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Buy Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Thomas Pynchon by Frank Miller available and for sale on Brightsurf
| View Larger Image | Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Thomas Pynchon
by Frank Miller
| | List Price: | $18.00 | | Price: | $12.24 | | You Save: | $5.76 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 14412 | | Studio: | Penguin Classics | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 784 | | Publication Date: | October 31, 2006 | | Publisher: | Penguin Classics |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
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. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 12 reviews)
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The Mother of All War Novels 
If you have not experienced Pynchon before, getting ready to have your life taken over for a while. I bought this book when I was a freshman in college at the suggestion of my Political Science professor and, after several unsuccessful initial attempts, it remained unread for more than 25 years. Awhile back, I got sick of the thing sitting on my bookshelf mocking me and so I finally started and finished it, along with the aid of Weisenburger's "A Gravity' Rainbow Companion". (The fact that a 900-page novel requires a 300-page companion to explain all of the embedded allegories and allusions says a lot, but I'm not sure what exactly.) That this is the mother of all war novels is at once an accurate and highly misleading statement. The prose is both complex and lyrical, the images both beautiful and frightening. It was a ride unlike any other that I have taken.
May 09, 2008 | |
Ambivalent on This One 
I read this book twice in the early 80's, and now I'm at it again to see if I still think it's that good. I've always had my doubts, and Pynchon's work after this didn't help them any. I have to give this novel four stars or how could I justify reading it three times? It must have something! On the other hand, I can understand why most people I give it to throw it aside after ten pages. It's certainly an "important" novel, and it's something special, but definitely for a niche audience.
Much has been made of Pynchon's prodigious knowledge, of technology in particular. I think this is vastly overrated, having been educated as an engineer in the interim since my first two readings. His profundity seems to wear thin quite quickly and become tiresome and sophomoric. I'd say the first part of the novel that takes place in London is by far the best - it's mysterious, weird, touching and sometimes poignant, and creates a marvelous atmosphere. Should have stopped there?
On the plus side:
- Some hilarious humour
- Some wonderful prose, really complex and deeply woven allusions and imagery. His description of the architecture of the White Visitation in the first section is a good case in point, contrasting the impulses that lead to the creation of Gothic cathedrals with the latter impulse to Gothic Revival.
- Very imaginative premise
- Can be vastly entertaining as a rambling picaresque novel
- A challenge to read that can reward with some duzy sentences!
- Some interesting takes on American culture and history, e.g., his interweaving of Puritan cultural themes.
On the negative side:
- Characters that are pretty much cardboard - no depth, after London, he doesn't seem to have much sympathy for them
- Extremely annoying habit of nudging the reader with his elbow to make sure we know he's "joking" even if we will never get the joke: italicized text, addresses to the reader, corny colloquial style
- Pointless and not all that funny songs interjected
- Tiresome fixation on paranoia and control as major themes, as if that explains anything about anything
- Boring wallowing in vulgarity as if we will be shocked - maybe readers in the 70s were, but it's pretty dated now
- Stoner humor: many passages are the type of thing that might be funny if you were high, and often the characters are, but I was not on this reading
April 02, 2008 | |
Huh?
Well, well.
As I consider myself erudite, at some point in my life I knew I'd have to read this book. It's been on the shelf with Finnegan's Wake, Moby Dick and The Magic Mountain. Having finished the other 3 I had no remaining excuse.
I still have no idea what it's 'about.' It frequently made me want to gouge my eyes out with a fork. I'm not sure if thats good or bad.
Now I'm going to start reading Against the Day. Pray for me.
November 23, 2007 | |
The most beautiful book of the 20th century
Despite Proust (who was really a 19th century author trapped in a different era), Joyce (who was a master craftsman and a genius of language, but we remember him less for beauty than for technique and for the concepts of his enormities), Kafka (who was a universal author, equally out of place in any era, the 20th century just happening to be there), Faulkner (whose dark obsessions cast a sobering personal shadow over his work), or Borges (who was more truly a reader than a writer); despite these giants and others, Pynchon's masterpiece, which incorporates all of them but makes them fit and transforms them all without so much as a single false note, remains to this reader the most beautiful that the 20th century has to offer.
To be clear, this book is very strictly speaking a book of the 20th century, incorporates styles and themes unique to the era, gives birth to characters that are of the 20th century alone, and weaves a fabric of unsurpassed beauty in the process.
To call Pynchon post-modern is limiting and flawed. Any comparison to DeLillo, or Gaddis, or the like, is comical and should not be taken seriously. Some books can be read once through, and stand for everything, more or less, that an author has to offer. Gravity's Rainbow can be read countless times, and the experience is unique and profound, always.
November 22, 2007 | |
The Best Novel Since "Lolita" and "Ulysses"
"Some joker put hashish in the hollandaise, causing a run on the brocolli." Just another event in the life of Lt. Tyron Slothrop, who was attending the wild party in question in the Herman Goering casino as part of his search for the Schwatzgerat--the V2 rocket (serial no. 00000) which carries the mysterious Imipolex G device--all over wartime Europe, while the British secret service, and assorted others, search for *him*.
Why? You'll have to read the book. Along the way, he meets--among many others--a British captain with black-market connections that allow him to have fresh bananas in London's wartime winter in return for homegrown "magic mushroom" drugs; an African tribe whose members serve in the SS as V2 crews; an insane American Major whose solidiers sing diry limmericks about the V2's various components; an Italian nobleman--and a British Brigadier--with odd sexual practices (even by Pynchon's standards); and that's just the start of it.
The adventures of Lt. Slothrop in this mad looking-glass world are funny, amusing, bizzare, and complex. What's more--and this is what makes the novel a masterpiece--Pynchon integrates so many actual facts into his fictional world that it makes it and its inhabitants have much more versimilitude than the people described in most *non*-fiction works about WWII. Slothrop is more "real" than the Hitler we read about in most biographies of the man; his friends and enemies more real than, say, the defendants in Nuremberg are in most books about the trial.
If Pynchon speaks, say, of a car used by a lieutenant in a specific sub-department of the German Army in 1944, you can be damn sure that particular car model was in fact used by just such lieutenants at the time in reality; that pynchon took into account the wartime shortages that made the car's quality to deteriorate from 1944 to 1941; and that the lieutenant's resentment of this would be relevant to the plot.
To be sure, the lieutenant might then want to kill Slothrop in order to fulfill an anient prophecy based on Mayan star charts (which you can bet are also accurately portrayed); or to have a homosexual affair with him; or to do any number of bizzare or absurd things that one would expect in the looking-glass world where the novel is set. But that is just what makes this novel so great: Pycnhon doesn't research to teach us facts about WWII--even if a lot of the facts he puts in the novel are probably unknown even to WWII history buffs (like myself). He *uses* his research to create his funny, bizzare, and incredibly engaging world.
Read it--perferably, with a glass of wine (or something stronger) at your side. You will laugh, chortle, be shocked, and be amazed. Rarely had a better novel been written.
September 07, 2007 | |
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