| View Larger Image | Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) | Paperbackby Thomas Pynchon (Author), Frank Miller (Illustrator)
| List Price: | $20.00 | | Price: | $13.00 | | You Save: | $7.00 (35%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Penguin Classics | | Edition: | Deluxeth Edition | | Page Count: | 784 Pages | | Publication Date: | October 31, 2006 | | Sales Rank: | 4,966th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780143039945
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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. |
Amazon.com Review
Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky. Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man. Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 310 reviews)
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Great, but not for the reasons some state by xanrastafari (CT, USA)  5 Stars
September 29, 2009
This book is a series of linked vignettes, that tell more of an imagined history focused on themes than a traditional novel. It is difficult, but not beyond the comprehension of a reasonably intelligent person paying attention on their first read. No guidebook or rereads necessary for enjoyment. It's also hilarious, bleak, uplifting, heart-wrenching and depressing. It is not, however, post-modern wankery indulging in style for its own sake or merely to indulge the reader in every absurd thing the author could think up. Every one of the vignettes carries with it something worth saying and worth thinking, tells a story worth reading that resolves into something worth feeling. Portions of this were so poignant I started crying.
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a demented scientist masquerading as an author by Villager (New Hampshire) 5 Stars
September 09, 2009
I have read through Gravity's Rainbow about twice. Each time I started with the usual system for reading a book - reading one page after another in order. But this book is so long, the story is so dense, the plot so outrageous, the characters so many, that sooner or later, like me, you will pick up the book and start reading only to realize that you are reading a section a second time, or that you've jumped ahead, and then you will realize - oh, oh - you are lost. You can wander in this book. You can despair of every straightening out the story line. You will search for a system, like my friend who purposely skipped around randomly trying to find where in the book he belonged. And then you will wonder: am I simply another character in Pynchon's paranoid universe? Am I the victim of a demented scientist masquerading as an author? Is the extreme emotional reaction of tossing the book violently away inevitable? What exactly is Pynchon trying to do? This is no way to write a novel that is meant to be read and enjoyed in the usual manner. This is meant to put the reader through a test. But for what purpose? What reason? I do not know, but I am sure that if I can just get through this book one more time - I will understand everything........
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Relax, just keep reading by Kevin S. Hollingshead 5 Stars
September 07, 2009
I've read Gravity's Rainbow four times, and I enjoy it more each time. I don't read it as a chore or because I'm supposed to admire it. I read it because it is so much fun.
Most of the people who have trouble reading this book are trying to read it the way your English teacher taught you to read "serious literature". Ignore that. Pynchon is deliberately trying to subvert that kind of reading. Rather think of Susan Sontag's "Style is content" and think of an amusement park ride. Begin at page one and hold on. Don't worry about what you don't understand. The important points are made quite clearly and repeatedly. Just enjoy the ride and marvel at the world he shows us. The writing ranges from sublimely "writerly", worthy of use in any creative writing workshop, to boldly preposterous, sometimes downright silly. But it is always imteresting, always fun.
Pynchon's themes are consistent. How we came to this modern world where immensely powerful forces, governmental and corporate, rule our world. Gravity's Rainbow, more than any of his other books, is fundamentally about the creation of our modern world. Corporations more powerful, more enduring than mere governments. The rooftops of Shell Oil in Holland being used to aim rockets at London, site of Shell Oil's English headquarters. Unlike other posters here, I love the early chapters set in the London of the Blitz. The writing is superb, the over-arching themes clearer.
Once we are set loose in the "Zone", the novel diffuses, wandering wildly, but the crushing weight of the multi-national forces is a constant. Until the smothering, unavoidable power of the real forces that define the modern world simply subsume the plot, extinquishing all other possibilities.
This is truly an exciting book to read, but not if you insist on highlighting and footnoting. Instead focus on rhythms and recurrence, brilliant insights and mad riffs.
In short, experience it more like music. Honest, its worth it.
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love it by Szãkãny Andrãs (Hungary, Europe) 5 Stars
August 28, 2009
I am now on page 130. This is a book, which I read after 2 year without books (just lazy). I am happy to have purchased.
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An important link in the changing form of the novel by B. Smasmasma (Grand Rapids, MI) 5 Stars
August 13, 2009
I am reviewing this mainly because I think the three and a half star rating the books has is too low. I will not go into much detail or be very comprehensive, but I will say what I think is important. After Ulysses, I think this is an important mark in the evolution of the novel. It was written by someone who, by both comprehensive and close readings, has obviously spent much time looking at the novel as an art form and has understood where it has been and where it will go. Because of this, it is not a book to read if you want to read only for entertainment. That also does not make it a novelty only for those in a cult following. I believe that a reader who pays attention and remembers the books they have read, attempts to learn things from them and carry that knowledge progressively from novel to novel, will eventually wander away from the mainstream books (e.g. the ones you find on an airport stand) to books of greater substance. Gravity's Rainbow is a book like this.
It does have its faults though. Pynchon, though highly imaginative and having an extremely open mind, does not have a lot figured out philosophically and the parts that were the easiest for me to understand (possibly the only parts I understood) were rather simple philosophical ideas (again, if writing a better review--or writing a paper--I would cite examples). Also he is overly obsessed with bodily functions. The poems and songs the characters sing, although respectable in quality, really aren't that good and are all quite similar. Perhaps if Pynchon spent more time working on them (instead of whipping them off and calling them good) the result would have been more stellar. I don't think that could be the case, though, because I think that, at times, Pynchon got tired of his own writing and just made absurd things happen to please himself.
Regardless, this is a very important novel (most important I've read from the time period). Gravity's Rainbow is beginning to feel a little dated, so if you are looking for an important novel that is even more current I would recommend Bolanos 2666.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
by Steven C. Weisenburger (Author)
Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of the indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Steven Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of...
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| V. (Perennial Classics)
by Thomas Pynchon (Author)
The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men--one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose--and "V.," the unknown woman of the title.
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| The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon (Author)
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
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| Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow
by Zak Smith (Author), Steve Erickson (Introduction)
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), set in an alternative-universe version of World War II, has been called a modern Finnegan’s Wake for its challenging language, wild anachronisms, hallucinatory happenings, and fever-dream imagery. With Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, artist Zak Smith at once eases and expands readers’ experience of the book. A leading exponent of punk-based, DIY art, Smith here presents his most ambitious...
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| Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
by Thomas Pynchon (Author)
A spaced-out story of Zoyd Wheeler's passion for Frenesi Gates finding fulfilment in his love for their daughter, Prairie. It has been described as "a meditation on myth-making - historical, personal, cinematic and televised". By the author of "V", "The Crying of Lot 49" and "Gravity's Rainbow".
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