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    Gravity's Rainbow
    Gravity's Rainbow
    Gravity's Rainbow
    Audiobook37 hours

    Gravity's Rainbow

    Written by Thomas Pynchon

    Narrated by George Guidall

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Audio
    Release dateOct 16, 2014
    ISBN9780698151260
    Author

    Thomas Pynchon

    Thomas Pynchon nació en Nueva York en 1937, y de él sólo se sabe que estudió ingeniería y literatura en la Universidad de Cornell, que redactó folletos técnicos para la compañía Boeing, que envió a un cómico a recoger en su nombre el National Book Award, y que vive en Nueva York. Tusquets Editores ha publicado toda su obra de ficción, compuesta por las novelas Vineland, Un lento aprendizaje, La subasta del lote 49, V., Mason y Dixon, El arco iris de gravedad, Contraluz, Vicio propio y Al límite.

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    Reviews for Gravity's Rainbow

    4/5

    1,651 ratings59 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Oh my goodness, what did I just read? Maybe I'm just not worthy. It was supposedly up for the Pulitzer in 1974, but they didn't give an award that year. Very dense, very disjointed, in my opinion. Very graphic, had some of the most shocking sex scenes I've ever read (and I'm no blushing violet). He touched on some fetishes that I didn't even know were real. The main crux of the story is the German rocket program and the allies trying to find this one special rocket via very phallic means. The saving grace was George Guidall, who narrated the audio, even at 1.6x, which I had to do to be able to finish, he kept me listening. I got shades of William S Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson when reading this. Its always been a bucket list read and I'm glad I did, but I can't really recommend it.
    • 3/5
      I always enjoy Pynchon's writing style, but this book featured far too much sex of various violent and disturbing sorts. The plot itself wandered a lot, but wasn't too hard to follow. I'm sure I missed all sorts of clever allusions, but I caught enough of them to make me feel smart. I liked the book as a whole, but I'd have a hard time recommending it to my parents, for instance.
    • 1/5
      The thing is, I read fifty pages of this book and I didn't enjoy a single one. I didn't see any beauty in the embarassingly self-conscious prose, the action was deliberately obfuscated and the only character that I could discern was Thomas Pynchon himself, waving his arms and shouting "look at me".

      Now, you can tell me that the whole thing gets wonderful on page 51, or at page 52 you see what the first fifty-one pages were about, but it doesn't matter. For me, a novel is about the journey, not the destination, and the journey in this is tedious. I'm not even convinced that it's a novel, more of a long poem designed for a readership of academics and fellow cryptic crossword aficionados. That's fine, but don't think this is a masterpiece just because it's popular among a certain crowd any more than a FK450C model aeroplane is a triumph of engineering just because it's universally adored in model aeroplane flying circles. And yes, I made that aeroplane up.
    • 5/5
      I read this book slowly, often just for twenty minutes at a stretch on the subway. Like so many people, I'd tried a couple of times before to read it but lost steam. He does that on purpose -- the first hundred pages includes lots of wild fun to lure you in, but also some intensely dense stuff. It loosens up immensely in the second part. And the book is worth the read! Very funny, both smart and crass at the same time. So many side stories that push you on into a mysterious direction. It's a hard book to try to explain. I loved it, though, and look forward to reading it again.
    • 2/5
      I just couldn't like this book and several times I almost quit. If it had been a movie I would've popped out the DVD fairly quickly as it crossed a lot of my red lines. Why did I go on? Well it's a modern classic right? It's probably good for me. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, though. In running for the dirtiest book I've ever read. Ulysses by James Joyce and Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen are also in the running.
    • 3/5
      Obviously this long, complicated book is immensely worthy, for the way it pushed the boundaries of post-modern writing. It used all the taboo breaking energy of the seventies to include as many fetishes and sexual inclinations as it could, and it is also occasionally brilliantly poetic and heart-breakingly beautiful...BUT...
      the way it felt for me was mostly a slog, through a turgid marsh, where I was frequently lost. There's too many characters in too many plot-lines that jump about seemingly at random, leaving me not really caring. I made the mistake of continuing beyond the point where I could easily give up.
    • 2/5
      I hate to do this...but I had to give up. I'm at least taking a break.

      Ulysses is my favorite novel of all time. I loved Infinite Jest. I've read a few of the massive Russian novels, but this was just too big of an ask for me.

      There were brief moments when I read a great passage (or more often a phrase) and recognized some of the talent (maybe even genius) that I understand many readers love about this novel; however, the digressions, passages in German, obscure vocabulary, constant introduction of new characters, math...I don't know...I only have so much time to read and this felt like too much work for too little fruit.

      Maybe someday, I'll try again...
    • 5/5
      I first read this a long time ago when it was given to me by a someone whose tastes I admire.

      Over the years since that initial immersion it has never been far from my mind. It often surprised me how many things would be on the radio, on TV, in songs, in films, where you could say, "do you know that bit in Gravity’s Rainbow where......."

      So I returned to Gravity's Rainbow. But first I read a few reviews on Amazon because when I first read it there was no Internet.

      This is my favourite one star review:
      "Every sentence (every, single sentence) of this novel attempts grandiose, complex profundity, so much so that it feels like being flayed alive by words alone. I wanted to stab myself in the head just to relieve the pain."

      Imagine wearing a pair of glasses that have one eye covered with one of those thick lenses that distort everything and the other with one of those prism lenses that split the image into six or eight kaleidoscopic images. Then imagine wearing those glasses while facing backwards on a runaway horse that is running through a hallucogenic landscape populated with very strange people having sex in every imaginable position. Somewhere in front of you someone is shouting something and even though you can catch most of the words you do not understand a single thing that is being said.

      That is what it is like when you start to read Gravity's Rainbow. It is not a book with a "beginning", it just "is", hence the numerous one star reviews like the one above.

      If you have ever taken really good strong LSD you will feel right at home here. If you have read and enjoyed Ulysses you will be right at home here. If you have ever had a serious mental condition you will be right at home here. If you have lived your whole life between the lines and never looked sideways then you may feel a tad uncomfortable with this book. There is more that is bent in this book than you can shake a very large penis shaped stick at.

      BUT...once you are in there you will feel really alive and wonder if you are becoming addicted. At 776 pages there is time enough to form a very unhealthy addiction and for anal sex to look like a healthy pastime.

      BUT...fear not dear reader, for once you have acclimatised you will witness one author achieving something that painters, potters, philosophers, musicians, writers, film makers have all tried at least once to do and that is to make something come alive and transcend its medium. For this book will take you to another place entirely.

      There is a flow about this book that once experienced will never completely leave you. It is like visiting another country while you are dreaming and yet awake at the same time. There are those shifting sliding dioramas familiar in dreamscapes, words that will stretch out to mean something altogether different.

      Like a spell this book will make you its own. You will never be really sure that you know what it is about then one day you will think you do know only for a later revelation that you never really knew even while snatches of it will be reaching out for you to hold on to.

      It's like this book wants to be rated at exactly 5.01293774265 Stars
    • 2/5
      This is where the 5-star rating system falls short. Do I think this book is brilliant, yes. Do I think that the author exhibited some sort of genius and is writing a book at a level above my comprehension, definitely! Did I enjoy the book, not so much...

      It took me about a year to read this novel, there are parts in it that are masterful and with prose and style that I couldn't believe. There was so much however that I simply didn't understand or have a clue as to what was going on. I felt like I was trying to play baseball with Major-League players - I was totally out of my league.

      I am happy I finished the novel, despite not knowing what a majority of it was about. I would like to think I'm a somewhat experienced and competent reader having enjoyed Cervantes, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, DeLillo, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky and many other classic authors. But this book was way beyond me. I have read Infinite Jest and Underworld and really enjoyed both thinking I would be able to handle Gravity's Rainbow and I was sorely mistaken. Beware future reader with what you're getting into with this book. The commitment of trying to read this novel is immense and I fully admit it's probably worth your time reading something else unless you're up for the effort of reading a book for 30 hours where you really don't know what's going on most of the time. To add to the overall frustration, I fully realize as well it's probably worth me now re-reading it to get a better appreciation of its depth but I admit I'm just not up for reading this book again any time soon.
    • 4/5
      I didn't get it. I know I didn't get it. But I got enough to get lost in the music of it. Like reading Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time, I enjoyed the act of reading, even if I would struggle to describe the plot.
    • 5/5
      Last week I viewed The Raid: Redemption and found myself actually astonished with the cardboard limitations of action cinema being actually transcended and nearly reinvented. One may ask about the relationship between a shootout with Jakarta's badasses and a hefty literary wormhole where Malcolm X and Orson Welles are but a staggered pair of chemical responses and Death gives Roger and Jessica the finger. Both examples pushed buttons and test our resolve. One could ruminate on bananas and Rilke for pages and not begin to grasp the richness of this novel. I consider it a gift that I was able to read Gravity's Rainbow twice. A yellow reader's guide was employed as was considerable espresso. The vision and nuance are maddening. I think of the latter albums from Scott Walker or Godard's Historie(s) du Cinema. There are limitless riches in this world, most have nothing to do with GDP or peer status.
    • 3/5
      Tried reading this a couple times. Got to page 400 (of 887) before bogging down with Pynchon's gumbo up to the hubs. (Uh, gumbo. Missouri River Breaks mud. It is known for stopping even horse drawn buggies with no fenders, let alone motor vehicles.) It's funny and ironic, but that's not enough. A story like this needs to be at least believable. This is tne main reason I had to stop. It just got too unbelievable. (A German in an FW 190 chasing a helium balloon and he can't shoot it down? Come on!!) I'll probably try finishing it again, but not soon.
    • 4/5
      I think I found it difficult in the sense of its denseness in fact. Well, I find it hard to answer the “difficulty” question with much certainty; I'm equivocating. I don't love it all equally no, that's not the case. There are parts that I prefer immeasurably to others however, simply because I prefer I'm not sure whether that persuades me that it would be 'better' in some sense without them. I don't have the figures for specific chapters with me but I do know that Joyce added a lot to some of the later chapters - from Oxen of the Sun to Ithaca I think - meaning that the manuscript expanded in proof. I think you notice this as you read it, right? On balance I'm not entirely convinced how 'necessary' some of the parts of the sections are, e.g., the example of Nausicaa would be a good sample of that. Still, I wouldn't want this to be a judgement too forcefully made - sometimes length, in my opinion, can be used not simply as 'story' or 'padding' but a sense of the passing of the time itself or a changing impression of the situation as it continues. For example, to some degree if Nausicaa was a great degree shorter I would be wary that the joke was too easy, the more critical parallel, ironical perhaps, less so.

      To take, again, a bit of care with words: for me, Donne and Keats and Dickinson are "difficult", in that seeing the image(s) and working with the syntax both to come to understand the meaning-generation in the poem and to enable the emotion in me to be clear (though not dissolute for its discernment) are slow and toilsome. Others may find these poets 'easy'. Proust is, for me, "difficult"; a lot of times, I have to rewind sentences and whole pages to figure out what he's saying. Again, other readers might find Proust to be a smooth cruise.

      I gulped Gravity's Rainbow in a couple of weeks, I think now because the sophomoric humor and 'cabals and caries' intellection were just the companionship I then needed. "Dense"- lots of characters, situations, ideas, cleverness- sure. "Difficult"? Not that anything potent doesn't continue to mean 'more' because it continues to mean differently, nor that effective writing is ever controlled by one's understanding of it, but I didn't, and don't, think Pynchon is, let me say, 'hard' to read because one doesn't know what's happening in his pages. That's not burdensomely much rarefaction "to admit" to, is it? I'm of the opinion that a novel should be as long or as short as its contents demand. I have conquered such novels of length as “Underworld”, “The Runaway Life”, “Ulysses” and “2666”, all of which I feel were not too long, as there power relied on their length. I do feel however that a novel will suffer financially if it exceeds 500 pages but this is just one of the many casualties of the era "I want it big and right now" generation.

      I think you'll find, if you keep reading, that there is depth of character in Pynchon (save where, as in all fiction, we're dealing with one-liners). You'll also find, if you get through it, that you'll have to read it again someday. And it'll be a different book when you do, characters included. Whereas a James Michener or Dan Brown tome will never, ever change. Ever read that paradigm work of fiction, The Bible? Is there "depth of character" there? Read, e.g., the story of David's career- all we're given as description is that he's a ruddy good-lookin' kid. That's all. (Which is about as descriptive as Biblical narration ever gets- what did Abraham look like? Not a word!) But in a few books you learn a great deal about (his) character. Actually, if you read the painfully succinct account of "The binding of Isaac" in Genesis, you'll find a great deal of Abraham's character revealed as well. There's more than one way to get there.

      Bottom-Line: Pynchon employs paranoia and conspiracy themes in his work because those are the warp and woof of America's Puritan heritage. Which, although most present-day Americans wouldn't recognize it, is no less present than the air we breathe. Pynchon's family tree is entwined in that heritage; William Pynchon, the first in the new world, wrote a theological treatise titled The “Meritorious Price of Our Redemption”, published in 1650, denounced as heretical and publicly burned. In “Gravity's Rainbow”, Tyrone Slothrop's ancestor William writes a treatise titled “On Preterition”, which suffers a similar fate. Plenty of clues there as to what Pynchon's up to! But it took me about 200 pages before I even worked out where I was and what I was doing there...
    • 2/5
      Clearly I missed something here. Angst, decadence, post-Auschwitz/Hiroshiima malaise, humanity's indecency to humanity exposed, sure I get that. A Joyce-esque romp through a Picasso-esque torturured chaos, I get that too. But none of Joyce's finesse. More Richard Fariña or Henry Miller self-indulgence with additional scatology. Does Pynchon make a point? Not that I noticed. Nice way with words. An extra point for gems like "What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?" (829). But basically that's ten months of my life I won't get back again. I saw another Pynchon in a secondhand bookshop the other day. I resisted the absence of temptation. Pity. I was told he was a great writer.
    • 1/5
      GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is just as hard to read, as it is to comprehend. Likewise it is almost impossible to write a coherent review. One feels a sense of exasperation with its length, density, and lack of coherence. Undoubtedly there are many grand themes hidden in writing that is always humorous and often quite clever. Yet one gets the feeling that Pynchon was driven more to expand his plot, characters and overall craziness than to create an experience that most readers can comprehend.

      The basic plot is simple. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop seems to be able to predict V2 rocket strikes during Britain’s blitz based on his level of sexual arousal. Inexplicably, British intelligence sends him on a search for the mysterious rocket 00000 in post-war Europe. This is characterized by a series of misadventures; plot twists; and intrigues that are almost impossible to make sense of. Most of the characters are never really developed. Instead they come and go, all the while injecting humor and craziness into the narrative while continuously challenging the reader’s perseverance.

      The novel’s complexity is so great that it leaves one bemused and wondering just what it is all about. Some reviewers have attempted to tackle that question with mixed success, suggesting themes like the “neurotic instability” that comes with war; the lack of meaning in life; blacks and blackness; drugs and sex; paranoia, and even death. All of those elements are clearly present, but none ever rises to the level of a coherent theme.

      What can one make of such a book? Clearly it is the work of a fertile imagination filled with much humor, historical insight, philosophy and occasional lyrical writing. Clearly, Pynchon knows a lot of facts but his tendencies to randomly insert them into his narrative with only the remotest relevance to his story make for an unsettling and—in the final analysis—boring reading experience. I’m sure that one could get more from a second reading of this novel, but life’s short and there are too many other things to experience.
    • 4/5
      This is a complex novel which appears to me to be a study of the relationship between master and victim. The author is a writer who enjoys the vocabulary, and range of english . Frankly he shows of his command of narrative styles, and is consciously creating a puzzle for his readers, hoping to lead them from one brilliant figure of speech to another and hoping that we will derive an impression of what he has to say rather then setting up a definite conclusion and moral. I'd train for reading this novel by reading Heller's "Catch-22", first, and then Joyce's "Ulysses" You would do them in that order, and if possible one right after each other to maintain the headspace necessary for maximum insight. Taper off afterwards by reading Neal Stephenson.
    • 1/5
      I thought about adding a "WTF" shelf just for this book. Alas, better judgement.

      I know many people love this book. I know this because I googled and read many people's ideas about this book as I trudged through these pages. I hoped, dreamed, indeed, I YEARNED for some help. How to read this thing?

      Alas, no matter how much people loved this book, they simply couldn't help me see their light.

      I'll take the blame. Maybe I'm too plot-bound (though I do, indeed, love many books that are light on plot). Maybe I like characters too much. Maybe the poop-eating scene turned my stomach so much I read the rest of the novel prepared to shut my eyes, to not look.

      Maybe. But really... This book just mystified me. For the first quarter or so I took notes. I thought it was helping, and then it wasn't. I tried re-reading. I tried reading more slowly. I tried shorter reading periods, longer reading periods. Nothing worked.

      Fact: I just hated this book. Never in my working memory have I dreaded five weeks of "pleasure reading" so thoroughly. I found myself simply reading to plow through words, enjoying the periodic clever turn of phrase (and there are quite a few of these), trying to catch some gist of something amidst the clutter of words that just felt like... snippets of text.

      I could not find the train of thought.

      This book passed me by. For five whole weeks.

      I never take five weeks to finish a blasted novel.
    • 3/5
      Bowed out half way, hit a point of diminishing returns.
    • 2/5
      Infinite Jest's cranky uncle - the hardest book I've ever read. There are 900 pages and 400 characters, and far more casual paedophilia than I'm used to, but despite my difficulties, it's obviously a work of (mad) genius. I even managed to enjoy some passages - the Anubis orgy, Ilse's impostors - but am mainly relieved to be finished.
    • 4/5
      Well I suppose you could say "this is rocket science", but this is a very difficult book to summarise. On one hand you could see it as obscene, rambling and unfocused, but on the other full of humour, ideas and fantasy, pitching the reader into a learned disturbed picaresque dream story of rockets, chemistry, psychological experiments and conspiracy, set during the confusion at the end of World War II. I enjoyed parts of it and found it very intriguing, but found the whole somewhat confusing (which is probably intended).
    • 5/5
      I have bachelor's degrees in psychology and chemical engineering, and am currently working on a PhD in chemical engineering focused on polymers. Most of the humor in this book (and it is *hilarious*) seems to require some advanced knowledge of the above mentioned topics. That said, the only way to get through this book, even if you are highly educated, is to give up on trying to understand everything.
    • 4/5
      I read Gravity's Rainbow within a few months of William T. Vollmann's equally dense and WW2-focused Europe Central, and it made for interesting comparative reading (the former focused on the forces behind war and the later more on the personalities involved and how it shapes them).

      Anyway..... Gravity's Rainbow doesn't make it onto my favourite's list, but it's undeniably a great book and, without having read Mason & Dixon or Against the Day, is the best thing I've read by Pynchon. It takes a lot of the themes of The Crying of Lot 49 and magnifies them to great effect. Some passages of the novel are better than others - Part 3 in the zone gets a little tedious at times - but overall the suffocating atmosphere of this is brilliant. Dense, dark days of war apply their weight and the sense of paranoia is palpable. Like in 2666, another mammoth tome of postmodern literature, the atmosphere is all important and brilliantly evoked. Slothrop might not end the novel a particularly rounded, or even that interesting character, but the world he inhabits pulls you in and is hard to escape.
    • 4/5
      ★★★-3/4

      Dense, funny and brilliant. This is a good book that fully deserves it's reputation as a difficult read. There are so many great reviews and explanations already written that I don't feel a need to write anything lengthy here. Suffice to say that I liked this book but am very glad to be done with it, (for now). Gravity's Rainbow is a story one never really finishes and I expect I will find myself thumbing through it on a regular basis.
    • 5/5
      I'm fairly sure this book will meet, and then exceed, your expectations. Whichever way they run. Brilliant, pretentious, deviant, long, and so much more. If you're planning on reading this for the first time, I'll echo some good advice: most of the hard to understand stuff is at the beginning, and Slothrop is the main character (to a certain degree).
      4.5 stars oc
    • 5/5
      all-time favorite.
    • 2/5
      A great deal of the book I absolutely hated; post-modernism just ain't for me. But I would be a lousy literary snob without reading the damn thing.
    • 4/5
      A friend once reviewed a book merely by asserting how long it had been around, as if this were an automatic testament to its worth. I had to remind them that Mein Kampf was quickly approaching a centennial, and still remains a worthless read (excepting for historians. It is also a great book to throw at the Hitler-exonerating fools who deny the holocaust).
      As our society progresses, the collective culture is becoming increasingly saturated with works. This saturation causes communities to spring up around certain values and tastes, often at the ignorance of other equally worthy works.
      If we want to argue for the existence of a cannon of excellence in any of the arts, we must consume these works with a critical eye, and not just assume their excellence on the basis of the fact that they have been handed down to us. We must ask how relevant they are to us, and we must ask whether it will be worth the time of the coming generations.
      Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is a much loved book by many people, but to a certain extent it suffers from he flaw of being automatically entered into the cannon without paying its right dues. Many people who sings its praise on the college campuses have never actually read it, but merely name-drop it to look and feel more intelligent. This is an absolute shame, for the book is rather wonderful. The humor in it is absolutely wonderful (I suspect Woody Allen pilfered one of his more famous jokes from this work). Though it is not the same funny of, say Terry Pratchett, I did have to put the book down a few times to work the chuckles out of my system (An example that will not ruin to much of the story: A certain character has the gift of Papyromancy - the ability to read someone's future from the way the roll joints). Vividly detailed to an incredible degree, the work I think can be thought of as a painting painted with a single haired brush. The dedication it must have taken to write this is absolutely incredible.
      But let us as well be very wary of that last point; it is something of the books fault as much as it is a virtue. A painting crafted with a single haired brush would not tax the viewer in any way; they could marvel at it and the artist's dedication without any kind of burden. That is not the case with Gravity's Rainbow: the reader must follow the writer, stroke by stroke, from beginning to end. And this, in such a difficult work, is incredibly demanding of the reader. And while some people argue that it is a good litmus test for education or taste, I find that at the end of the day all such a journey proves is tenacity in the reader (I've met many people, with whom I am at odds on the way and the purpose of their reading, and they have read this book, cover to cover). And I do not feel that is something that should be rewarded.
      Despite the book's many merits, I do not feel that it is Pynchon's best. Of the one's I have read so far, V and Vineland hold that honor. This is not to say this book is worthless; it is still an excellent work. The biggest flaw with this work is that it has over-stuffed itself, to point of being somewhat immobile. It is why so many people ultimately put this book down. V, on the other hand (a book that resembles the book in terms of density) while still being as richly detailed as Gravity's Rainbow, has not pushed it, and still has a lightness to it that eases the reader.
      Now, onto the coming generations I would want to give the cannon of Pynchon's work, as I have felt that of everything I have so far read all of it is worth while. But had I to chose just one, I would easily pick V. It is just as challenging, as well demands much of the reader, but does a better job of incentivizing them to continue, without playing to the game of having to be one of those works a person finish only for the hipster-ish reason of 'few others have.'
    • 5/5


      I read this many years ago. Definitely starts slow, but it's incredible. I always thought the best tip to start is to know that Tyrone Slothrop is the main character. By the time I had finished, I was wondering what else there was to say, it was like everything was covered under gravity's rainbow.
    • 5/5
      It has been more than a month since I bunged Slothrop’s world of paranoia. Yet, the very mention of Gravity’s Rainbow sends an agonizing quiver through my spine. With a half-burnt Marlboro dangling in between my lips to preserve my sanity, I am geared up to shred Slothrop and the psychoanalytical puzzle of a disgruntled civilization.

      Pynchon is a badass! He knows the poise of unbalancing the sanctuary of one’s mind. Just when you get composed with the narration, a bombshell laced with mystifying lexis splatters your brain cells into a neurotic mirage of bewilderment. Akin to an Archimedean Spiral this manuscript propels you into a hypnotic daze making you yearn for rehabilitation sessions with Freud. Pynchon in this fierce literary opus skillfully crafts a jagged brainteaser, dexterously moving through every character modulating strains of fright, convoluted psyches by means of sardonic humor; overwhelmed by the cosmic premeditated aggression of the World War II and tentative military technology. Analogous to an amoeboid action, the labyrinthine plot propels into a sinister reverie engulfing the most impenetrable enigma –Tyrone Slothrop into a mammoth annihilation of sanity and perseverance.

      Is Slothrop a military covert operative? Is he an experimental specimen or a mythopoetic hero? To me, Slothrop is a frightening model of entropy. A quintessence of degradation trying to decipher the flippant conducts of war-conspiracies and inevitability of death, finally fading into a collective zilch. An American agent who is allegedly being monitored by the Allies in London during WWII ,Slothrop comes across as the "anti-hero" with his shady misdemeanors, sexual orgies and his ever so volatile penis which equates Slothrop’s copulations with frequent bombing targets (Pavlovian sexual conditioning). However, as the script unfolds amid the admission of numerous secondary characters, Slothrop metamorphoses into a justifiable representation of humanist dogma heaving with extreme paranoia and hallucinatory raptures. His European sojourn involving fatal information on the V-2 Rocket mechanism and sinister elucidations of the Government conspiracies delineates the fine line that sustains the parameters of life and mortality eventually decomposing in the calamity of rockets and bombs.

      "All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we would have h the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilian? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology ,deify it if it will make you feel less responsible-but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are."

      Underneath the astrological parameters and laws of thermodynamics, Pynchon employs each building block of the universe to impart us the knowledge of irrevocability of death and its unethical exploitation through inhumane power-mongers.

      Festooned with an astounding color palette, the rainbow is a nature’s charming bequest after a treacherous storm. Conversely, Pynchon in the course of Slothrop cautions us about the prevalence of a man-made scientific marvel – a mock arc (rocket) that looms on our tomblike unawareness and may unpredictably descend on to the earth patterning a “rainbow” of blood and gore of humanity. A baffling sarcasm, isn’t it?

    • 5/5
      Ha! I finally got you, Gravity's Rainbow! I have finally conquered you!

      Man, I need to read this again later.

      After several tries and a year long streak of binge-reading, I must claim a vain show of pride at finishing this for the first time.

      This is a very intimidating book, and I know only too well how tiresome and baffling it can be. Side plots, digressions on native blacks in the Wehrmacht, the submission of science to war, long languorous stretches of prose on the horrors and banalities of survival not out of place in Remarque or Vollmann, raunchy sex, noir film, multilingual puns, and show tunes.

      Few can possibly claim to 'get' this beast, even after multiple readings. I will make no such claims. Instead, I tell my fellow suffering readers to endure.

      Take us out. Follow the bouncing ball.