Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Black Magic
Review: Is there any magic blacker than the Bomb? Is there any humor any blacker than this book? Both as a revisionist---and very accurate--- history of the last great war and a surreal---and very cinematic---fantasy of power and paranoia, a great novel.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant in 1973 and still so in 1998.
Review: GR was spellboinding when I first read it in 1973...and remains so through my second read in 1998. Byron Bulb's exploits to elude GE's grid (kills light bulbs folks)...Slothrop's bumbling as V2's hit the ground..is just plain briliant theater...and a superb read. OK,and it's just stange, too. What I'm saying is don't read it because someone says its a "classic"...read it because it's a trip. A brilliant one at that.

Rating:
Summary: The most eloquent vanity project in literary history
Review: This is the most beautifully worded, exceedingly complex work I've ever read. It's also the most boring, pretentious, repetitive tripe I've ever slogged through. There were moments when Pynchon floored me, absolutely knocked me out with incredible passages, fraught with unreachable depth and stunning vision. Then I'd have to read another two hundred pages before it would happen again.
And now that I'm finished, I don't feel proud that I'm done. I feel that I just finished forcing myself reading a novel which isn't that entertaining or enlightening, reading for no other purpose than to satisfy that insatiable part of my ego which loves to think of itself as intelligent. Why did I let my pride compel me to read this although it took more than it gave? I'm still not sure.
More disquieting yet is the attitude of many reviewers below, who loved GR but insist that we also read the companion book which purportedly explains the hidden meanings and structures within. Well, if you manage to get through the book, anyone can understand Pynchon's themes. They aren't exactly subtle. So what's left? Obscure cultural references and some extremely misogynist and homophobic "jokes." My question is: What's the point of reading the companion piece? When a writer intentionally goes over your head(as Pynchon does often), it would stand to reason that he's doing so to entertain one person: Himself. What joy can anyone find in reading someone else's discoveries within a novel? Are these reviewers this desperate to think Pynchon is a genius? Or are they too afraid to admit that he's simply a very clever writer who hasn't much to say?
The most heartbreaking aspect of all this is that GR could have been a classic, if anyone would have had the courage to edit it before its printing. While I was reading, I couldn't help but feel that it was an early draft of a very impressive novel in progress: Cut another two or three hundred pages and we really could've had something. Alas, it was not to be. Perhaps one day, someone will finally cut away the fat from Gravity's Rainbow, do what Viking Publishing was unwilling or afraid to do. Then I could recommend this book. Until that day comes, try your luck elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: On the Genius side of the Argument.
Review: Many thanks to A.Reader above for recommending Weisenburger's 'Companion'- very useful indeed. Also, will anyone in future wanting to compare Gravity's Rainbow with Finnegans Wake, please note the spelling of Finnegans Wake - ie, there is no apostrophe. For reasons, see Ellman's biography, among others.

Rating:
Summary: Feel Naked and Dead reading this.
Review: I first picked a copy of this book up when I was fifteen or so, as I was searching through my dad's library of books. Now I'm in college, an English major. Last semester, I was in a class devoted to Joyce; this semeser, a class devoted to Shakespeare. Neither professor felt a need to justify their respective subject's canonicity. But everyone I come across feels an overwhelming need to justify Pynchon's canonicity. Why? That for me is the problem with this book: is it so ponderous as to be an ostentatious piece of loquacity or is it a cogent discourse on the frailties of the human mind a la Ulysses, Portrait, Hamlet, Lear? The jury is out.

Rating:
Summary: difficult, black humor
Review: An unquestionable difficult book, similar to Faulkner's Sound and the Fury in structure, where incoherence gradually leads to clarity. Has some incredibly funny sections. Some people will be put off by the black humor, which is british in style. If you like this book you will probably love the English satirist Tom Sharpe. It took me a few tries but I finished the book and had many memorable moments. In a way, World War II was the most important event this century, and Gravity's Rainbow is attempting to grapple with that insanity. Not as human as Catch-22, but still very rewarding. There will be many people who cannot enjoy this book. But I sure remember the book like few others.

Rating:
Summary: important
Review: The review is not mine, but worth posting: New York magazine referred to this book as "the least-read must-read" in either American literature or 20th century literature - I don't remember which. The book is not an easy-reader, hence the sprinkling of 1 and 2 ratings on this page: people get angry when they can't understand. Gravity's Rainbow is not beach-reading unless you're a nutcase like me, but it is certainly a hugely important part of the American canon. I gave it a 9 and not a 10 only because a 10 on this page is clearly meaningless. Brilliant.

Rating:
Summary: Why Gravitys Rainbow is the bomb.
Review: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is the literary analasis of the parabola that simultaneously connects and seperates the binary opposites of life. This Parabola appears as a solid line, and indeed it is so as to offer a convenient model for descriptive purposes, yet the line is an infinite string of subatomic sigularities that refer to what they are not and represent what they are comprised of. That parabola is microcosmically shown in the life of Tyrone Slothrop, for he can never know his exact proximity, he can merely gauge his ditance to the closest 1 or 0.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Influential Book of My Life
Review: The day Jorge Anchando, my shipmate on the USS Vulcan (AR-5), placed this book into my hands and told me that I must read it, my life changed forever. I could never look at life the same again. I am now a writer and publisher myself and I credit Tom Pynchon for setting me on that road and kicking me in the pants to set me in motion. For those who are confused by his writing, I have to explain that Tom is above all a humorist, and the book must be read with that in mind. As humor, Gravity's Rainbow stands with the greats. Tom stands comfortably in the company of Twain, Benchley, and Vonnegut. But there is much, much more here than comedy. Using a language as rich and evocative as any in 20th century literature, exposing the broken heart of postwar Europe, plumbing the depths of depravity and paranoia, Tom takes us on a candle-lit tour of the sewers modernity has made of our souls. This is a desert-island book, a textbook of styles assembled by a man who (despite his youth) was already a master, a book for all seasons and all people. It would richly reward any reader's time.

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor Has No Clothes: We were wrong we now know.
Review: I sucked it up and read this whole book because I desperately wanted to justify the time spent wading and at times sprinting through this muck. Call it cognitive dissonance. When one contrasts Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five with this book, it's like comparing an Olympic sprinter with an obese man running for the bus with a hot dog in one hand and a soda in the other. Where Vonnegut is concise and elegantly economic, Pynchon is wasteful and ostentatious. Where Vonnegut's images are economically and powerfully portrayed, Pynchon's images are disorienting and leave little impression but surprise. Having read this novel from the perspective of 1996, I agree that this novel is an experience as did the reviewer who favorably compared it with the Summer of 1974. However, I recall the summer of 1974 with horror at a world that was paranoid, obsessed with impersonal and degrading sexual mores and filled with androgynous images not to mention political corruption, defeat in war and an American Dream turned upside down. Perhaps the value of this novel lies in its ability to reflect the mad society in which it was born. However, it's not worth reading unless you want to evoke a pleasant experience from those mad times. Such a narrow purpose does not befit great literature.