Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Delightful. I'm going to read this again, right now. ( )

Algo así como Moby Dick con cohetes en vez de ballenas.

No queda claro quién es el capitán Ahab, porque son muchos los personajes que están obsesionados con la V-2 nazi.

El argumento no puede ser más sencillo: NO HAY.

Una locura muy gorda. ( )

I have never been this hard-pressed by a book either to understand it or just to finish it. I realize now that understanding it was never really the point, though. There are parts of Gravity's Rainbow that operate as a regular novel would. There is plot and character development and a connection between one event and another. But I don't think that this is necessarily the best way for me to have read this book (and that is how I read--follow the characters through a plot as they do things that lead on to other things).

This is a big idea book but is one written on the sentence level. I think I could easily agonize over each sentence and find something to say, but I think that would take away the enjoyment this book taught me to take in the reading of it. Gravity's Rainbow is complex (obviously), high-minded, incredibly coarse, funny, frustrating, self-referential, self-deprecating, and (ultimately) circular. One of my favorite lines in the book happens near the end, an absurd simile that reminded me that Pynchon is just playing: "The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple." I laughed and nearly threw the book. I had been holding the book too tightly mentally, and Pynchon seemed to reach through and say 'Relax. None of this matters. Everything is absurd.'

Would I recommend this book? It would really depend on the person. There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons not to bother with this book. But there are plenty of reasons that someone might find pleasure and even enlightenment in this text. It has taken me the better part of a year to get through this because of some false starts and fractured attention, and laborious reading and re-reading of passages. If that does not sound like fun (or that it would be worth it despite not being 'fun'), then perhaps no. This is one of those books that I feel like you have to finish to appreciate, though (duh). The end ties things together like a good punchline. ( )

Aborted attempt; haven't read

Obviously this long, complicated book is immensely worthy, for the way it pushed the boundaries of post-modern writing. It used all the taboo breaking energy of the seventies to include as many fetishes and sexual inclinations as it could, and it is also occasionally brilliantly poetic and heart-breakingly beautiful...BUT...
the way it felt for me was mostly a slog, through a turgid marsh, where I was frequently lost. There's too many characters in too many plot-lines that jump about seemingly at random, leaving me not really caring. I made the mistake of continuing beyond the point where I could easily give up. ( )