I just started reading Gravity's Rainbow. A lady at the bus stop asked me what I was reading. I told her the title and showed her the cover. All I could tell her was, "It's weird." She wasn't going to press me for details, thank God. In fact, she walked out of the bus shelter a few minutes later.
If you've ever read the book you know it's very dense in a way that at least courts complete incoherence. But Thomas Pynchon studied engineering physics in college, so it does have that kind of solidly researched background. But in essence, since it's set during the Blitz and imitates the Blitz, I'm just letting myself get bombed by it.
2 comments:
Gravity's Rainbow is one of those books I've never been able to get through, although not for lack of trying. I read just a few of his novels - 'V' and 'The Crying of Lot 49' are the ones I most remember other than, of course, 'Against the Day' which I may very well read again.
Now that I've read the wikipedia write-up about Pynchon I'm thinking it may well be time to reconsider putting GR back on the list of novels to be read soon. I presume you're also ready to recommend it.
Pynchon's most famous novel is his third, Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973. An intricate and allusive fiction that combines and elaborates on many of the themes of his earlier work, including preterition, paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity, and entropy, it has generated a wealth of commentary and critical material, including reader's guides, books and scholarly articles, online concordances and discussions, and art works. Its artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce's Ulysses. Some scholars have called it the greatest American post-World War II novel, and it has similarly been described as "literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices". Richard Locke, reviewing it in The New York Times, wrote, "Gravity's Rainbow is longer, darker and more difficult than his first two books; in fact it is the longest, most difficult and most ambitious novel to appear in these pages since Nabokov's Ada four years ago; its technical and verbal resources bring to mind Melville and Faulkner."
I remember enjoying The Crying of Lot 49, and at some point I'll probably tackle another Pynchon book. This one didn't do it for me. There are scenes so viscerally unappealing that I just decided to skip ahead at some points. Part of it was not knowing what to connect them with. Also--and I noticed this in Vineland as well--Pynchon puts songs into the story a lot. It kind of falls flat, since you can't actually hear them.
I can't really regret trying, though. A surfeit of ambition isn't a bad thing in itself, even if the ambition doesn't really come off. Pynchon was reaching, at least. I can see why Locke was impressed with it.
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