Rating  - The most beautiful book of the 20th century
Despite Proust (who was really a 19th century author trapped in a different era), Joyce (who was a master craftsman and a genius of language, but we remember him less for beauty than for technique and for the concepts of his enormities), Kafka (who was a universal author, equally out of place in any era, the 20th century just happening to be there), Faulkner (whose dark obsessions cast a sobering personal shadow over his work), or Borges (who was more truly a reader than a writer); despite these giants and others, Pynchon's masterpiece, which incorporates all of them but makes them fit and transforms them all without so much as a single false note, remains to this reader the most beautiful that the 20th century has to offer.
To be clear, this book is very strictly speaking a book of the 20th century, incorporates styles and themes unique to the era, gives birth to characters that are of the 20th century alone, and weaves a fabric of unsurpassed beauty in the process.
To call Pynchon post-modern is limiting and flawed. Any comparison to DeLillo, or Gaddis, or the like, is comical and should not be taken seriously. Some books can be read once through, and stand for everything, more or less, that an author has to offer. Gravity's Rainbow can be read countless times, and the experience is unique and profound, always.
Rating - The Best Novel Since "Lolita" and "Ulysses"
"Some joker put hashish in the hollandaise, causing a run on the brocolli." Just another event in the life of Lt. Tyron Slothrop, who was attending the wild party in question in the Herman Goering casino as part of his search for the Schwatzgerat--the V2 rocket (serial no. 00000) which carries the mysterious Imipolex G device--all over wartime Europe, while the British secret service, and assorted others, search for *him*.
Why? You'll have to read the book. Along the way, he meets--among many others--a British captain with black-market connections that allow him to have fresh bananas in London's wartime winter in return for homegrown "magic mushroom" drugs; an African tribe whose members serve in the SS as V2 crews; an insane American Major whose solidiers sing diry limmericks about the V2's various components; an Italian nobleman--and a British Brigadier--with odd sexual practices (even by Pynchon's standards); and that's just the start of it.
The adventures of Lt. Slothrop in this mad looking-glass world are funny, amusing, bizzare, and complex. What's more--and this is what makes the novel a masterpiece--Pynchon integrates so many actual facts into his fictional world that it makes it and its inhabitants have much more versimilitude than the people described in most *non*-fiction works about WWII. Slothrop is more "real" than the Hitler we read about in most biographies of the man; his friends and enemies more real than, say, the defendants in Nuremberg are in most books about the trial.
If Pynchon speaks, say, of a car used by a lieutenant in a specific sub-department of the German Army in 1944, you can be damn sure that particular car model was in fact used by just such lieutenants at the time in reality; that pynchon took into account the wartime shortages that made the car's quality to deteriorate from 1944 to 1941; and that the lieutenant's resentment of this would be relevant to the plot.
To be sure, the lieutenant might then want to kill Slothrop in order to fulfill an anient prophecy based on Mayan star charts (which you can bet are also accurately portrayed); or to have a homosexual affair with him; or to do any number of bizzare or absurd things that one would expect in the looking-glass world where the novel is set. But that is just what makes this novel so great: Pycnhon doesn't research to teach us facts about WWII--even if a lot of the facts he puts in the novel are probably unknown even to WWII history buffs (like myself). He *uses* his research to create his funny, bizzare, and incredibly engaging world.
Read it--perferably, with a glass of wine (or something stronger) at your side. You will laugh, chortle, be shocked, and be amazed. Rarely had a better novel been written.
Rating - The Rocket Arcs, the Fight Rages On, the Challenges Remain
Ever since I discovered Thomas Pynchon, in college in 1982, I have fought the battle between the two camps on this book ("greatest ever written" vs. "fraud") on the side of Pynchon, where I still stand today. Many of my friends, having heard me talk about this novel, have attempted it and given up. Not necessarily because of its difficulty, but more because of what they want in a book, or don't want, or because they were not interested in what Gravity's Rainbow does, offers, and succeeds at. I don't disparage anyone who does not like Pynchon, but you must conceed the notion that just because you don't like something doesn't mean it is bad. I can't stand rap music, but I would never tell anyone it has no validity for them, and I freely admit that I don't know what makes rap good. Therefore, we all need to be careful in judging Pynchon, and especially Gravity's Rainbow as bad when we just don't like it. For those it speaks to, it has no peer.
As a fiction writer myself, this book first served as an inspiration to me. Few writers since Shakespeare have Pynchon's vocabulary and word craftsmanship. He can write a sentence that you can read over and over and marvel at in its genius. Put a lot of those sentences together and you get a tome of genius. The most important moment for me when reading this novel for the first time was when I was reading along, and I stopped and actually said to myself "wow, I didn't know a novel could do that." This declaration was repeated many times before I reached the end, and it is that amazing realization that makes this novel so great, and so important to human letters. Even the naysayers, those who attempt to find flaw with this novel, those who hate it and find it unreadable, would be unable to point to another novel like it. No other novel takes you where Gravity's Rainbow does, no other novel challenges you in the way this one does. For me, a challenge is what makes a novel special. I don't mean a challenge to understand it, but a challenge to imagine the world it describes. A challenge to look into yourself and find the things that this novel thrives on, and the challenge of letting your mind float across language that the brilliance of which could not have been imagined before you read it. Gravity's Rainbow takes you to places and inspires thoughts that no other novels do.
Now, that being said, let's have a caveat. Gravity's Rainbow was written by a man with a wide range of knowledge, a large vocabulary, and a prodigious thought process. You'll need a dictionary close at hand and you should use it without shame. You might want to read one of Pynchon's shorter books to work your way up to this one, just to get the feel of how he operates. Lots of players spend time in the minors before they are ready for the major leagues. When I first read this novel I had read V and The Crying of Lot 49 before attempting it. I also had a literature class in which we discussed Pynchon and his themes (paranoia, conspiracy, what lies beneath the surface) Most of all, don't take anyone's word for anything about this book. Just read it and let the words do their work. Make of it whatever you want, and if you don't like what's happening to you as you read it, just stop. You're no less a person, no less a reader, no less an intellectual, it just wasn't for you, and this novel is not for everyone. That's one comforting thing about it, it makes no bones about the fact that it just isn't for everyone. Few things of quality are. For me this has always been the greatest novel I've ever read, but that may not be true for everyone. To those who tread the Pynchonian path and, like me, find a home there, I welcome you.
Rating  - A very good 3 1/2 star book
Yes, there's a lot of gravity here - dense, intense, tyrannical and demanding gravity. It does demand. There's nothing wrong with a little work though. Some of the reviewers here had to attempt this thing a few times before actually making it - myself included.
It's a mountain and I the reader felt like a mountain climber, if you will, and when I got close to the top, even though I knew the view would not get any better I said to myself: I'll take the extra steps and finish this thing. Then I can say: I finished this thing. Was it worth it? For all the five star reasons, sure why not. There's gold in them hills.
But, too often I felt frustration knowing I have enjoyed journeys far more user-friendly that had just as good a pay off.
Rating - Sex and explosions, what more can you want?
What sets Gravity's Rainbow above other books, at least in my humble (but correct) opinion is that it changes your perception of how to tell a story. In this book we don't have a simple and straightforward storyline. We don't have just prose to tell it (there are many digressions in the form of songs and poems and details of the lives of inanimate objects). In the end, there is a story behind the madness, even if it's sometimes hard to see.
Also, a little tip. Tips don't work for everybody, but I think this is a good one. Re-read it. I don't think any human can read it once and get everything they can from it. Don't limit yourself to one reading and say "This is great!" or even the opposite. Do it again.
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Customer Reviews for Penguin Classics,0143039946,9780143039945,0143039946,813.54 |
