Why Do People Think GR Is So Hard?

"The hardest piece of fiction," they said. Bookchemist and ForTheLoveOfRyan warned me against its "density!"

It's fucking good, but why do people ham it up to be so hard? I'm 200 pages in and it's a nice breeze so far. I couldn't read Infinite Jest since I found it boring, but this seems to do everything IJ aspired to do e.g. change style and genre, have interlocking sub-plots that create a circular whole, etc.

Did you find it hard, Veeky Forums?

I'm about halfway and while I'm not finding it hard I do admit that there are aspects if it that I avoid getting too worried about and am just enjoying the ride. I get the feeling that there are puzzles that would be difficult to solve in there, but maybe that is just an illusion of the style.

Having said all of that, there have been large times where, even though I enjoy each sitting thoroughly, I can't be bothered staying another one so it sits on the bedside table for a while. It is more of an effort to get my head back into the world than other books.

Not at all and English isn't my first language. I think they don't read much or are used to simple writers.

Is just very confusing at times

i read it as a 17 year old stoner, so

>not being hyped on enzian and tchitcherine meet up or more hash hijinks

I've got my own hash hijinks to get through, buddy.

"The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth’s soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here—kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken . . . plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, drycleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert . . . but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition . . . to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste. . . ."

yeah. shit's so easy it's ridiculous.

Pretty much this.

Occasionally when Pynch goes off on obscure tangents I find my mind beginning to wander as I'm reading and sometimes I find I need to go back and re-read a paragraph or two because I feel like I missed something. And the perspective shifts / time jumps can get a little bit confusing but I was kind of ready for that.

I'm only halfway through but so far I think V. was a much harder read.

It's not really that hard. Even if he structure is relatively complex the language is not that difficult on average, it flows naturally, the imagery is vivid and everything makes sense in context. The meaning emerges on its own without the need to analyze every word. It requires a bit concentration at times but that's about all.

I can't even begin to imagine why IJ is considered hard. It is merely long and repetitive.

I found lots of the passages in AAVE, or just a how he changes style in different chapters, jarring. I also felt I was supposed to remember all the timelines, but didn't bother to.

May have been a brainlet when I was reading though. Haven't had to read properly until this year when I started university, but am now an avid enough reader.

Maybe it's a matter of having experience with this kind of writing.
You can easily get the gist of pretty much anything if you know in advance what you are getting into and how to filter the important information from the unimportant.

because insecure english majors have to hype up the fact that literature is difficult to prove themselves. No, there is no single book in literature that is more difficult than a standard advanced physics textbook, and neither should there be. Literature should not be primarily about intelligence but about wisdom, and yet wisdom doesn't make you look like a big-dicked smarty pants "patrician" that gets the ladies with their superior intelligence. In addition, genius in literature is something much more creatively-disposed, more difficult to apprehend in everyday life than say, the high-IQ of a good mathematician, and thus not something that insecure undergrads are happy with, being that they want recognition and to have their egos stroked. I would say also that it comes a lot from an inferiority complex to STEM subjects, but I don't want to project too much. GR is hard, though, as far as literature goes, but I would say there exist much deeper works.

I think it's the most difficult book I've read to date. I don't go out of my way to read things referred to as "difficult" though. I've read Gaddis (TR, JR). I find even "Pynchon lite" to be more trouble than Gaddis (in a different way). Gaddis is much easier to get through than GR. Something about Pynchon throws me off. I get where I'm at page for page while reading GR, but I feel like I'm missing so much when I'm reading it. And that I'm not laughing as often as I should. I do like the things he has to say, and I think a lot of it is brilliant, but it's odd.

I'll keep going with GR.

It's a long book. It requires a sizeable time commitment to finish. If you get out of your reading groove you can lose track of what's going on. Anyone with poor reading comprehension probably couldn't handle it.
Veeky Forums's tryhard plebs CAN get through it if they're not lazy.

Pinecone's prose style is generally considered to be very dense, so if you don't read it slowly it can be hard to follow what is happening. GR is particularly hard due to how ambitious it is. Characters are introduced, leave, and reappear hundreds of pages later, had Pynchon will trust you to remember who they are. The story is also intricate and extremely complex on a thematic level.

there are a lot of conventional narrative threads set up none of which are conventionally paid off

the book tells you to watch for certain things that never come and 650 pages into the book when not even Slothrop remembers what he's doing it's very easy to feel completely lost and like you're not understanding everything you're supposed to. i think the book's narrative unfolds better the second time around. you have to have a blueprint of the overall structure to see the drama in the pieces are sliding into place. nobody gets to the end and goes "I saw THAT coming!"

How can you compare difficulty between literature and a physics book you retard

I don't know how people can seriously suggest that it's easy. It's literally designed to overwhelm the reader with a constant barrage of information. It's by no means opaque, but people saying it's easy are tryhards wanting to sound clever.

>dense
When will this meme die? "Dense" just means well-edited and full of insight. If a text isn't dense, it just needs to be paired down.

I didn't say it was easy. I said it was pleasant and not jarring or boring like Jest.

>I'm only halfway through but so far I think V. was a much harder read.
i've only read v. and the crying of lot 49, so your post encourages me to continue

i don't know why this has to be a point of comparison, i mean i do, memes and everything, but why must you bring it up in a thread like this?
regardless, there is nothing jarring or boring about infinite jest, and you're allowed to enjoy both without ranking one higher

>The meaning emerges on its own without the need to analyze every word

okay, then what was the meaning of the quoted paragraph?

IJ is a big rip-off of GR imho desu. I heard they both may be rip-offs of Gaddis though

it kind of sucks when someone writes a book in a particular way. it means nobody from that point on can write anything even remotely similar without being accused of ripping them off.

every book written narrows the field. the only answer is to get out there now, write original shit and claim your territory.

Are you fucking kidding me?

No. deconstruct it, then we can all laugh at your sophomoric interpretation.

wait til the Counterforce bucko, heh heh

>sophomoric interpretation
You don't say, fucking genius. What in the world are you on to?
I didn't say you can write a dissertation on it with a single read, just that you can relatively easily understand the overall meaning.
When you remove all of the decoration it pretty much boils down to:
>The rest of us, (not chosen for enlightenment), must go on...kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia...trying to string them all together...to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in ... so much waste.
This much stands out at a glance.
A further understanding is completely unnecessary for the regular reader who only seeks to get acquainted with the main ideas running through the text.
The only actually hard part of the passage that could require more than two read-throughs is
>plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, drycleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert
because it's a word salad and is mostly there to create through rhythm and striking imagery an impression of chaos.

I've tried to read Gravity's Rainbow thrice and thrice I've stopped reading before I had finished the first page.

AMA

For me it's one of the funniest books I've ever read
I'm only 80 pages left so I'll wait to say if it was easy or if I didn't get shit (like in V. where when it ended I felt like an idiot, then after some tought everything fell into place)

huh. he means theyre floundering in godless materialism. quite explicit really. nice prose.

>>plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, drycleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert

So those are relating the waste with the meanings that he mentioned above. Like a shampoo bottle, the marketing on that connects you to the product even though the product is essentially the same as any other shampoo (and just plain soap for that matter). Or meat packaging, it's just an atempt to sterilize and hide from us that the hunk of meat was a real, living animal at some point. A couple of them I'm not totally sure where the two connect but I'm sure Pynchon did. It's fucking fantastic and "wise" (as someone mentioned earlier) writing. Senpai just got to the bottom of all the "plastic trivia", the best we can grasp at because we are the "not chosen for enlightenment"

Actually maybe Veeky Forums can help here because I've been thinking about it the past month and haven't figured out "drycleaning bags infant strangulation". Any ideas?

Obviously there has been cases of children suffocating in dry cleaning bags. Or something.

It's okay, user. I was like you. Come back to it when you feel like it. Are you studying? I found university keened my reading abilities enough for me to enjoy it.

Welcome to Veeky Forums

Fuck yeah.

If I am not much of a reader and try to read Infinite Jest, would I have a really hard time?

> reads this grade-school swarf

next up: Der Eisenkrote is the archetype of the frogposter

You didn't get shit, you arrogant fool.

Infinite Jest was designed at every level to test your patience. I'd avoid it unless you're a meme completionist. Has some good moments but Wallace is at his best in shorter formats.

For Wallace brevity truly is perfection. He is truly best when he says nothing at all. he is ok when he writes short essays. and his long fiction is dreadful.

Agreed, I can only read his non-fiction now.

>Bookchemist and ForTheLoveOfRyan
stopped reading here

I've not read the book, but based on context here's the connections my mind immediately leapt to:
>plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre
Traditionally saxophone reeds were made of actual plant material. Not sure how common or not that is today as I'm not a musician. This passage is suggesting that the plastic reeds are inferior in sound to the original organic reeds.
>Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement
Cracker Jacks are a junk snack food that are advertised to have a prize within each bag. It's a marketing ploy. The prizes are crummy and disposable, ultimately disappointing to the children the snack is marketed to.
>home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition
I'm not sure about this one, actually. I'm curious about it of anyone here knows what it means.
>baby bottles tranquilization
Yet another disposable synthetic substitute. Plastic baby bottles pacify infants, distracting them from their hunger or comforting them, ultimately shutting them up. Instead of natural breast milk straight from their mother, children learn from a young age to take comfort from hard plastic.
>drycleaning bags infant strangulation
Drycleaning bags are unnecessary for life, air is; unfortunately some children have died trying to play with plastic bags. This is also pointing out possibly consumerism or a certain class of people as not every one can afford to have their clothes drycleaned. It's also pointing out priorities: convenience over safety, perhaps also a commentary on the worth and care of children; parents pay extra money for their clothes to be cared for outside the home and keep their clothes well protected in plastic dry cleaning bags, but can't afford the time or money to properly supervise their children so that they remain safe.
>garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert
I'm not sure about other countries with deserts, but in America it is common in desert cities which have to have all water brought in to keep them going to still have lush green lawns. It's unnatural and not something that can last forever. At some point, something will have to give.

Not too sure how all this fits into the first passage quoted, but it's interested me enough that I want to give this book a try sometime.

m8 you can't invent your own definition and act incredulous that people don't apply your personal interpretation to it. Raymond Carver has a lot loaded into what he writes and every word and sentence has a reason for being there, but it goes down easy like water. You wouldn't dream of calling him dense.

Maybe becuase of your super advanced ability to understand highly complicated literature that no one else could possibly understand you have lost your Simple English reading-comprehension skills?

>Drycleaning bags are unnecessary for life


and yet, they exist. in large numbers. care to explain that?

i don't understand it, and i don't need superpowers to laugh at your pretending you DO understand it.

>I haven't read the book and I'm gonna try to meme
Children are pretty important in Gravity's Rainbow. He didn't write a pseudo kid diddling scene for laughs.

lmao

I have not pretended to understand it and I have provided no interpretations or analysis of it, sophomoric, grade-schooler or of any other kind - something you seem quite incapable of comprehending.
What I did is make a long sentence shorter by removing some of the subordinate clauses in order to demonstrate that the language is not, in fact, particularly hard on syntactical level.

But never mind. I don't want to ruin your segrit club. You are the smartest.