Rating: 
Summary: If Lucifer wrote a novel, this would be it.
Review: In my esteem, this the greatest novel I've ever read defiescriticism, exceeds analysis, and confounds explication like no other.Called variously "obscene," "non-sensical," and "pointless," Pynchon's proze is so good as to be almost perfect, and as such likely to be misinterpreted by the many readers who can never approach his level of insight. Very few writers truly derserve the term genius, and Pynchon is one of them. This book proves it like no other. Find me a better novel. Please! By the way, when this book was denied the Nobel Prize in 1975, it became the first and last year that no prize was awarded for literature. It became the nil year, the entropic year, and how very Pynchonesque! Belated congratulations, Thomas, on your singular contribution to World Literature. You will be read with awe for millennia to come.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible.
Review: The jumping up and down tour-de-force masterpiece of the modern era. Nothing else to say.
Rating:
Summary: Paranoia wore me out.
Review: I don't think a whole book can be written on paranoia alone. I really don't believe in it at all, personally. The best insights that Pynchon offers in this book come in short and direct commentaries offered by the narrator in about a dozen various pages of the book. "Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, what with information come to be the only real medium of exchange these days?" "I thought it was cigarettes." "Some day it will all be done with machines. Information machines.... You are the wave of the future." Pynchon obviously reads a lot. WWII makes a lot more sense to this 25 year old after reading Gravity's Rainbow.
Rating:
Summary: Pynchon's Greatest Work
Review: Perhaps the second half of this Century's greatest novel. A masterpiece of post-modernism prose, Pynchon celebrates the beat and modernist writers as Joyce clebrated his predecessors in Ulysses. Containing over 400 characters, Pynchon began a new school of writing; one so complex that some have tried to copy and all have failed. GR is a slap in the face of tradional writing and story telling techniques. Some examples of this can be seen in the innovative structure of the novel. Pynchon's narrative follows no main character, although Tyrone Slothrop keeps popping up. The real and unreal, history and pure fiction are blended perfectly. A brilliant, sometimes disturbing look at a world on the cusp of a terrifying new order.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe not for everyone... especially lazy readers
Review: Up front, I admit being a Pynchonphile. I make an annual pilgrimage to Gravity's Rainbow and find it a different book each time I crack the covers. It's also the book I give to friends most often (anyone selling stock in TRP?). Every reading brings new insights into history, not only of the US, but much of the world as well. Among the most marvelous aspects of the book is its almost-100% accuracy in historic fact. The interpretation of those facts, filtered as they are through a shim of paranoia, are open to interpretation, though. With some 400 charaters acting on five continents, over a 300-year span, it's easy to get lost in the non-linear plot. It's hard, too, to make out just what it is that the author is getting at--I still don't have a declarative sentence to describe the book. Adjectives have to do: stupendous, pyrotechnic, obscene, funny, caustic, tramatic, wonderful. Pynchon is not Gaddis, he's not Delillo, he's not Wallace. He's better than each and all of them, as excellent as they are. If you're willing to build some muscle in your grey matter, you'll like Gravity's Rainbow. If not, then look elsewhere.
Rating: 
Summary: While a grandiose accomplishment, inherently distancing
Review: Pynchon's novel sprawls over its reader. It entangles, engrosses, excites, and at times even astounds those who dare turn every single page of the book. For both the conception of such a multifaceted work and the actual execution of the writing, I believe Pynchon is to be commended, lauded, and awed. However, as a reader, I found very little color with which to connect within the rainbow. It is nearly impossible to associate one's self with a protagonist, or text, for that matter, that is as lost within itself as Pynchon's twisted history is. While the book certainly amuses the cynical reader with Pynchon's incredible plot and firguartive language, and while the book does indeed blow the mind of the every-reader by mere scope, very little goes on emotionally in Pynchon's WWII. After the first part of the book, we readers are forced, conditioned, to finish the entire work, just as Tyrone, ignorant of his own condition, slogs through Europe until the very end of rainbow. I find the text to be captivating eye-candy that keeps the reader out from under the uber-rocket's parabola and safe from emotional involvement, as well. While _The Crying of Lot 49_ may not offer more in terms of reader sympathy, thanks to the smaller size of the book, we readers are invited to feel a bit more intimately involved with the in-jokes and satire. _Gravity's Rainbow_ seems to want us outside of the wicked jokes into which Pynchon transforms WWII, marvelling at their wit while sharing none of the laugh.
Rating:
Summary: One of the five greatest books written this century.
Review: One of the five greatest books written this century.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of Time
Review: This is not literature. Pynchon writes liberal, paranoid diatribes against any and all institutions, especially conservative ones. Pynchon certainly possesses the skills of a writer, but he lacks the discipline and creative drive of an artist. His wandering narrative style is meaningless - comparisons to works by Joyce are absurd. The further you delve into Pynchon's work to seek out deeper meaning the closer you come to realizing that there is no meaning - just variously colored blotches and stains, pasted together for shock effect. If you would like to try something intelligent that reads along similar lines, try Philip Dick, an under-appreciated 20th century American writer who possessed talent and vision superior to anything Pynchon could approach.
Rating:
Summary: Pynchon's good ear.
Review: Stunning. Pynchon's analysis of the Western World's linear, "rational" development is second only to his incredible way with wording. I don't know how musically inclined Pynchon is, but his ear for human speech is quite impressive.
Rating:
Summary: Can't read it, can't put it down.
Review: Block out a week of your life where you do little else but eat and sleep, and treat yourself to a tour of the world and its history as seen through a whole collection of distorting lenses. Reading this book is WORK, and if you aren't dedicated to finishing it you probably won't. I must have started it at least three times before getting through, and it took a week of doing very little else for me to make it. But make it I did, and I'm glad.If the book seems plotless, and at times even formless, that's because it is. Almost every element, from each character's name to the individual events, manages at some times to resonate with every other and at other times to seem almost totally disconnected from everything around it. Like Finnegans Wake, it starts in mid-event, if not quite midsentence, and ends by looping back on itself. In between, it riffs on just about every topic from the immortality of the occasional light bulb to how "They" staged WWII for ! Their own fun and profit. The book is laden with naughty bits (anticipations of Lewinsky, perhaps, and then some), and it draws on a great variety of the arts and other disciplines. Much of this detail sounds too incredible not to be made up out of whole cloth, but in those areas with which I am familiar, everything is true to fact. A fun read it isn't, but it's the reading experience of a lifetime. I plan to take it up again in a couple of years and see if I can make more sense of it. I don't expect ever to understand all of it.
|
