Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Paperback – Deckle Edge, October 31, 2006

I just read GRAVITY'S RAINBOW twice in a row, one reading right after the other. It was good the first time through and excellent the second time. Plus, instead of paying something like thirteen dollars to read one book, I ended up paying less than seven dollars apiece to read two books. Both of them were a bargain at over seven hundred pages.I notice, though, that the Amazon price is above Amazon's ideal ten dollars. I notice also that the sentences Amazon quotes from GRAVITY reviewers are selected from very favorable reviews but, out of context, they seem like very unfavorable sentences. Of course, I figure IT'S A CONSPIRACY.Although it's a book you either love or hate, it has four times as many five-star as one-star reviews. The reviews, both raves and pans, say pretty much the same thing as professional reviewers do, so there's really not that much for me to add.I'd like to address some of the things one-star reviewers say, just for fun.First of all, there are the one-star prudes. They're right. The book has coprophagy and pedophilia, both treated non-judgmentally. If you're the kind of reader who gets upset by that, you'll have to stay away. On the other hand, it's a book about Nazis ... and for some reason nobody seems to get prudishly upset about Nazis. Pynchon is on to that little paradox, and if his prudish readers are missing it, too bad for them.Next, there are the one-star haters of Post-Modernism. They all have at least one thing in common: they think Post-Modernism is easy to recognize and every example of it is equally bad. Wow. I'd have thought that, like Romanticism, it has gone on for years and years in the hands of hundreds of different people, in music and painting, poetry and novels ... and really I can barely tell how all the examples resemble one another, can barely tell what JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR has in common with EVITA, and couldn't tell you for sure if either one of them were Post-Modern. My bad, I guess. Apparently all you have to do is call a book Post-Modern and Bingo! everybody who likes it goes to hell.There are the one-starrers who love ULYSSES and say GRAVITY is nothing like it. There are the ones who hate ULYSSES and say GRAVITY is exactly like it. These two groups should meet on neutral ground and fight until they both disappear.A couple one-starrers say GRAVITY is liberal propaganda. Hmm. Liberal propaganda that nobody can understand. That's pretty liberal. But wait! Isn't THE WASTE LAND ... conservative propaganda? And nobody can understand THE WASTE LAND either. Suddenly it all makes sense!There are the academic conspiracy one-star haters, whose complaints go something like this: When you were in high school or college, an English teacher you hated told you GRAVITY'S RAINBOW was a good book. You didn't even read what this teacher assigned, let alone what she recommended, she was such an obvious loser, but nevertheless you have ever since believed that everything she ever told you was cold, hard fact. As a result of this belief, you read GRAVITY and, under the hypnotic influence of this hated teacher, never even noticed how bad it was. That's how the academic conspiracy works, and if it weren't for the one-star haters, nobody would even know about it. What made them so bright? They hate teachers a magic tiny little bit more than you do.Last and least are the one-star reviewers who just get all crazy inside when they suspect someone else is smarter than they are. Smart people, according to these reviewers, are pseudo-intellectuals who write to impress, and writing to impress is a great sin. All their lives, these reviewers have been making sure they never write to impress, and so naturally they write the world's least impressive reviews.----- -----On the positive side, this is a very well-constructed book. The first part is prologue, and the fourth and last part is epilogue. During the epilogue, the characters fade away, sort of like the hero of TENDER IS THE NIGHT, who never realized he was Post-Modern. The second and third part are NORTH BY NORTHWEST, as discussed below.Readers of traditional novels often seem, from their comments, to be disoriented by this book. It has a lot in common with ALICE IN WONDERLAND, including an explosively dissolving dream ending. ALICE influenced FINNEGANS WAKE, which the book also builds on. It builds on William Blake's Prophetic Books too, and all these would be good training for reading GRAVITY, except that GRAVITY is the simplest of them all. In fact, Pynchon is better as an introduction to Blake than Blake is as an introduction to Pynchon. Time running backwards sort of thing.While I was reading GRAVITY, I watched Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. The two are virtually identical, complete with the mysterious "they" who control the action and refuse to save the hero they're manipulating, and their easy-going Anglo-American ruthless indifference to his fate, and their ownership of the mysterious woman who sleeps with hero and villain alike. Both works made a lot of money, and they deserved to.GRAVITY also has things in common with a really challenging crossword puzzle book -- though the one-star reviewers who think no novel should challenge its readers probably think crossword puzzle books should never be sold.It's all good. I'm sure they're part of the conspiracy too. This is some wild, crazy fun.

I first read this book when I was 16, and it was the Spanish translation. Later on, I read it in English, and although I consider it one of the best, most complex books I have ever read, I was a little disappointed in the rest of Pynchon's production. I think he reached his zenith with "Rainbow" and it has been all downhill ever since. The book is not easy to read, and the action is not easy to follow, because the author likes to take the scenic route to enrich our view, so we get the whole treatment with physics, engineering, strategy, espionage, sex, love, fear, paranoia, and an assortment of other fields -some strange, some crude- that provide us with the view of a world gone mad from the prizm of an author that seems to have been down the rabbit hole once or twice. The only thing that has always bothered me about "Gravity's Rainbow" is my inability to understand its ending. I want to believe the author designed it in such a way that it would be very ambiguous, but I am really not sure. In any case, a great reading experience, although, reader, beware: those who look for uplifting messages; those who don't like harsh language; those who don't like depictions of sex; those who would not be able to read through very descriptive passages of (one hopes) less than popular and rather grotesque sexual practices; those who would not continue reading after the lavishly descripted love scene between a grown man and a twelve year-old girl; those who dislike "dense", descriptive literature; those who don't really go for the stream of consciousness stuff; those who don't like war books; those who have read this far and already hate the book and the review; all those potential readers should know that in "Gravity's Rainbow" you get hundreds of pages of what I have just outlined, and more. If you don't think you can stomach this list, move on to other books: there are plenty of good ones out there. This one is good, but not for all tastes.

A superbly inventive, darkly comic WWII epic envisioned from a '60s countercultural perspective. The commonplace view of GB as extremely difficult reading has never seemed very generally applicable to me. You do need to learn to get comfortable with its flamboyantly original style and its post-modern inclusion of pop culture —cussing and scatological metaphors, arcane belief systems like anarchism— as part of its world. I also helps to have been once immersed in the LBJ-and-Nixon era countercultures, “paranoid” aspects of which are central to GR. (Ditto for INHERENT VICE; and some sense of Gilded Age anarchist culture is similarly helpful for appreciation of AGAINST THE DAY). After struggling with its first forty or so pages it went by like a page turner for me and did not rely for enjoyment on a grasp of its every allusion.