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Loading... Gravity's Rainbow (1973)by Thomas Pynchon
  
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  ) windowlight | Oct 10, 2023 |   ) grahzny | Jul 17, 2023 | ) bookwrapt | Mar 31, 2023 | Crokey20 | Feb 24, 2023 | Even though I got very little out of this, it was a fun wild trip...not ride. Is Pynchon on LSD or is he crazy or just a weird writer? Erections, chaos, erections, bananas, erections, squids, erections, military, erections, WWII, erections, Shirley Temple, erections, some kind of plot, and last but not least ERECTIONS. (  )1  Ghost_Boy | Aug 25, 2022 |
 There’s a dirty secret tucked away in Thomas Pynchon’s novels, and it’s this: beyond all the postmodernism and paranoia, the anarchism and socialism, the investigations into global power, the forays into labor politics and feminism and critical race theory, the rocket science, the fourth-dimensional mathematics, the philatelic conspiracies, the ’60s radicalism and everything else that has spawned 70 or 80 monographs, probably twice as many dissertations, and hundreds if not thousands of scholarly essays, his novels are full of cheesy love stories.  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.  As of course is all this jammed input — a parlous challenge to the reader's perseverance. But then however much the latter may have been strained, one must pay tribute to Pynchon's plastic imagination, his stunning creative energy, and here and there the transcendent prose: "It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame" — all marvelously descriptive of the world in which we live and are sure to die. Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inContainsHas the adaptationInspiredHas as a reference guide/companionHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.05)
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