudly condemns the erratic spillover of voluntary intercourse, no matter how privately or safely it is conducted, no? Finally, going back to the knowledge. Right now, the liberal arts and the hard sciences hate each other.
Loathe each other entirely. And you know which book combines that all in a singular, sexy package? Simply, this is not an issue with the book, which chooses not to follow the path of literature referencing literature referencing literature ad infinitum, hardening the bubble to an insoluble force field of fear and close-minded intolerance.
Which, by the way, makes it perfect for teaching, small excerpts taken out of a context that still retains enormous amounts of contextual information, spanning scopes of knowledge and lines of reasoning with simple skips of words and sentences. No, this is an issue with education itself, the handling of separate subjects in separate ways that result in the same lesson.
We learn to hate learning, whether it be by the mindless cramming of scientific gobbledygook or the training to view books as a sponge to be soaked dry of every pointless and emotionally draining detail.
We are taught by those who have found refuge in the ideological constraints, concentrated themselves in high enough amounts of personal pride and vicious disdain for anything that lies outsides the traditions of their specific field.
We are trained to hate neutrality and loathe those who refuse to subsume their selves under a single formula, see them as traitors to the cause. As if the human mind, ever metamorphosing in endless streams of fickle time and violent happenstance, constantly shifting in reaction to similar seething cauldrons of fate and fortune, is a block that once fitted can never go back.
As if empathy is equivalent to proposal, as if understanding the viewpoints of others without being able to ignore their faults is a secret sign of defending said faults. As if any other reaction to capture bonding born and bred and colonized and commercialized beyond stoic subservience be grateful you have been passed over is not a screaming across the sky for survival, is not only heresy. It is evil. Where is the joy? Where is that feeling of acquiring something and loving it so much that one wishes to show it to others, help them understand that this thing they may have feared has so much beauty and really is not so frightening or impossible to comprehend?
Ignorance is bliss is the true evil of neutrality, and those loaded words are used to good measure of their full range of context. This book is hard. This is how I cheat. Anonymous: What? Aubrey: Irony. Aubrey: Okay. You know what. I get it. Here, all nicely formatted and quotable. And if that is indeed the case, well.
I can live with that. View all 86 comments. I've always been told that Gravity's Rainbow is one of most unfilmable books ever, but, seeing as others have somehow ended up on the big screen to my surprise, I just thought - this is before reading it mind you - that I bet it isn't as complex as people say, and could yet still end up being made. It's completely unfilmable. I'd put my life on it. I know its been thought about in the past, but even if it did have a straightforward narrative - which it absolutely doesn't - there is just no I've always been told that Gravity's Rainbow is one of most unfilmable books ever, but, seeing as others have somehow ended up on the big screen to my surprise, I just thought - this is before reading it mind you - that I bet it isn't as complex as people say, and could yet still end up being made.
I know its been thought about in the past, but even if it did have a straightforward narrative - which it absolutely doesn't - there is just no way. Firstly, by the end of this doorstopper of a novel, I had a pretty good idea - or at least my own interpretation of - just what the hell it all adds up to. But, I'd be lying if I said everything made sense and all the dots were joined.
There came a moment where certain pieces of the multi-complex plotline started to come together, but of course, to get there, I had to get through a really tough first third or so. It was tough I can tell you, but, unlike V, it didn't infuriate the bejesus out of me, as I always had a feeling that if I stuck with it the rewards will come. Secondly, I'd say for the writing alone, it's the best of the five Pynchon novels I've read. And whilst I did find it very funny in places - for me, Vineland is still the most fun, and the most character driven of the five - it is the darkest, most dense, most paranoid, most unsettling, most dazzling, most tragic, and most poetic.
A journey into a fearful twilight zone of semi consciousness is how I'd put it. It literally felt like I was neither awake nor asleep for most of it's pages. Can't think of any other book that has taken me out of my comfort space in the way this did. Some of the scenes where breathtakingly spectacular, outrageous, utterly revolting, and completely off the chart - that would be the chart of insanity - and I'm no doubt taking them to the grave.
But, although I did find the whole experience great, it is problematic in terms of not being able to take everything in - I even thought about back tracking, and reading say, the last 20 to 30 pages again each time I picked it up, but in the end dismissed this idea.
For one thing, people who aren't even in the novel get more of a story than some of the actual characters that are. And that brings me on to the places. One minute we're here, then we're there, then we're And how does an international light-bulb cartel that are having trouble in the amazon jungle trying to locate a missing light bulb from a military outpost, tie in with a polish undertaker trying to get struck by lightning in the Baltic sea? It is either very very clever or it's just plain quackers!
But then again, from what I can put together, is it not both? The plot, in fact, is so clever, that I now have to label Pynchon an all out genius as well as a mad man. I bet on second reading even more of the narrative will click into place too. And that brings me to the point, like others have said, It probably needs two, maybe even three reads, to fully grasp this monumental beast.
But that doesn't mean to say you can't enjoy it the first time, because I know I did. A record breaking post-modern orgy of references, flashbacks, cultural historical facts; and fictions, scientific terminology, philosophical musings, sperm induced blather, disguises - got to love um! View all 13 comments. I'd say it's even better than this. Also, if you haven't rea Michael wrote: "Steven wrote: "Michael wrote: "Great review!
Also, if you haven't read them yet, you might be interested in writers Like William H. I just checked, as I wasn't sure. It's in my TBR pile. Jared I'm curious about that one too.
I have a few more books I want to tackle before GR, but my copy did come in the mail the other day. I tried Lot of 49 o I'm curious about that one too. I tried Lot of 49 on audio and quickly found out Pynchon is best suited in written form, at least for me. Certainly won't make that mistake again with future Pynchon works.
As is true of any simulation, there is a deterministic component and a random component. Simulated paths will vary, but the statistical distributions from which the stochastic terms are sampled match those of GR. We begin by describing the basic structure, we then discuss our vision of the text generation process as it applies to GR , and conclude with final thoughts on how text simulation may be used going forward.
Simulation Structuring Interest in random text generation appears to have begun with the famous, though untested, proposition that an infinite number of monkeys with infinite time at their keyboards would ultimately reproduce Shakespeare. Of course, pure randomness without some kind of structure is a highly inefficient path toward literary art.
Plus, the process is just as likely to produce piggy porn as it is to emulate Pynchon granting, for our purposes, that there is a distinction to be made. The opposite side of the spectrum would be a well-defined set of sentences featuring blanks to fill in using a pre-chosen set of options. Such an approach differs from ours in that their structure is more narrowly defined, allowing insufficient latitude to characterize the chaotic and disorienting nature of GR. The input parameters to our simulation will, by default, result in 4 sections, 73 chapters, over characters mostly minor, wordplayfully named , and pages, just as the original did.
However, one of the advantages of a simulator is that the resulting length is configurable. We are also careful to specify stylistic breakdowns that may enter in a probabilistically identical way. The sampling ranges extend from ridiculous to sublime in one dimension and vulgar to sublime in another. By applying noise terms to the narrative, comprehension will vary throughout. Text Generating Process The backbone of our simulation structure is established in the initial step.
We specify a superset of core influences which are drawn upon by the random text extractor in accordance with user-supplied probability weights.
The next step is to intersperse small elements of plot into S1 with insertion points determined by a Poisson distribution. The sprawling narrative comprises numerous threads having to do either directly or tangentially with the secret development and deployment of a rocket by the Nazis near the end of World War II.
Agents of the Firm, a clandestine military organization, are investigating an apparent connection between Slothrop's erections and the targeting of incoming V-2 rockets. As a child, Slothrop was the subject of experiments conducted by a Harvard professor who is now a Nazi rocket scientist.
Slothrop's quest for the truth behind these implications leads him on a nightmarish journey of either historic discovery or profound paranoia, depending on his own and the reader's interpretation. As a work in the postmodernist tradition, nonlinearity must be actuated. At no point may the plot as a function of time P[t] be twice differentiable, and only rarely may it be first-order differentiable. Flashbacks, digressions, and various other discontinuities must be introduced as P[t] is inserted into S1.
In a related way, causal orderings must be distorted for a more authentic Pynchonian narrative. Once the plot convolutions specified above are inserted, resulting in S2, various themes may be brought to bear. Seminal reviews by Penkevich , Jenn ifer , and Graye discuss a wide variety of these themes and should serve as the basis for the next stage of textual input.
Elite, Us vs. Them, etc. Sampling from B proceeds in the same manner described above for A, i. We denote the result of this as S3. Authorial insights into human nature are treated in a similar way. However, lists constructed using the aforementioned reviews feature insights of the reviewers themselves.
This, in essence, removes layers of obfuscation so that transformations are necessary to reconstruct the more muddled original set. This is achieved by adding random perturbations and mapping the results into Hilbert space. Draws from this set of transformed and re-adumbrated insights inserted into S3 give us S4.
Stylistic modifications to S4 are important when attempting to simulate the GR experience. For one, the narration should vary depending on the POV character. Allow average words per sentence in certain randomly chosen sections to be fully three times greater than the overall average. The result of these modifications is denoted S5.
Any vanilla sex scenes within S5 may be replaced with random draws from Y. It is our contention that S7 will be a lexically similar rendition of the original when the default values of the parameter inputs are chosen. Alternatively, our framework also allows customization such that GR may be generated with a twist. Options along these lines are discussed in the final section below. As stated above, by choosing the relevant inputs and their GR -consistent probability values, a book very much like GR may be generated.
By repeating the process, multiple instances may be constructed. For instance, by dialing down the weight assigned to silly poems in the initial stage, one could generate a new GR of even greater ponderousness and density. Similarly, length settings may be varied. A GR sampler could be generated that is only a fraction of the original length. Or for the show-off readers out there looking for even greater challenges, a simulated version that doubles the length and halves the signal-to-noise ratio could be produced.
Hybridization is also possible. Hybrids that do not involve GR are also possible. We encourage readers to generate these important inputs to spectrally enrich and parabolically ground all further text simulation exercises. This is then fed into the simulator to randomly determine the next note consistent with the probabilities. The newly generated note pattern would then be windowed and used in an iterative fashion to determine all subsequent notes.
In contrast to him, I vow to support education, the environment, the people, bridges to nowhere only when the quid is sufficiently pro quo. Penkevich, S. Appendix A Our rating of the original GR instance, as published by Pynchon, was derived by integrating across a uniformly distributed utility function, U x,y. The limits of integration in the x dimension range from boring to funny; in the y dimension they range from obscure to profound. The primary input was a single page of a rhyming dictionary.
Yet I cannot abstain Despite genuine pain. Besides, Can it be the worst bane? A skull full of Chow mein? Oct 13, Mattia Ravasi rated it it was amazing. Video review Reading project Shit Happens For A Reason??? View 1 comment. Not to adore a book so repulsive? The National Book Award winner was voted to win the Pulitzer, but the committee decided it was too offensive to win the award, or something like that.
Now, I think WTF? The story was all over the place, but mostly repugnant by any set of morals of which I know. And yet, I don't think I'm simple or a prude. I've appreciated the literary quality of books revolving around statutory rape Lolita and sibling incest Ada, or Ardor. I can handle a lot. But I cannot get past the abominations listed, to appreciate, enjoy or find literary redemption in this novel.
This does not mean that I ignore the reality that such things occur in this evil world. What I mean is, where do we draw the line? For me, it is at acts albeit fictional that make me physically sick and that civilized societies of this world—who draw criminal lines all over the map on other moral wrongs—are pretty much united in condemning and outlawing with severe and stringent punitive measures, such as sex with pre-pubescent children and visual depictions of sex with children , and sex between parents and their children.
View all 24 comments. Mar 24, Conrad rated it it was amazing Shelves: owned , pomo , masterpieces , fiction. This might be my favorite novel. I read it over the course of around three months, on my fourth attempt, when I was living in Tallinn, Estonia. Something about residence in a very small European country heightens one's sense of the absurd. I would bring it to lunch at the bars where I dined and start crying into my club sandwich when the book was sad and laughing into my kebabs when it was funny which is nearly always and there are a lot of bartenders who probably thought I was crazy.
The first This might be my favorite novel. The first rule of Gravity's Rainbow is you do not talk about Gravity's Rainbow. Just read it and don't worry about all the things you don't get. You could spend the rest of your life in graduate school of various sorts and not be as smart as Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, so don't sweat it.
There are swaths of this book that I definitely don't get. Pointsman, the psychologist? Didn't get it. Didn't get him, as a character, didn't understand why he did what he did, almost ever. But hidden inside all the dross is literature of unparalleled terror and beauty: the chapter in the very middle of the book about Pokler and his daughter, which left me literally bawling in public, the only time I can think of I've ever done that.
Oddly, the description of U-boat latrines. The dejected Slothrop wandering Germany in a pig suit. Pirate Prentice's romance. The overgrown adenoid that invades London.
The dogs grown intelligent. The sad allusions to Webern's death. The notorious scat sequence that people get all worked up over. The Proverbs for Paranoids interspersed throughout "You will not touch the Master, but you may tickle his creatures Blicero's carnival of torture, better than anything Gonzalez could devise, and more honest, too.
Gravity's Rainbow is a quick guide to all the ways you could have lived your life but did not; all the injustices you have not had to face; all the ridiculous theories of the afterlife you can't bear to accept. It teaches you how to read itself. It's been copied relentlessly, by Trainspotting and Kurt Cobain and reading it means there's a certain voice that will inhabit your brain forever.
Caveat emptor. View all 25 comments. Jun 02, Jenn ifer rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: degenerates. Shelves: you-should-read-this , own , game-changers , the-tops , 5-f-ing-stars , dark , national-book-award-winners , giggles , read-in , beach-reads. First off, a song: this was supposedly influenced by Gravity's Raibow. Everything I've learned, I've learned from reading books. Crappy public school education Where to begin?! Perched atop t First off, a song: this was supposedly influenced by Gravity's Raibow.
Perched atop this stack of papers was his small offering to the Muse, a totem of invocative magic: a rocket formed from "a pencil type eraser the kind from which you peel off the corkscrew wrapper with a needle in its nose, and a re-formed paper clip serving as a launching pad. This man is so blessed that he is able to make women orgasm upon entry! Who needs porn when you have Pynchon? However… There comes a time when the ability to sincerely shock your reader reaches a threshold, after that, nothing you write will cause me to so much as raise an eyebrow.
This point came for me about half-way through the novel maybe a little further with the whole incest bit. Pynchon threw in just about every taboo subject there is, and maybe even made up a few new ones. Oh, Slothrop screwed another farm animal? Or did he? Hmmm… I think he must have a very vivid imagination. Yet women seem to be flocking to our friend Slothrop.
But who am I to judge, there was a war going on! Pynchon tackles the Big Issues without blinking an eye: the preterite vs. I mean, come on, pie fights in hot air balloons, nasal erections, silly songs, a trained octopus, Byron the Bulb?
Pynchon likes to keep you on your toes. I will not make claims that this is a perfect novel. There were times when I felt like Pynchon was beating me over the head with a hammer, times when the vulgarity was too much to take, the slapstick humor way too over the top. But those moments paled in comparison to the joy I felt reading this novel. Poor Major Marvy, I'm lookin' at you. View all 67 comments. There is no doubt that Pynchon is a brilliant writer.
The entire enterprise seems to defy the rational laws o There is no doubt that Pynchon is a brilliant writer.
The entire enterprise seems to defy the rational laws of physics — such a thing cannot maintain cohesion, and yet somehow it does, improbably, and against all expectations. Firstly, there is the seemingly endless obsession with penises and penis-related activities. I mean, what the hell is this book actually about , anyway?
What begins quite promisingly in the early part of the novel, has utterly degenerated by the time we are thrust into The Zone. The novel loses all grip on reality and devolves into a obsessive fever dream of sex, drugs and paranoia.
What are we to make of the tortuous paranoid conspiracy theories, the weird maritime pedophiliac orgies, the fantastic intercourse of every variety from the commonplace to the impossible, the seemingly random diversions that occur without rhyme or reason?
Is this really anything more than titillation and cheap thrills? These absurd antics persist through most of the novel, but Pynchon - brilliant writer that he is - can be trusted to extricate himself from this quagmire, and he does so satisfactorily if somewhat anticlimactically in the final section, but he neglects to take the reader with him, leaving them to wallow in the shelled-out muck of The Zone, confused, maybe slightly aroused, and feeling like the party has gone off somewhere without them.
Where is the substance? Where is the humanity? Yes, there are genuine moments, but these appear in stark contrast with or are perhaps inserted to justify the rest of the novel, which is dominated by cartoonish characters in farcical situations, lacking all but the most tenuous link to the real world. Only by analysing and drawing connections between metaphors and symbols do we locate something approaching an underlying meaning whether or not this is what the author intended.
But in each case the execution appears more impressive than the substance. Sure, the novel says some things about life, and death, and war, but it says little that is really surprising or profound, and it spends vastly more time being childish, silly, and indulgent. For a book that is widely considered one of the greatest of the last century, I was left unimpressed.
The three stars represent an ambivalent response, not an apathetic one. Never before have I read a novel that is simultaneously and in equal magnitude a work of genius, and a piece of shit.
My first thought I am an intellectual was WTF?! This has over twenty five-star ratings on the first page?! 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.
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 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. View all 42 comments. Jul 10, Bram rated it really liked it Shelves: I think reading and reviewing this book requires taking on some extra baggage because it 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.
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.
In truth, I was hoping I wouldn't love it too much or hate it I more or less succeeded here. 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. 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? 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 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. 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!
The first section is both the easiest and hardest to navigate. At the beginning of a book, I expect to be a little lost when dealing with the many character introductions, new setting, etc. 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.
Strangely, I am unsure whether this book itself is Elect or Preterite—was Modern Library right to exclude it from top books of 20th century? Or is the quote from The New Republic on the back cover correct? This question of what is lasting and remembered literature, hinted at with subtle brilliance in , 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.
But it allows us science geeks to finally justify the hours spent studying organic chemistry. Actually, justify is much too strong a word. Only from Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. 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.
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.
For me, this is where the one star deduction comes in. 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. 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 pages or so, Slothrop starts to disappear literally? 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.
Or is that just a red herring, a false trail to divert us from some greater meaning? View all 28 comments. Artist for this review is American painter Jackson Pollock.
My granny, after all, wa 90th book of My granny, after all, was once a child being taken from Germany on the Kindertransport, the War making her and her brother an orphan. But I press on, cautious of her wide eyes, almost, fear? For all her paranoia, she laughs a lot brightly coloured flowers: funny; birds tweeting loudly: funny; cars honking their horns: funny; anyone else laughing near her: funny: infectious.
Once, talking to Dr Swan codename , at university, about The Crying of Lot 49 , we discovered shared opinions about Pynchon though admittedly mine was rather minimal on knowledge : Pynchon, whether he is a genius or not, I suppose he could be, writes novels that are so scattered, so ridiculous, so wild, that any emotional investment is impossible and therefore Swan could never will himself to care.
He is on the wrong side of postmodernism for me [Swan said], apart from the writers he adored like Vonnegut. Not always a bad thing. And here? Not entirely a bad thing. I once read someone describe the novel as an exploded bomb reconstructed as a novel. On closing the final page last night well past midnight I had the usual moment of keeping my hand on the book and allowing the scenes that remained in my head to float about, visit me.
It was quite the storm, a storm of erections, boners, penetration, sperm, rockets, toilets, paedophilia, incest? It does often beg the all important question. Funnily enough the two novels are very similar. The last days of WW2, the V-2 rocket, the overarching paranoia, these things hurtle the novel on. The last pages or so feel completely abstract, Pynchon almost does away with the main characters and we are, instead, attacked with more crazy scenes, strange characters.
Byron the Bulb, a sentient lightbulb, is one such character in the novel. It may be connected, it may not be. When I post this review They will undoubtedly read it. The problem with the Internet is whatever I do They know, They see. The worst part is you can never prove that They are reading everything essentially your mind, your thoughts , but you know.
It is far more fun for Them that you know, that you are conscious of it, that you know every time you think, They think. No, every time you think, They hear. They have their ear against the wall of your mind and They hear every whisper from the other side. They hear. I read once that Nabokov was asked about T. All she could recollect was that his work Mrs Nabokov helped Nabokov mark papers, apparently was a strange mix of typewritten and handwritten, breaking suddenly from being typed into his strange handwriting and then starting again being typed—incidentally, a little scattered and disjointed, like his later works?
Most pressingly, the novel is supposed to be funny. People do find it funny. All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash though not the kind he wanted , at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived.
What stories they could tell! You see, I already need to read it again. The novel spins with speed, unravelling. Same chance of getting hit. Looking back, however, it seems to me that of all the American novelists who emerged with Pynchon in the 's only Vonnegut, Barth and Heller are his peers. Pynchon is a much more complex writer than Vonnegut, a less esthetic and narcissistic one than Barth, and works on a larger scale and has a finer prose style than Heller--though he is not a better architect, or "greater" novelist, or bigger heart.
Pynchon's new book is thus an event--it breaks seven years of silence and allays the fear that he might never go beyond his early success. Immersing himself in "the destructive element" and exploring paranoia, entropy and the love of death as primary forces in the history of our time, Pynchon establishes his imaginative continuity with the great modernist writers of the early years of this century.
It could have been titled "V The heroine, V. Love-play until then thus becomes an impersonation of the inanimate, a transvestism not between sexes but between quick and dead, human and fetish. It is thick with references and flashbacks to World War I and Weimar days, to England and America in the twenties and thirties, to early experiments with genocide and concentration camps in German South-West Africa during the Herero uprising of , which played a part in "V. Such characters from "V.
In the new novel Weissmann has adopted the SS code name "Captain Blicero" white death and devoted himself to the creation of V-2 rockets. At the end of the war he commands a Nazi rocket station from which he finally blasts off a secret missile, numbered and headed for the North Pole, the Herero land of the dead.
In the body of the rocket he has imbedded, behind a plastic insulating shield, a fair-haired Aryan boy whom he has been torturing and buggering devotedly throughout the war in partial compensation for the loss of a black South-West African lover, a Herero native called Enzian. At the end of the war Enzian himself is the leader of a group of African expatriate rocket technicians, the Schwarzkommandos, who have dedicated themselves to assembling one more model of Blicero's rocket of death.
This intricate plotting and world-annihilating, phallic, homosexual imagery are well-known characteristics of paranoia. Indeed, an explicit project in all of Pynchon's works is the exploration, celebration, condemnation and proliferating dramatization of paranoia.
In an essay on "The Mechanism of Paranoia" Freud himself discusses a classic case and connects his clinical observations with the tendencies in German literature "Faust" and music "Tristan and Isolde" that Pynchon draws on in his novel.
At the climax of his illness, under the influences of visions which were 'partly of a terrifying character, but partly, too, of an indescribable grandeur,' [the patient] became convinced of the imminence of a great catastrophe, of the end of the world. Such is the mental world of "Gravity's Rainbow. In a way, the book could be read as a serio-comic variation on Rilke's "Duino Elegies" and their German Romantic echoes in Nazi culture.
The "Elegies" begin with a cry: "Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I would fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror that we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
These lines are hideously amplified in the first words of Pynchon's novel: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is a scream of sado-masochistic orgasm, a coming together in death, and this too is an echo and development of the exalted and deathly imagery of Rilke's poem.
Pynchon's novel is strung between these first lines of the "Duino Elegies" and the last: "And we, who have always thought of happiness as climbing or ascending would feel the emotion that almost startles when a happy thing falls. The arc of a rocket's flight is Gravity's Rainbow--a symbol not of God's covenant with Noah that He will never again destroy all living things, nor of the inner instinctual wellsprings of life that will rise above the dark satanic mills in D.
Lawrence's novel "The Rainbow. Elsewhere one of the major characters thinks of the rocket as "a peacock, courting, fanning his tail. Ascending, programmed in a ritual of love.
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