Can somebody please explain to me what is so "special" about Gravity's Rainbow? It seems like a book vaguely about the war written by a man wandering through the Mexican desert while heroically high on amphetamines.
Please tell me why it's good. Please use specific examples and provide citations.
Postmodern trash for numale leftists who want to appear smart for reading a fragmented narrative with pop culture references
>Please tell me why it's good. Please use specific examples and provide citations.
What? If you didn't like the book, an analysis of it after you've read it won't make you like it, fucking retard. This is what is wrong with Veeky Forums, the idea that talking or reading about a book is more valid than the book itself.
/r/books, the post.
It's hailed as a classic. I'm asking why and looking for perspective. Stop being retarded.
>hey guys can anyone just explain this 700 page tome to me real quick?
>Heroically high
Nice to see a Bill Hicks fan
It's stylistically incredible, but Pynchon and most postmodern literary writers don't have anything to say and were enculturated into a childish judaized pop culture that peaked in the 60s and left most men of the now-dying generation in a perpetual state of immaturity, so it's like a long cartoon in book form.
No one on here has actually finished it. I myself got all the way to counterforce section once. It made me vomit with rage so I quit.
what did writers before Pynchon say?
never read it, gonna admit
I've read Ulysses and Infinite Jest though, 2 outta 3 ain't bad
Well, I'm on page 590 and so far I'm disappointed. From things I had heard about it on Veeky Forums, reviews I had read, and all of the many quotes from it I had browsed through, I had a vision in my head of this book as a masterpiece. The vision didn't come true. It feels ridiculous to call a 776 page book with so much meticulous research embedded in it and so many crisscrossing plots and characters "lazy," but it's lazy. Often, I get the feeling that Pynchon is just pulling a Kerouac and typing like crazy, with no effort whatsoever into making a cohesive book with any kind of grand theme or message. I feel like he devoted no time to the most important part of the book- fitting it all together with purpose and intent. All that being said, he's still a great prose writer and there are plenty of great moments that pop up. Maybe if I re-read it, or re-re-read it, I'd get more out of it, but as of right now, I feel like I'm just wandering aimlessly through Pynchon's head, when I was expecting an incredible tour-de-force focused on the paranoia that has risen out of the complexities of the 20th century.
Pynchon admitted he was heavily on drugs when he wrote GR and can't remember most it, so yeah it isn't a cohesive story
More than postmodern writers even if it was just exploring emotional relationships like Fitzgerald or expressing the European Faustian spirit in Melville/Moby Dick like works; it wasn't pushing the envelope of mainstream acceptability with degenerate bullshit and never exploring any kind of high-moral message.
oh I see, you're just posturing without substance, sad
I'm still up for reading another Pynchon book because I like his style. Does Veeky Forums know if any of his other books are more organized, less drug-induced? Would Mason and Dixon be more satisfying?
it's overrated OP, a ranking of the long Pynchon novels would go
Mason & Dixon > Against the Day > Gravity's Rainbow > V.
yeah Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are more coherent and satisfying novels than Gravity's Rainbow
The Crying of Lot 48 and Inherent Vice are a lot of fun if you want something shorter
What are you stupid or something? Dab your anus elsewhere.
Why not just search JStor for reviews of the book? Here's the first one, from Scientific American:
>GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, by Thomas Pynchon. The Viking Press ($15). A V-2 missile links the two ends of the ballistic parabola that is gravity's rainbow. At one end is London, dogged and ingenious; the other end is by extension Germany itself. This bulky, intimate, particular and detached novel, a ork of the First magnitude, is a tale of V -2. There is a protagonist at each root of the parabola: in London, Slothrop, the young New England intelligence lieutenant, with a hidden childhood under psychological experiment; on the Continent, a mad and perverse S.S. officer, Captain Weissmann, commander of a V-2 battery. Slothrop leaves London to spend the year in fugue across shattered nations, in a search for the unique rocket, serial number 00/000, that Weissmann once requisitioned and launched with the S-Gerat, strangest of all the payloads of the Wehrmacht. The prose is intricate, turbulent, streaming without rest in a spate of idea, event and allusion. Here we merely note that this is a novel of a new sort. James Joyce grounded his flowing work on the ledges of epic, myth and folklore. Gravity's Rainbow instead founds its intricacies and expertise of allusion on science and technology, adjusted to the wartime ambiance.
>There are a number of remarkable set-piece essays, one on organic chemistry and its origins, one on operant conditioning, another on rocket dynamics. Ackeret and Leibniz, the Poisson distribution and double integrals are references as natural to Pynchon as limericks and vintages are to other novelists. To sketch one example, an apt connection is made between the serial wood engravings of late medieval German art, the calculus of Leibniz, the successive frames of an Ufa film and the unfolding time trajectory of the rocket, striking unheard a theater in London. Not all readers will persist up the wordstream past the bizarre and explicit sexual couplings, diverse as molecules, into the analytic heart of the novel; those who do will gain a richness of thought and motive, for which they must pay in spiritual coin. The literary reviewers have treated the novel as seriously as it deserves; it is a brilliant book, but be warned, that glow is icy cold.
But I guess the people who don't like Pynchon probably hate the work of looking stuff up or thinking about it or trying
M&D is better in this respect, although it lacks any kind of "grand" resolution because it's at least loosely historical.
Stop thinking like a pussy. I think Pynchon is the best prose stylist of all time and am reading ATD as we speak, but that doesn't change the fact that he doesn't have anything important to say and embodies the cuck generation that was shaped into iconoclastic and immature burnouts by a jewish counterculture, which is why we're being invaded now.
Pynchon has plenty to say about science, history, racism etc you just don't like what he has to say
>the Poisson distribution and double integrals are references as natural to Pynchon as limericks and vintages are to other novelists.
implying pynchon's works aren't filled to the brim with limmericks and other corny little songs
>racism
Didn't I tell you to stop thinking like a pussy?
you're the pussy m8, you get triggered by a writer who dislikes racism
I hate niggers and can still read black writers, get over yourself you pathetic worm
Clearly it's you who's triggered, son. Stop using fake words like "racism" and maybe you'll turn out with more to say than the boomer cuck your 16 year old ass thinks is infallible since you have no perspective about the world. And everyone hates niggers, that's not edgy.
Yes, what's your point? Are you too fucking retarded to form an opinion on the text as a whole just because it's long?
It's a poor man's Catch 22
>unironic /pol/ posters on Veeky Forums
Fuck off to your safe space. Books are made to explore the human condition, not pander to your ideological resentments
When you don't have anything important to say it's hard to appeal to the human condition, isn't it? Once again confirming the 'everyone who isn't a jewish slave like me is pol' poster for dumbest poster.
i'm nearly finished with the pynchonian half-ovum of gaia, and i must say it was fun and all, but i will be glad when its over. i hear that Mason & Dixon is a better and more satisfying work, which was what I heard last time I read a Pynchon novel.
I only just got the taste of Dante's Inferno during Pirate's Assassin dream, and it helps me simplify the book in my mind, all the paranoia. Whatever the beethoven argument was about, that the other composer wrote a work in which amidst chaos and horror or whatever, love can be found, I would say that the Pirate scene with Katje is by far the most triumphant moment of the entire book. the moment amidst the chaos where some love is found, aside from the ever skulking Pynchonian avatar of Slothrop, the book has been utterly intolerable. There were moments where things allowed themselves to be absorbed, but it seems in the end that I am the dead duck here. I hear people say close the book and start reading again from page one immediately, and i say they must be out of their god damned minds.
Like I said, look forward to it being finished, and moving on. Don't feel it was terrible by any means, but yet another example of Pynchon and I, two ships passing in the night without signal.
>I see conspiracies and race wars everywhere! This means i'm smart and Woke!
No, you paranoid fuck. It means you're a paranoid fuck. Go look for hordes of spooks and gooks and other scary imaginary things where you belong
Plotinus?
What the fuck is BEA?
dante you dweeb
Terrence Mckenna*
I've never even posted there. How does someone as transparently stupid and angry as yourself make it into a thread like this?
>Don't feel it was terrible by any means, but yet another example of Pynchon and I, two ships passing in the night without signal.
I wish feelings like this didn't make me dig deeper. I haven't gone back to GR, but I'm slowly getting sadder about that. The other day I read the introduction by Mark Z. Danielewski of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, and he D mentions ATD. I can't remember the comment other than framing the novel in an interesting way. What I do remember is another instance where I realised I'm probably going to enjoy Pinch when I get the luxury of time to sit and read again.
Gravity'a Rainbow has some of the most moving human to human relationships I've ever read.
Tell me more about this Bea. Was she a gift from God, or did she emerge from the ocean?
it was the rossini and beethoven discussion. definitely matched up with the infernal Pirate and Katje freeze frame before the dance, what i like to call a living painting stuck in pynchon's mind, and the true purpose of the entire book.
there is a film i watched with my grandfather i cannot recall the name of, but there was a scene in which the train rolls by and a man and a young woman are kneeling, clutching each other, it perfectly cements the entire film and you can practically feel the hardon the director had seeing it coming to fruition. That was the Katje Pirate scene.
>Gene Wolfe
jesus christ. just doesn't belong. my immersion, what little there was from such a poor attempt at mimicry, shattered.
for example?
Never read him, though I spied a few of his books at the second hand shop a week back.
It sucks getting worse at things, especially somethings, as you get better at doing others.
Maybe I'll keep the bad in to be good in a poor way that makes me interesting.
"I have become the destroyer of threads."
the Virginia Woolf one was far worse, very out of place
anyway, in terms of pynchon, if you didn't like what you read when you did, it may change if you go back, expecting something else, or not coming in with expectations at all. i dunno. i like many of the themes in the book, but there's just something i can't quite place. just a general sense of misunderstanding on my part, i suppose. i attribute it to just being a little dense. I am excited to read almost anything else, though. even just a different book by him. i definitely intend to read MD. hopefully it's a little easier on my poor dim head.
Go back to fucking /pol/
>one of the most beloved modernist authors
>sci fi pulp author
nah i think the walrus is the odd duck.
she's the weakest of the modernists, she only gets remembered because she had a vagina
Beatrice
She was some chick Dante thought was a cutie
To me the beauty was that the whole book was a rainbow. The screaming that comes across the sky at the beginning is the rocket that's an infinitesimal time from landing at the end. Fate (notice all that Calvinism and preterition?) binds the characters to arcs that inevitably lead back to the earthly state they are trying to escape. The earth, the zone, the war, the white north--all block the complete circular perfection of the true for of a rainbow. The rocket is everything that people use to escape this ugly life (notice that the imagery of the rocket constantly shifts. It is in turn a penis, a womb, salvation, destruction, science, magic.)
The plot is nested like the colors of the rainbow, with Pokler in the middle (notice that his is the most coherent story, that it is at the center of the book and the center of the plot). Reading takes you along the rainbow and at the end (assuming youre mentally capable of the literary double integral) you see the whole thing. Except the whole thing is still obscured by the surface of the book, the zone. There's more to it, there must be more, beneath the surface. You know it and feel it and believe it because the equation doesn't stop there, gravity doesn't end at the surface and from above you can see a whole perfect rainbow so you have to believe in some sort of continuity, in the life after death that von braun was talking about in the epigraph.
But it does end.
Now everybody-
Veeky Forums is too stupid to read Pynchon now, incredible. BTW for those of you saying that GR was about nothing, it was essentially about the residuals of how America decided to believe that everything was connected rather than believe the reality that nothing added up at all
beeeyonnnnd the zeeerooo
now everybody-