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Loading... Gravity's Rainbowby Thomas Pynchon
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. One of my favorite books of all time. Demands reader exuberance I don't know why all epic books have become epic comedies (oh wait, it's cuz of Ulysses) but this book manages to be hilarious and redefine the impact of WWII on the 20th century. Pynchon's masterpiece. V feels like a warm-up to this. If you have not experienced Pynchon before, getting ready to have your life taken over for a while. I bought this book when I was a freshman in college at the suggestion of my Political Science professor and, after several unsuccessful initial attempts, it remained unread for more than 25 years. Awhile back, I got sick of the thing sitting on my bookshelf mocking me and so I finally started and finished it, along with the aid of Weisenburger’s 'A Gravity’ Rainbow Companion.' (The fact that a 900-page novel requires a 300-page companion to explain all of the embedded allegories and allusions says a lot, but I’m not sure what exactly.) That this is the mother of all war novels is at once an accurate and highly misleading statement; it is a ride unlike any other that I have taken. From reading the myriad reviews on this site and others, Pynchon clearly is not to everyone's taste--if you are not hooked within the first 75-100 pages, you probably never will be. I found his (very) playful command of the language to be both impressive and occasionally enthralling. Reading this novel was well worth the effort, once the time was finally right for me.
Those who have read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow know that those 700+ pages add up to more than just a novel; it’s an experience. The hundreds of characters are difficult to follow, the plot is nonsensical, sex is graphically depicted, drugs are smoked out of a kazoo and a poor light bulb goes through many humiliating experiences. But the brilliance of Gravity’s Rainbow is not in spite of its oddness but because of it. Like one of his main characters, Pynchon in this book seems almost to be "in love, in sexual love, with his own death." His imagination--for all its glorious power and intelligence--is as limited in its way as Céline's or Jonathan Swift's. His novel is in this sense a work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis that will take its place amidst the grand detritus of our culture. Its teetering structure is greater by far than the many surrounding literary shacks and hovels. But we must look to other writers for food and warmth.
References to this work on external resources.
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400)
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Frequently digressive, Pynchon subverts many of the traditional elements of plot and character development, and traverses detailed, specialist knowledge drawn from a wide range of disciplines. The novel has been praised for its innovation and complexity, though the acclaim has been criticized by some. (