Rating: 
Summary: "Mindless Pleasures"
Review: "Gravity's Rainbow" is definitely the most bizarre and challenging book I've ever read. One can't just sit down and read it; it demands the most concentration you'll ever have to muster to read a work of fiction (if you're going to try it, by all means get Steven Weisenburger's companion book). Pynchon's writing is at times like a prose-poem told through a wandering camera lens; indeed, that's one facet of what the novel's about--the mediation of our consciousness by photography and cinema. At other times it seems like a mad sloppy party between an "underground" history book and a Warner Bros. cartoon, or a pornographic physics textbook (a la Burroughs). Stylistically, Pynchon is the most brilliant digresser you'll ever encounter. His technique of using ellipses and multiple clauses and constantly interrupting himself succeeds in capturing the multiple dimensions of whatever he is trying to describe. And all of it is couched in an American voice which directly winks at the reader, as if the cogs are showing, yet it is a very serious book (all benzene-ring jokes aside)...This book seems "pre-deconstructed", which is sure to confound literary critics in their quest for any final interpretation (another of Pynchon's apparent goals--although all his works have created a cottage industry of scholarship). Poor Tyrone Slothrop! Thirty years after being rented to a chemist for experiments as a baby, it's discovered that wherever he makes a bird in wartime London, a V-2 rocket hits that spot minutes later--a weapon which happens to contain the same material the evil Laszlo Jampf used in his Pavlovian experiments on him. And even now, while a lieutenant in the US Army, he still has to suffer truth-serum and post-hypnotic suggestion sessions by his psychological "handlers". And battle hypnotized octopi. And Dutch women. And deal with the long fingers of the I.G. Farben-G.E. nexus whose fingerprints he finds at every turn in his quest to discover the mysterious cargo of the V-00000 rocket...Every character in the book--except Slothrop himself--seems to know what happened to him as the famous Pavlovian Infant Tyrone, and that he may be the center of an ongoing experiment. Which makes "Gravity's Rainbow" a tragedy and a farce at the same time. Slothrop's is the epic journey of self-discovery. He is seeking solace in symmetry, or a reality beyond Their control, beyond Their systems but where can you find that in war-torn Europe? Something strange about this epic World War II novel is that the death camps and Nazi ideology are hardly mentioned in Pynchon's 760 pages. He's trying to get at something which, I take it, he finds even uglier: a matrix of supposedly "neutral" technologies and the attitudes constituted by them which are the grounds for the possibility of the "banality of evil". "Gravity's Rainbow" explores the collision between mythology and technology. Our imaginations are compelled to re-assemble the pieces of the scientifically parceled world, and Pynchon's take is that it goes into default setting: paranoia and skepticism towards absolutely everything. "We have no home," hence his running theme of the preterite and those "who are passed over" and the many refugees and diasporas presented in the novel. A key to the whole thing 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. After this, Slothrop becomes a specter of the Quest, the person who lives on in our memory only as readers, when the book turns into vignettes which parody of how media "remember" the events of history. And beware: The entire canvas has the signature of chemical-induced all over it (supposedly, Pynchon wrote it Kerouac-style on long sheets of engineer's scroll in spartan apartments in California and Mexico). Really--if one needs a gentle reminder as to what several hits of hashish could do to one's noggin, pick up this book stone cold and read several pages.
Rating:
Summary: Still Crazy After All These Years
Review: One of my all time favorites. Many people quit before page 100 - but if they could only get past that first hurdle, they might glimpse Pynchon at his best. This is a giddy and complex ride, with a lot to say about the "zero" that state between yes and no. Rich and humorous, with memorable characters and imagery. Not a book to fall asleep to - this baby needs a good deal of concentration and chunks of time.
Rating:
Summary: Don't drop it on your nuts
Review: Whatever one may think of GR as a novel, there is no doubt about the richness, range, and depth of Pychon's intellect and his themes and ideas. GR is clearly a book that challenges the reader on many levels, and the novel's themes and meanings also work on many levels. People have complained about the difficulty of the book. To me there are relative degrees of difficulty, and there's a big difference between something that's merely esoteric or recondite, because one doesn't understand the vocabulary, and something that's really intellectually difficult to understand--like quantum physics. For example, take Pynchon's large vocabulary and his allusions to various mythic but obscure Qabbalistic, Celtic, and Christian facts and ideas. A good dictionary will fix the first problem, and a good encyclopedia of world myths and religion will fix the second problem, of which I've seen at least a couple on sale at local bookstores recently. But getting back to GR, Pynchon's writing style is either the benefactor or perhaps victim of this richness, and I did find his style somewhat ponderous occasionally, and his long sentences and long-winded descriptions of things to be a bit labored and hyperborean at times. Someone once said the reason why no-one reads John Milton except English majors and professors is because no-one has the patience for Miltonian periods anymore. Since both authors often write sentences that go on for a more like a paragraph or even a bigger portion of a page, the same could be said of Pynchon. You can find sentences with exclamation points in the middle, sentences with multiple dashes and ellipses, and multiple sentence fragments that refer to other sentence fragments. One could almost say that his style is more about punctuation and syntax than semantics. But in Pynchon's defense I'll say that from a linguistic standpoint, his ratio of modifiers to non-modifiers, of adverbs and adjectives to nouns and verbs, is probably higher than most writers, and there is a certain technical and perhaps linguistic validity and aesthetic charm in that. In addition to the obvious oddities of his punctuation and syntax, there is Pynchon's obsession with English and with what I call his "language games," although perhaps not in the sense in which the modern philosopher Wittgenstein meant, but I'll have more to say on that shortly. Pynchon delights in the use of the English language, with all its expressive capabilities-its rhythms, harmonies, dissonances--and many opportunities for word-play, esoteric vocabulary, arcane references and allusions, and imaginative and even bizarre figures of speech. He even brings in foreign phrases and even calculus equations occasionally. Pynchon is particularly adept at the creative use of metaphor, which many analytical rhetoricians regard as a sign of an especially accomplished writer. As Lois Shawver, a philosopher at the University of Calgary, Canada, points out about Wittgenstein's theory of word games, "Words seem to be passed from primary or primitive uses of language into this more metaphorical or parasitic use of language with little awareness on our part. These hidden metaphors lead us into language games that we have learned in other contexts without our awareness by a process that the post moderns call "metaphorical structuring." " She goes on to say, "The enormity of this observation is only striking when one's attention is awakened to the wealth of implicit metaphors that fill our ordinary speech." All this is just by way of saying that metaphor is perhaps the ultimate trope or figure of speech of the linguistic universe, and that Pynchon himself seems to be intuitively or explicitly aware of that fact, since he is a master of it. I do think he goes a little too far with all the cutesy and weird names, and I don't think this really adds much to the novel. Also, apropos of Pynchon's long-winded descriptions and obsession with observing the most minute details, one thing that separates a great author from a lesser one is the ability to pick and choose the most salient and most telling details without having to inundate the reader with extraneous trivia. This is an important part of writing craftsmanship. Theodore Dreiser comes to mind in this regard, and as a result, it can be said of Dreiser that he is a great author but a lesser writer. The same may apply to Pynchon. If I may paraphrase something the great art historian, G.C. Argan, observed about van Eyck's oil paintings but that I think applies equally well to Pynchon, even nature is not so capillary, meticulous, and absurd as Pynchon's prodigious eye sees it. Since the novel is a storytelling art and medium, I think the language should promote the telling of the story and therefore be mostly perspicuous and transparent rather than opaque in terms of facilitating such telling. Pynchon's language tends more toward the opaque and overtly self-conscious end of the spectrum, but I didn't even mind that, since I can get into word games and philological esoterica as much as anyone. But Pynchon seems more concerned with providing an intellectual smorgasbord for the reader rather than a real story in the traditional sense. That, too, is fine, except one needs to exercise some measure of control and discipline over the process. And I'm not referring to the problem of the intellectual odyssey becoming nothing more than a vain and self-serving display of erudition, a complaint which a number of reviewers here have levied against Pynchon. I'm referring, rather, to the need to maintain some kind of structure and minimal architectonic basis lest the novel partly or completely disintegrate because of the chaotic intellectual and literary adventurism of its author. That having been said, overall, I found Pynchon's imaginative and eclectic mix, or perhaps alchemical witches brew, of historical, paranoid, erotic, scientific, philological, philosophical, and fantastic themes entertaining and imaginative, and at the very least, educational. So I'll go on record by saying that despite the several issues I discuss above, I thought this was a unique if not brilliant book. If I can indulge in a somewhat Pynchonesque and risque metaphor myself, I would describe Pynchon's at times cerebral, at times low-brow, and at other times, pornographic magnum opus, as basically the intellectual foresk_n on the flaccid p_nis of the present literary universe.
Rating: 
Summary: The Longest Comic Book Ever Written
Review: "It's a Novel!" "It's a Satire!" "It's a Joke!" - Don't look now, but you have just delved into none other than the longest - and possibly the most hilarious - comic book ever penned, drawn, and inked. Many unusual works of prose have an interpretative key, without which encountering them may be frustrating, the reading exasperating, and the entire experience feels like a false tune -- a fake, a breach of gestalt. Sometimes that key has to do with generic classification, because we expect different things from different genres, and because surfing across genres plays on these expectations. For instance, it took me about a third-way into Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" to realize that it was not a novel at all, but a parody - of novels, and of many other things. "Gravity's Rainbow" isn't a novel either; its main aspect is not the multilayered structure in which distinctive characters express themselves in their own voices the better to present the human condition. It is a comic-book, only without the graphic panels. Not for nothing is its protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, referred to as "Rocketman" from a certain point on. It's sources are "G.I. Joe" and the Grimm Brothers' tales - it is also a hilarious, lascivious parody of Galahad and Lancelot's quest of purity for the holy grail - more than Faulkner or Hemmingway or any other novel. Yet it has nothing of "Ulysses" of "Finnegans Wake" in it either. This is a uniquely American work, albeit set mostly in Europe. It must have been great fun to write and Pynchon had a great many laughs at our expense. Note the cruel technique of introducing characters and filling them up with content only to off them when all that could be said has been; like in Catch 22, most everybody dies violently. And it hurts: these are comic-book characters, which is to say characters to whom readers, habitually encountering, grow to be extremely attached and about whom they are deeply concerned (if you think I'm kidding, you know or remember little of the sociology of comic-book consumption). Sexual perversity is explored at great lengths, but as episodes, not defining any moment of characterizing a human relation. The spatial and temporal movements don't always correlate, another fixture of adventure comic-books. By this generic classification I do not discount any of its attractions.
The lack of graphics doesn't impair the lush visual and otherwise sensuous descriptions. This is a book that can be thoroughly enjoyed over a period of time, although it also grows tedious - Pynchon does that deliberately no doubt - and some scenes (notably those involving Pirate Prentice's dream-commando missions) can be visited again and again. This book is a joy - only it should sell in comic-book stores. And of course it's long - any idea how many pages the entire 71-year run of Batman would hold?
Rating:
Summary: Read it and see for yourself; a monumental work
Review: Gravity's Rainbow has been compared to Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" or "Ulysses" but really, that is superficial. This book really grasps the confusion of war, the cruel absurdity and mankind's foibles that sadly determine life and death. The setting is London and the Blitz. There is not much plot here but plenty of action. Sometimes it reads like an episode of "South Park", other times you are reminded of "Catch-22." This is a very memorable, original work and one that should be read by anyone interested in modern literature. It's fascinating and despite the total confusion of this book, it really sticks with you.
Rating: 
Summary: Stunningly incomprehensible
Review: Thomas Pynchon has duped the entire literary world with this 800 page assortment of random words and phrases that at times come together in complete thoughts, most likely unintentionally. I can honestly say that I looked at each word, but I came away with no sense of having read a book here. My best assessment of this book's success is that there are a good handful of insecure literati-types who convinced themselves that any book too confusing to understand must be brilliant. The only reason I can give to read this book is to able to say that you have read this book.
Rating:
Summary: What's the Point?
Review: This is by far the WORST book that I have ever read in my entire life! I found it frustratingly hard to follow so much that I found myself asking why in the world am I reading this? and Is Pynchon crazy? There is no discernable plot and I found that Slothrop and his sexual exploits to be obscene and disgusting. I honestly preferred J.G. Ballard's Crash to this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Toothsome Challenge Turns Out Merely Long in the Tooth
Review: Maybe it's the wide variety of styles and motifs used in this psychedelic hippy dippy slide show as we jump from vignette to vignette that added - intentionally, I'm sure - to the disorientation and vertigo I felt trying to slog my way through Gravity's Rainbow. But I'm not convinced my rising gorge was caused so much by brilliant exposition as by the sensation of Pynchon casting about like a man going down for the third time, grabbing at any piece of flotsam floating through his consciousness at the moment. This can lead to some creative anecdotes, I grant, but there are just too many ancillary passages that peter out into ". . . . . ." when the steam's run out that I'm quite convinced Pynchon himself lost the thread. It isn't his, ". . . Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel" style, or the way the story bounced around in space and time that caused my eyes to glaze over but these rants of Pynchon's, which add nothing to our understanding of Tyrone Slothrop or the overall mood of the book unless that mood is one of random meaninglessness - completely antithetical to the Grand Conspiracy in which Pynchon is so insistent his characters believe they are immersed. Pynchon spews forth these digressions in an unending torrent (digressions heading off on tangents, defined by ever finer changes in the "Ecks!" and "Why?") as if he expects the reader to share the same paranoid/drug-addled state of mind as his characters ("in the zone," so to speak har-har, where, since anything can happen, it necessarily does!) so that the proper irrational conclusions will be drawn, "Oh, the complete history of Slothrop's zoot suit and Planetoid Katspiel where pinballs come from . . . a-and oh yeah! Byron, the immortal light bulb and a giant, trained octopus that - wait a minute, *immortal* light? Now, I don't want to be an alarmist here, but it's all coming clear . . . sort of . . . at least I sense it coming clear soon." That moment just before the synapses snap to! Sweet anticipation of the Big Revelation when the scales will fall and They will be named. Pynchon is a master at postponing that moment indefinitely and keeping it all lively with his fancy oh-wow-man-I-wish-I-was-high-right-now-so-I-could-appreciate-this footwork. The humor in the book mainly derives from Pynchon's cranking up the gross-out factor which I'm sure was cutting edge in 1973 and seems to be the reason Gravity's Rainbow has been able to coast so long on it's notoriety. Burlesque denizens of the Zone soft-shoe (or sometimes foxtrot) their way across the story in droves. The effeminate soldier who is not taken in by a diversionary ploy involving buxom showgirls, and who, when confronted at gunpoint ("'. . .this is out of bounds, you big sillies.'"), fairly hikes up skirt and scampers off Stage Left is played for laughs, but such humor strikes me as being more hopelessly dated than universal, the innuendo about as subtle as Eric Idle as that Monty Python character, poking us in the ribs, "Wink wink, nudge nudge. Say no more, say no more. Eh? Eh?!" However, while I can resent Pynchon for his self-indulgence, I can't hate him because there is some fine writing in Gravity's Rainbow, but pointing out what exactly is appealing is a task akin to pulling hair out of molasses. The problem is he oversells the lie that is supposed to contain the kernel of truth hidden within. The facade is encrusted with too many gargoyles; cherubim and succubi jostle for space, bodies pressed together obscenely; caryatids groan under the weight not only of spires, clock towers, dormers, balconies, balustrades and the crenulated eaves of the roof, but are called upon to support each other. There's graffiti over the gilded, gessoed, plastered, parqueted, mosaicked, painted, carpeted surfaces. It snakes around corners, up and over statuary and seems innocuous enough - a tooth blacked out on Priapus, Aphrodite with Groucho brows -oh look! A marble micromosaic depicting an alchemist holding aloft the Philosopher's Stone, said Stone surrounded by requisite halo of cartoony light-rays (and that's not meant to be *sun* light, if you know what I mean) - or is that a Chess piece he's holding? Made of Imipolex G? Hard to tell: it's been obscured by the words, "Rocketman was here!" But mentally unfold the surfaces: ceiling, wall, floor; lay them flat, smooth the ripples in masonry and certain areas of graffiti spread, break apart while others overlap, creating dark shadows and a form takes shape - like a Mad Magazine Fold-In but in reverse - a pictogram emerges - the back of a giant hand, fingers curled away except the middle one. But no. That's not the message we want to see and now the spell's been broken. Anything we might have seen there dissipates into the Aether, much like Slothrop himself eventually does. In the end, there isn't so much a structure standing there before us as it is an amalgamation of decorations and conceits. Or is that exactly what They want us to believe?
Rating:
Summary: Ten Reasons To Read This
Review: 1. The opening words. " A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." As openings go, this is way up there. Straight into the action. Physically. Emotionally. At the centre of the Blitz. London. Second World War. V2 rockets pounding the city. The Crystal Palace crashing down. The fact that this may not actually be the Blitz but a character dreaming it, a character whose contribution to the war effort is to dream the fantasies of his superiors thus making them manageable, sets the novel up perfectly. And you may know already if this novel is for you.
2. Everyone loves a conspiracy theory, right? Well, this novel is crammed full of them. Just count how many times Pynchon uses the word 'paranoia'.
3. Just the sheer quality of the writing. No other writer has left me as dazed and staggered. Try sentences like...Well, on reflection it's never a single sentence; it's a real cumulative effect and has an almost hypnotic quality. You may very well just have to read it yourself...
4.For the story. Or rather the stories. Someone somewhere has counted that there are over 160 plots and sub-plots in 'Gravity's Rainbow'. I was too busy enjoying the trip to count but I can believe it, the pace is breathless. Just don't expect a linear narrative. Or an ending that makes everything clear. That is not Pynchon's intention. Just roll with the punches. And enjoy the ride.
5. Because you will want cause and effect. Because Thomas Pynchon says this. And then says, All right. And then frustrates by all possible means this actually happening for the reader. The centrepiece of this is the symbolic shattering of the V2 rocket once it hits its destination and the central 'character', Tyrone Slothrop ('sloth or entropy'? )anticipating the rocket hits with each of his sexual encounters in London as a GI. From which the story springs. Or stories spring. Or ultimately disintegrate.
6. You will want to read it and re-read it. I have read it twice now and I know I will read it again.Whan I first read Pynchon I was dazzled in a way that only the greatest literature can achieve. I am not exagerating when I say my first encounter with Pynchon was akin to that exhiliration on first reading Proust. Or James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. Or looking in awe and, it must be said, confusion at 'Finnegans Wake'. Yes, we're talking Literary Heavyweights here.
7. But don't let that put you off. This book is also funny. Pynchon does slapstick better than any other 'serious' writer. And his puns are invariably terrible.
8. Because like all great literature, this doesn't date. Yes, it is set at the end of the Second World War but its themes and concerns are universal. " Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? ". Pynchon comes back to explore this in 'Vineland'. A moment in history when things could change for the better but instead are invariably frustrated by Cartels or secret societies or both. Or shadowy others. Pynchon here refers to 'They' and the feeling of claustrophobia throughout is tangible. But I mentioned conspiracy theories above, didn't I?
9. Because ultimately, it leaves you with more questions than answers.Again, like all great literature.
10.The final words. No-one should pretend that this is an easy novel to read. Because it isn't. It is better than that. Martin Amis once referred to literature as 'complicated pleasure'. And this is what this is. " Now everybody - "
Rating:
Summary: Metaphorical marvel...
Review: Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" is a fascinating read; I had picked up this book some two or three years ago and had waded through about a third of it, I picked it up again this past month and finished it in about that span of time. I love this book for its sheer density and difficulty, it is a challening book with numerous and hard to tie together themes woven through it. Pynchon ties together themes of astrology as well as organic chemistry, sexual escapades (which abound), history, music and to some extent, comedy. I found myself having to consult online dictionaries as well as the OED and to that extent, it is somewhat of a vocabulary "enhancer". I found it interesting that he mentions the character name "Cherrycoke" in this novel (published in 1973) as well as in his most recent work to date,"Mason and Dixon" and I assume (without having read his other works) that he tackles some overarching themes in all of his work, including conspiracy theories but I'm digressing... All in all, a challenging and difficult work and one which I would recommend to any reader with an interest in the comical and the historical.
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