Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: One of the best
Review: Given the cultural and political climate today, and especially in America, it's no wonder that more people are re-discovering GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. The book (1973) was published during the Vietnam and Nixon era, a time when many Americans began feeling suspicious about their government. And while GR is a historical fictional novel about Pynchon's imaginary years after WWII, the ominous tone, which permeates the entire book, is rather timely and fitting. I was reminded at times of Jackson McCrae in his BARK OF THE DOGWOOD (think intricacies and size, not plot or themes) and indeed, just as one needs to be educated to read McCrae, one needs the same to tackle Pynchon. But Pynchon's writing is really for me more of a mix of McCrae and Robbins (think, EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES). Vonnegut is another one, though Curt sometimes veers off into a more commercially viable land. A key to the whole thing in GR is that the book's narrative structure completely fragments on August 6, 1945, when hell was unleashed on Hiroshima by the U.S. government and its mil-indus-com subsidiaries. Once again, you have to be up on your history to fully appreciate Mr. P. A good thesaurus doesn't hurt either as many of the words are extremely of the beaten path-this done on purpose and admitted to by the master himself. This is not a small book, and if you've not read Pychon before, I would recommend that you start with his much smaller but equally fascinating CRYING OF LOT 49, then work your way up to GR.

Rating:
Summary: The Odd-yssey of the post-Joyce era
Review: While "The Crying of Lot 49" used as a backdrop the southern California defense industry of the 1960s, "Gravity's Rainbow" takes the technological angle to a brash new level which often looks like somebody tried to slip an overview of a freshman engineering curriculum into a novel about World War II military rocketry. At one point in regard to a wind tunnel, Pynchon explains with admirable clarity and accuracy the rationale behind dimensional similitude, which is the operational basis of experimentation in all branches of fluid mechanics. An unlikely passage in a novel, to be sure, but I'm amazed more by the author's resisting the temptation to present the Buckingham Pi theorem, of which the name alone could have been good for at least one cheap pun.

The Germans were the rocket experts in World War II, and the plot of "Gravity's Rainbow" follows the fantastic adventures of U.S. Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop through Blitz-torn London and postwar Europe in his involvement with the search for the design secrets of the A4 rocket Schwarzgerat, code name 00000. Hounded by various government and military operatives from British psychologists to Soviet intelligence to the Schwarzkommando (African SS division), all seeking worldwide ballistic supremacy, he encounters everyone from hashish dealers to a Brocken neo-witch to the boorish racist Major Marvy in locations like an underground missile factory and a casino on the French Riviera. Slothrop is as slippery and resourceful as James Bond, but this is not a formulaic espionage thriller that exhausts all its possibilities in the first few pages.

The style of "Gravity's Rainbow" is a freeform burlesque in which calculus jokes, control theory, organic chemistry, electrical circuitry, and the Heisenberg principle mix with Masonic conspiracies, the story of Byron the light bulb who finds himself screwed into the most inappropriate places, vulgar limericks and song lyrics, scatology, orgies, a [...], sodomy, [...], and all sorts of debauchery. Somewhere buried in the novel are a Maclaurin series expansion and a time-dependent second-order differential equation (a damped oscillatory system) describing yaw control, "that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware." The book is uniquely mystified by the synergy of mathematical grace and the brute mechanics of the real world to create instruments of life and death.

Pynchon's prose technique has an obvious forebear in William Gaddis's "The Recognitions," an even more nebulous but less humorous book. Like Gaddis, Pynchon constructs a paragraph around a central idea using exotic imagery that changes, often abruptly and incongruously, from sentence to sentence without losing the thematic focus. This approach grants the novel an extraordinary lexicon, as though Pynchon were inspired by every little nut and bolt of daily living, just as "Ulysses" benefits from James Joyce's polyglot interests. Any long paragraph you pick out is practically a self-contained tableau of fresh (and occasionally gross) sights and sounds contributing to the panorama of Slothrop's odyssey.

Some may find the blunt mathematical insertions, the endless wordplay, and the juvenile humor to be overwhelming and sophomoric, but in an age of literature where anything goes, they are salient and intelligent enough to be appreciated by a reader with a healthy curiosity for the unfamiliar or the unusual. Personally, I enjoyed the technical allusions in all their brazen disregard for subtlety simply because they're so rarely, if ever, seen in literature. If you question the significance of "Gravity's Rainbow," consider it a postmodernist update of "Alice in Wonderland" with the hookah-smoking caterpillar replaced by the seedier drug culture of the early 1970s, the rocket expanded into a metaphor of the impact of military technology on almost every cultural aspect of the twentieth century, Pynchon boldly guiding the foolhardy few who are willing to follow him into uncharted territory, having fun with everything along the way.

Rating:
Summary: Moving at the speed of a tardy glacier...
Review: I needed a dictionary to wade through it, especially the first 150 pages. The detail put into this book is awe inspiring. Everyone should read it.

Rating:
Summary: Don't leap into it blindly.
Review: First and foremost - don't read Gravity's Rainbow if you haven't read something else by Pynchon first. The Crying of Lot 49 is possibly your best shot: it's very short (though only slightly simpler). If you can't stand Lot 49, which you may very well not, don't read Gravity's Rainbow.

Second, you must know what you're getting into. It's not going to be easy; at times it will be hilarious, at times, thought-provoking, but often it will be nearly meaningless.

Third, realize before you read that this book isn't 800 pages long - it's 1600 pages long. You HAVE to reread it; those meaningless passages will make a bit of sense. Which is, after all, the point - Pynchon is NOT trying to confuse you for the purpose of confusing you. At the same time, he's not feeding you pizza or apple juice; Gravity's Rainbow is not for those with an eight-year-old's taste buds.

Fourth, everyone (me, you, critics, Pynchon) must confront the issue of whether the book is a pretentious, self-possessed, I'm-better-than-you-because-I-can-confuse-you, meaningless, useless load of crap. Personally, I don't think it is (it's *funny*, *all-encompassing*, and, to tell you the truth, only difficult to read, not at *all* impossible), but it's an open question.

Finally, while Gravity's Rainbow is a great book, but it's NOT a good book. Go in with that mindset, and you'll be okay. And the book will be, too.

Rating:
Summary: A magnificently written yet excruciatingly tedious book
Review: It's been said that there are two reasons to read literature:

1. For the enjoyment of reading
2. To say that you have read literature

If you fall into the latter, then this book is for you. If you happen to fall into the first category, then there are a multitude of books other than Gravity's Rainbow which are more worthwhile to read. Throughout the majority of this novel, I found my attention wandering as I sludged my way through Pynchon's sublime yet mind numbingly unfathomable prose. To be fair, I wouldn't call Gravity's Rainbow a bad book. It is simply a chore rather than a joy to read. If you are interested in Pynchon I strongly recommend The Crying of Lot 49 or V over this.

Rating:
Summary: Gravity's Rainbow is thus:
Review: Experience a continuous, dynamic stream of enthralling verbosity and unrivaled creative use of the English language. At any given moment, life may not make sense, but it changes you as a person, at every moment. Every discrete moment, if we are to take the word of Weirestrass. It tastes wonderful, like succulent creamy banana bread, or zucchini bread, ideally moist. Eating, gnawing, enzyme accelerated pre-digestion reactions and bubbles. Some physicists, of course, dedicate their entire careers to studying the mysterious, musing bubble. Pressing and pushing mandibles, and hydraulic presses, also pushing. A push, a push on pushes, dancing with a spark through a valve and along a tube, quivering like a caterpillar uncertain to move, with an integration, into a whole, a new whole. Piles and piles of sparks, as if specks of light were as real as specks of sand. Each part of the whole is, of course, the same thing, all one, at the Zero. The ultimate Zero, which somehow has evaded the ubiquitos uncertainity. Can any normal human really escape the uncertainty? Gosh, that seems, well, utterly relevant. Relevant, of course, to the schwarzgerat, which controls the Zero... And the Zero? Well, the people that know about it don't like to talk about it, because, I gather, they haven't successfully achieved the internal calm of Zero uncertainty. But we don't want to indulge in the evasive obfuscation of a talented salesman or politician, rather we want that straightforward distortion of experiences provided by a propaganda artist, visions of the ideal race, the ubermensch, why an eugenics program is inherently permitted as an institution, or so it is said, though really why such a program ever exists is only because the Rocket permits it. The Rocket, using the parabola, that beautiful curve that is an inherent structure of the Universe, perhaps more so than the rest of Mathematics..... Advertisements of the Reich: the double integral SS, integrating over the parabola. The Rocket and the parabola, and launch, and Brennschuss, and penetration... rapid death determined completely by statistics, that inhuman science, but that which no human can escape. That is how evolution works, by such dreadful numbers. Evolution is part of the whole, and it has now produced the Rocket, so many occurrences of chance and chaos, leading up to the Rocket, which pervasively clings to the mind, against all rational will, as something inevitable. They say that determinism is logically untenable, but they never talk about the Rocket, which turns death into a matter of numbers, and so the rocket controls life. Of course, Slothrop makes his own choices only when the Rocket lets him make his own choices. But we all belong to the Rocket.

Rating:
Summary: flaming gaucho
Review: I am writing this to express my concurrance with the opinions of reviewers here to whom the reputed difficulty of reading Gravity's Rainbow, in truth, exists only in certain facets of the book. As with many other authors I've enjoyed reading, it does take some time to adapt to Pynchon's style, but even within the first few pages it becomes clear that it's not nearly as obtrusive and difficult as has been suggested by its reputation.

I did encounter difficulty when concepts and objects exterior the book were rapidly namechecked or subtly alluded to, as well as in the use of alternately fluid or disassociative and short transitions between characters and plot lines occured, especially mid-chapter, but, for large portions of the book all the various styles are used perfectly to communicate situations and massive tidal waves of emotion and tone (which is good, because I would not have read this book if it were all sparse stream of thought or obscure sexual preferences and german expressionist film references).

It's also "difficult" puzzling over all the possible connections and ideas behind the story, the styles employed, the references made, but really it just adds additional fun to reading this book and also invites multiple readings... which is good, because the writings so d*** beautiful.

Outside of this the only real difficulties concerning reading this book appear to me to be for students who are reading this book and are pressured to provide an analysis of it for a class (which is probably the case with any famous novel that has other books about it), and it's reputation as a great book, which for any art can make it as frightful to approach as it is enticing.