Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

I just read GRAVITY'S RAINBOW twice in a row, one reading right after the other. It was good the first time through and excellent the second time. Plus, instead of paying something like thirteen dollars to read one book, I ended up paying less than seven dollars apiece to read two books. Both of them were a bargain at over seven hundred pages. I notice, though, that the Amazon price is above Amazon's ideal ten dollars. I notice also that the sentences Amazon quotes from GRAVITY reviewers are selected from very favorable reviews but, out of context, they seem like very unfavorable sentences. Of course, I figure IT'S A CONSPIRACY. Although it's a book you either love or hate, it has four times as many five-star as one-star reviews. The reviews, both raves and pans, say pretty much the same thing as professional reviewers do, so there's really not that much for me to add. I'd like to address some of the things one-star reviewers say, just for fun. First of all, there are the one-star prudes. They're right. The book has coprophagy and pedophilia, both treated non-judgmentally. If you're the kind of reader who gets upset by that, you'll have to stay away. On the other hand, it's a book about Nazis ... and for some reason nobody seems to get prudishly upset about Nazis. Pynchon is on to that little paradox, and if his prudish readers are missing it, too bad for them. Next, there are the one-star haters of Post-Modernism. They all have at least one thing in common: they think Post-Modernism is easy to recognize and every example of it is equally bad. Wow. I'd have thought that, like Romanticism, it has gone on for years and years in the hands of hundreds of different people, in music and painting, poetry and novels ... and really I can barely tell how all the examples resemble one another, can barely tell what JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR has in common with EVITA, and couldn't tell you for sure if either one of them were Post-Modern. My bad, I guess. Apparently all you have to do is call a book Post-Modern and Bingo! everybody who likes it goes to hell. There are the one-starrers who love ULYSSES and say GRAVITY is nothing like it. There are the ones who hate ULYSSES and say GRAVITY is exactly like it. These two groups should meet on neutral ground and fight until they both disappear. A couple one-starrers say GRAVITY is liberal propaganda. Hmm. Liberal propaganda that nobody can understand. That's pretty liberal. But wait! Isn't THE WASTE LAND ... conservative propaganda? And nobody can understand THE WASTE LAND either. Suddenly it all makes sense! There are the academic conspiracy one-star haters, whose complaints go something like this: When you were in high school or college, an English teacher you hated told you GRAVITY'S RAINBOW was a good book. You didn't even read what this teacher assigned, let alone what she recommended, she was such an obvious loser, but nevertheless you have ever since believed that everything she ever told you was cold, hard fact. As a result of this belief, you read GRAVITY and, under the hypnotic influence of this hated teacher, never even noticed how bad it was. That's how the academic conspiracy works, and if it weren't for the one-star haters, nobody would even know about it. What made them so bright? They hate teachers a magic tiny little bit more than you do. Last and least are the one-star reviewers who just get all crazy inside when they suspect someone else is smarter than they are. Smart people, according to these reviewers, are pseudo-intellectuals who write to impress, and writing to impress is a great sin. All their lives, these reviewers have been making sure they never write to impress, and so naturally they write the world's least impressive reviews. ----- ----- On the positive side, this is a very well-constructed book. The first part is prologue, and the fourth and last part is epilogue. During the epilogue, the characters fade away, sort of like the hero of TENDER IS THE NIGHT, who never realized he was Post-Modern. The second and third part are NORTH BY NORTHWEST, as discussed below. Readers of traditional novels often seem, from their comments, to be disoriented by this book. It has a lot in common with ALICE IN WONDERLAND, including an explosively dissolving dream ending. ALICE influenced FINNEGANS WAKE, which the book also builds on. It builds on William Blake's Prophetic Books too, and all these would be good training for reading GRAVITY, except that GRAVITY is the simplest of them all. In fact, Pynchon is better as an introduction to Blake than Blake is as an introduction to Pynchon. Time running backwards sort of thing. While I was reading GRAVITY, I watched Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. The two are virtually identical, complete with the mysterious "they" who control the action and refuse to save the hero they're manipulating, and their easy-going Anglo-American ruthless indifference to his fate, and their ownership of the mysterious woman who sleeps with hero and villain alike. Both works made a lot of money, and they deserved to. GRAVITY also has things in common with a really challenging crossword puzzle book -- though the one-star reviewers who think no novel should challenge its readers probably think crossword puzzle books should never be sold. It's all good. I'm sure they're part of the conspiracy too. This is some wild, crazy fun.

I first read this book when I was 16, and it was the Spanish translation. Later on, I read it in English, and although I consider it one of the best, most complex books I have ever read, I was a little disappointed in the rest of Pynchon's production. I think he reached his zenith with "Rainbow" and it has been all downhill ever since. The book is not easy to read, and the action is not easy to follow, because the author likes to take the scenic route to enrich our view, so we get the whole treatment with physics, engineering, strategy, espionage, sex, love, fear, paranoia, and an assortment of other fields -some strange, some crude- that provide us with the view of a world gone mad from the prizm of an author that seems to have been down the rabbit hole once or twice. The only thing that has always bothered me about "Gravity's Rainbow" is my inability to understand its ending. I want to believe the author designed it in such a way that it would be very ambiguous, but I am really not sure. In any case, a great reading experience, although, reader, beware: those who look for uplifting messages; those who don't like harsh language; those who don't like depictions of sex; those who would not be able to read through very descriptive passages of (one hopes) less than popular and rather grotesque sexual practices; those who would not continue reading after the lavishly descripted love scene between a grown man and a twelve year-old girl; those who dislike "dense", descriptive literature; those who don't really go for the stream of consciousness stuff; those who don't like war books; those who have read this far and already hate the book and the review; all those potential readers should know that in "Gravity's Rainbow" you get hundreds of pages of what I have just outlined, and more. If you don't think you can stomach this list, move on to other books: there are plenty of good ones out there. This one is good, but not for all tastes.

Another white whale, conquered. Infinite Jest a couple of years ago, now Gravity's Rainbow. Ulysses... maybe in another couple years. Gravity's Rainbow is quintessentially Pynchon, and his most famous novel. Everything you've heard about it is true, and probably some thing you haven't heard about it as well. The interesting thing about these ultra-dense, filled-to-the-brim novels is that they grow on you; or at least they grow on me. V. for instance is a book that I've thought about often since finishing it. It wasn't a favorite, I didn't love it, and yet I've thought about it more often than many other books I've read. Why is that? What is that factor that a book like V., a book, presumably, (time will tell), like Gravity's Rainbow has? I'm not sure, but it's there, hiding atavistically beneath the text like some weird palimpsest. And you have to buy in, is the thing. You can't just pick it up off the shelf and fall in love, I don't think. Maybe some could. But you have to commit. "Buy the ticket, take the ride" and all that. It's long, it's complex, it's confusing, it's difficult. But... It's Pynchon. I've come to expect certain things from his work (and this is probably a good point to mention that I wouldn't recommend this as your first Pynchon novel; in fact, in many ways this book feels like a sequel to V.) Density, yes, complexity, for sure, but a breadth of knowledge that can't be overstated. Dazzling prose; blazing at times, like the tail end of a rocket ascending. Hilarity. Absurdity. He is often laugh out loud funny. Scenes will meld, shift, trail off and come back. He haunts the pages with this omniscient narratorial frenzy of character, time period, and location. And it's hypnotizing, after a fashion. It's like a literary rant, and it lulls you, and then you fall in, not a paragraph break in sight. At its most effective (and the reader's most receptive) it's like some textual flow-state, and can often leave you drifting, as if in dream; unaware of how you got there, liminal phases of transition lost, with only the now resembling anything reliable. He has an uncanny ability to unveil the personal in the historical. He can take a period, recent or otherwise, and birth a character there, quickly and effectively, and suddenly you are wondering how Thomas Pynchon is so intimately familiar with the plight of the dodo bird on the island of Mauritius. Or how he knows so well the horrors of the German genocide against the Herero people. It's a casual power of characterization that often proves revelatory. But here's the but. The text is challenging not just on a word-level, but a subject-level. Not for the first time Pynchon wrote scenes here that made me deeply uncomfortable. And not for the first time I knew that I was probably missing three or four layers of thematic relevance for their inclusion. But regardless, when it comes to my personal reading experience, if I miss the relevance, or the connection, it's the same as it not being there. Now, it's not Pynchon's fault that I missed it. Nor is my reaction to these scenes his fault, really. And I suppose the very act of going outside the text to research something that made me uncomfortable means that, on one level, the book got me to think. Maybe thinking hard about uncomfortable things is necessary sometimes. But again, these are all revelations that I'm engineering after the fact. Pynchon has a way of presenting things that sometimes leaves his intentions, and his own feelings about something, vague, or even completely unknown. There are pros and cons to this. And whether that external research brings me more understanding or not, whether it made me less uncomfortable or not, these are different questions. The point is, there were moments that made me stop in my tracks. These moments, paired with a general struggle to write convincing female characters, and the occasional rearing-head of outdated attitudes you'd (unfortunately) expect to see from someone born in 1937, made me feel like failing to mention any of this would feel too much like an excuse of some kind. It would feel like brushing everything under the rug, when in fact there is no rug, and all of this stuff is just laying around on the floor, and I'm simply walking through it, rather than trying to step around it. And so isn't this entertainment? Of course, it's more than entertainment. There are questions to ponder, themes to explore, cerebrally it's doing something. But still, one reads fiction, at least in part, to enjoy oneself. And so I'm short of a five-star rating here. And I'm not saying that I wasn't entertained by Gravity's Rainbow, I absolutely was. All of the praise above is just as valid as the critiques. My point is that it wasn't all fun. It's a demanding book, and truly you have to work for it. I think the question, for me, comes down to this: was it worth it? I think so, beyond a doubt. Will everyone? Surely not. So I just felt I had to represent both sides of the reading experience here. It's no walk in the park. Though, to be completely transparent, I revise my star-ratings on here all the time, and may even sneakily do so with this one, some future day. My ratings, while not meaningless, are certainly nebulous, and shouldn't be taken as gospel; by me or by anyone else. Right. I knew this would be long-winded. This book was like running a marathon. Got to keep up, got to lock in. Pynchon brings a lot to the table in this one, but some of his most prevalent themes are, of course, present. Entropy. Violence. Sexuality. Colonialism. Conspiracy. Institutions vs. Individuals. Death. But specific to this book, I thought I'd let future readers in on what they can expect... The second world war; supernatural abilities; meta-textual orchestras; Pavlovian doctors; hallucinatory dreamscapes; psychological sound barriers; shadowy organizations; sadistic, pedophillic Nazis; English candies; Poisson distributions; giant octopuses; reflexive erections; dominatrixes; decadent parties; political intrigue; subterranean mountain factories; limerick-singing ordnance troops; custard pie air-balloon battles; weird letter committees; half-brothers in the throes of destiny; Argentine anarchists; myriad paranoiacs; neurotics of every shape and size; sexually traumatized aging movie stars; island rescues; wartime barbers; immortal light bulbs; lost lemmings; pig suits; a nonstop revue; and of course... the Rocket. Any of that hit you right? Then dive in. 'He is now always the same, awake or asleep—he never leaves the single dream, there are no more differences between the worlds: they have become one for him.'

A few moments after I finished reading Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel with as many opponents as defenders, I felt this strong urge to go back to the beginning and re-read the book immediately. I'm trying to think of another novel that has had such a profound effect on me, but I can't think of any at the moment. Even though I don't like everything about Gravity's Rainbow—in fact I find much of the book to be a mess—there's a range of emotions I experienced that's both broad and intense. I laughed, I cried, I felt aroused, I felt disgusted, and ultimately I felt sucked into this strange world with all these disturbed and disturbing characters. Make no mistake, Gravity's Rainbow is technically a war novel, but its themes of sex and anarchism stood out more to me while reading. At this point in time, during the late 60s and early 70s, Pynchon was experimenting with a lot of things; drugs, sex, and literature seemed to be intertwined during this period which overlapped with GR's development, and it's easy to see how Pynchon's Bohemian phase affected his writing. Gravity's Rainbow is probably the closest thing to a pornographic Pulitzer Prize finalist, with characters major and minor taking part in all kinds of sexual deviancy. There are a couple scenes in particular that are so infamous that one of them—involving consensual coprophagia—essentially denied Pynchon his only real chance at winning the Pulitzer Prize. In context, though, the scene in question is quite poignant once some thought has been put into it: We have cities being bombed, children being left homeless, young men getting killed in trenches, and yet what disturbs us more than violence is a consensual act between adults. I'm not sure I would call Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon's best book; The Crying of Lot 49 is more consistently captivating while Vineland is more mature in how it conveys its themes. Yet for some people, including me and the rest of GR's cult following, it's the book's endless depth and fearlessness in how it dives into the darkest corners of human nature, shattering conventional expectations and values in the process. It's not quite The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which is a more straightforward example of essential libertarian literature, but it's clear to me that Pynchon was getting more and more intrigued with anti-authoritarianism while he was writing Gravity's Rainbow. Later works of his would explore themes established in Gravity's Rainbow with greater care, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a novel more challenging and—at the same time—more rewarding and entertaining with how much effort you put into it. For my first reading, I think I put in enough.

If one with Pynchon's apocalyptic view of western society and his desire to write about it were to devise a novel on the subject, what form would suit his story best? In broadbrush form, it should probably consist of episodic segments using arcane terms, everything bouncing from place to place geographically, back and forth in time. Since life on planet earth has grown absurd, then the story should benefit from wry, edgy humor. Characterizations would be grossly exaggerated to fit this model of absurdism, and since these characters personify such absurdity, they would be depicted with little depth, the author dwelling on the manic, purposeless surface of everyday life. Occasionally, the insertion of grim, acerbic all-too-real philosophic passages would render such absurdism most trenchant. Gravity's Rainbow incorporates each of these traits, and I believe that's why Pynchon chose the post-modern form. I suspect he didn't intend to further this form of literature; rather he appropriated the then-embryonic form to suit his vision for the novel he chose to write. For example: As alluded to before, Pynchon apparently had, at least in his early years, an ability to assimilate both the exotic language of science and technology and the equally esoteric language of the various schools of mysticism that have proliferated over the ages. Used in tandem in Gravity's Rainbow, these have the effect of padding the terminology of science with that of exotic spirituality. In his hands, this launches his characters into a story of a humanity spiritually bent toward excess of all sorts, and death in the form of self-destruction: "As some secrets were given to the Gypsies to preserve against centrifugal history, and some to Kabbalists, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, so have this Secret of the Fearful Assembly, found their ways inside the weatherless spaces of this or that Ethnic Joke." In Pynchon's hands humor becomes ribald, sophomoric. That shouldn't be seen as an impediment in this novel, though; the more inane and childish the humor, the more his vision of an absurd humanity gains flesh: "There is some excitement amidships. The Russians have thrown back a tarp to reveal the chimps, who are covered with vomit, and have also broken into the vodka...Some of the chimps are docile, others are looking for a fight." "And now, libeling," Margherita with a rare and somewhat phony, smile, "let's hear `Animal Crackers in My Soup'!" "'Super Animals in my Crack,'" hollers a humorist from the crowd. Page after page of this comes to a halt before: "What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical joksterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one." Humor, then, counterbalanced by abject reality or depictions of institutionalized paranoia, allows the ground under our feet to shift, and we slip into Pynchon's form of literary chaos. But any drunk or doped faux-writer could accomplish something of this sort. Is Pynchon one of these? Hardly. He knows his way around literary technique. Clearly he knows how to use the post-modern form - what it can and can't do. He stretches the form perhaps beyond reasonable limits; still, he's consistent in its use, and its effect on this reader's sensibilities becomes consistent. Among other clever uses of language, he compresses dialogue tags with narrative snippets and stage directions, adding to the book's intensity: "Well now--" at which point Närrisch comes walking into them. and "You're really hot, Rocketman, wow," Krypton lying in back offering ankle and taped cocaine bottle go to Shirley with a smile. This then is Gravity's Rainbow in a pair of nutshells. But does it work? Is it literature? Debate argues the case on both counts, even some thirty years after its publication. While I have to admire certain aspects of Pynchon's efforts here, and while I recognize his ability to make such mental scramble consistent in its effect, it's difficult to follow. It's work, not fun. Consistency is not coherence, and it seems not to matter if one skips a hundred pages ahead in a story line that offers a glacial pace and overwhelming, largely senseless detail. And so we come to the question of accessibility. This work, along with James Joyce's and others, will always be lauded by some, simply because their convolutions are technically well crafted and manage consistency. Some will also say that art should have no social import; its presence in an artistic form is enough. Regarding Gravity's Rainbow, then, I have to ask: If not for a world set on its ear by the stupidity, depravity, and senselessness of the early twentieth century, why would one write such a novel? It's good (and part of the reason literature exists) to challenge readers, to confront them with unexpected style and structure, but if such work is so daunting in its inanity as to put off those who might otherwise read it, then even its presence as art should be challenged.

A superbly inventive, darkly comic WWII epic envisioned from a '60s countercultural perspective. The commonplace view of GB as extremely difficult reading has never seemed very generally applicable to me. You do need to learn to get comfortable with its flamboyantly original style and its post-modern inclusion of pop culture —cussing and scatological metaphors, arcane belief systems like anarchism— as part of its world. I also helps to have been once immersed in the LBJ-and-Nixon era countercultures, “paranoid” aspects of which are central to GR. (Ditto for INHERENT VICE; and some sense of Gilded Age anarchist culture is similarly helpful for appreciation of AGAINST THE DAY). After struggling with its first forty or so pages it went by like a page turner for me and did not rely for enjoyment on a grasp of its every allusion.

One of the most complex, disturbing, and notoriously "unreadable" novels ever written. The novel's plot follows the arc of a parabola, much like the V-2 rockets which dropped on Europe during World War II (the setting for the story). The novel's main protagonist, U.S. Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, finds himself mercilessly pursued by various secret international agents, when it is discovered that a map kept by Slothrop, detailing his sexual conquests over Europe, happens to exactly match the sites of the V-2 rocket bombings. Slothrop flees into the Zone, a nowhere-land somewhere in Europe, where he indulges in drug-laden hedonism, all while continuing his quest to learn about the Rocket 00000 (a super-secret rocket, created with the mysterious polymer Imipolex G). As a baby, Slothrop had been conditioned (similarly to Baby Albert and the loud noises in the presence of cute bunnies) to develop erections in the presence of Imipolex G... he is determined to learn more about his family's involvement in the conspiracy to develop the rocket. Woven into the novel are the evil machinations of Captain Blicero (who is really SS officer Weissman, from "V"), who trains his sex slave Gottfried to sacrifice himself in a sadomasochistic fantasy of Blicero's: to man the Rocket 00000, and to die on impact. At the climax of the novel, Slothrop meets the pre-teen Bianca, whom he seduces...and falls in love with. Shortly after the seduction, Bianca is murdered by the mysterious forces following him...and he loses interest in life, and hence literally falls out of the story, to be forever lost in the Zone. The novel is full of references to science (physics, organic chemistry) as well as to serious philosophy and poetry...yet manages to maintain a sense of surrealism and absurdity. Profoundly disturbing and sad, the book describes how easily one can become unhinged from reality, from all connections to life as we know it...

I'm glad that some people like this book, but I think my brain is just not wired in a way to read a book like this. Over the first 20 pages I must have said out loud "what the hell is he blathering about?!" 10 different times. I thought it might have been a peculiar opening so I jumped ahead a few chapters to try again, but it was just as frustrating. If this book was only 200 pages written this way I probably still couldn't get through it, but I'm not going through 760 pages of aggravation to understand the basics of what the author is trying to say. Maybe I need to be on a particular cocktail of narcotics to get any value out of this.

Hamur kalitesi abicim...

If you liked "Da Vinci Code", don't try this. "Kelly's Heroes" re-written by Joyce and Burroughs on acid. Impressive but I had to grit my teeth to read right to the end.

Impressão da capa parece uma imagem em baixa resolução impressa em um papel ruim. Lembra uma xerox. Está desalinhado em alguns pontos também e a borda das páginas parece ter sido mal cortadas

El problema no es la historia, sino la encuadernación: la orilla de las hojas no está bien cortada y desluce mucho la edición. Pésimo trabajo de Penguin Random House. Es cierto que Thomas Pynchon es difícil de leer, y este libro es una clara muestra al respecto; sin embargo, "El arcoíris de la gravedad" es una joya de la literatura universal, probablemente. Tiene segmentos dignos de poesía, como otros que son literatura experimental muy atrevida. A cambio de un enorme esfuerzo para leer este libro, obtenemos una cosa enajenante y canónica, una de las mejores novelas estadounidenses de todas.

Ottimo