Gravity's Rainbow

I just read GRAVITY'S RAINBOW twice in a row, one reading right after the other. It was good the first time through and excellent the second time. Plus, instead of paying something like thirteen dollars to read one book, I ended up paying less than seven dollars apiece to read two books. Both of them were a bargain at over seven hundred pages.I notice, though, that the Amazon price is above Amazon's ideal ten dollars. I notice also that the sentences Amazon quotes from GRAVITY reviewers are selected from very favorable reviews but, out of context, they seem like very unfavorable sentences. Of course, I figure IT'S A CONSPIRACY.Although it's a book you either love or hate, it has four times as many five-star as one-star reviews. The reviews, both raves and pans, say pretty much the same thing as professional reviewers do, so there's really not that much for me to add.I'd like to address some of the things one-star reviewers say, just for fun.First of all, there are the one-star prudes. They're right. The book has coprophagy and pedophilia, both treated non-judgmentally. If you're the kind of reader who gets upset by that, you'll have to stay away. On the other hand, it's a book about Nazis ... and for some reason nobody seems to get prudishly upset about Nazis. Pynchon is on to that little paradox, and if his prudish readers are missing it, too bad for them.Next, there are the one-star haters of Post-Modernism. They all have at least one thing in common: they think Post-Modernism is easy to recognize and every example of it is equally bad. Wow. I'd have thought that, like Romanticism, it has gone on for years and years in the hands of hundreds of different people, in music and painting, poetry and novels ... and really I can barely tell how all the examples resemble one another, can barely tell what JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR has in common with EVITA, and couldn't tell you for sure if either one of them were Post-Modern. My bad, I guess. Apparently all you have to do is call a book Post-Modern and Bingo! everybody who likes it goes to hell.There are the one-starrers who love ULYSSES and say GRAVITY is nothing like it. There are the ones who hate ULYSSES and say GRAVITY is exactly like it. These two groups should meet on neutral ground and fight until they both disappear.A couple one-starrers say GRAVITY is liberal propaganda. Hmm. Liberal propaganda that nobody can understand. That's pretty liberal. But wait! Isn't THE WASTE LAND ... conservative propaganda? And nobody can understand THE WASTE LAND either. Suddenly it all makes sense!There are the academic conspiracy one-star haters, whose complaints go something like this: When you were in high school or college, an English teacher you hated told you GRAVITY'S RAINBOW was a good book. You didn't even read what this teacher assigned, let alone what she recommended, she was such an obvious loser, but nevertheless you have ever since believed that everything she ever told you was cold, hard fact. As a result of this belief, you read GRAVITY and, under the hypnotic influence of this hated teacher, never even noticed how bad it was. That's how the academic conspiracy works, and if it weren't for the one-star haters, nobody would even know about it. What made them so bright? They hate teachers a magic tiny little bit more than you do.Last and least are the one-star reviewers who just get all crazy inside when they suspect someone else is smarter than they are. Smart people, according to these reviewers, are pseudo-intellectuals who write to impress, and writing to impress is a great sin. All their lives, these reviewers have been making sure they never write to impress, and so naturally they write the world's least impressive reviews.----- -----On the positive side, this is a very well-constructed book. The first part is prologue, and the fourth and last part is epilogue. During the epilogue, the characters fade away, sort of like the hero of TENDER IS THE NIGHT, who never realized he was Post-Modern. The second and third part are NORTH BY NORTHWEST, as discussed below.Readers of traditional novels often seem, from their comments, to be disoriented by this book. It has a lot in common with ALICE IN WONDERLAND, including an explosively dissolving dream ending. ALICE influenced FINNEGANS WAKE, which the book also builds on. It builds on William Blake's Prophetic Books too, and all these would be good training for reading GRAVITY, except that GRAVITY is the simplest of them all. In fact, Pynchon is better as an introduction to Blake than Blake is as an introduction to Pynchon. Time running backwards sort of thing.While I was reading GRAVITY, I watched Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. The two are virtually identical, complete with the mysterious "they" who control the action and refuse to save the hero they're manipulating, and their easy-going Anglo-American ruthless indifference to his fate, and their ownership of the mysterious woman who sleeps with hero and villain alike. Both works made a lot of money, and they deserved to.GRAVITY also has things in common with a really challenging crossword puzzle book -- though the one-star reviewers who think no novel should challenge its readers probably think crossword puzzle books should never be sold.It's all good. I'm sure they're part of the conspiracy too. This is some wild, crazy fun.

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A few moments after I finished reading Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel with as many opponents as defenders, I felt this strong urge to go back to the beginning and re-read the book immediately. I'm trying to think of another novel that has had such a profound effect on me, but I can't think of any at the moment. Even though I don't like everything about Gravity's Rainbow—in fact I find much of the book to be a mess—there's a range of emotions I experienced that's both broad and intense. I laughed, I cried, I felt aroused, I felt disgusted, and ultimately I felt sucked into this strange world with all these disturbed and disturbing characters.Make no mistake, Gravity's Rainbow is technically a war novel, but its themes of sex and anarchism stood out more to me while reading. At this point in time, during the late 60s and early 70s, Pynchon was experimenting with a lot of things; drugs, sex, and literature seemed to be intertwined during this period which overlapped with GR's development, and it's easy to see how Pynchon's Bohemian phase affected his writing. Gravity's Rainbow is probably the closest thing to a pornographic Pulitzer Prize finalist, with characters major and minor taking part in all kinds of sexual deviancy. There are a couple scenes in particular that are so infamous that one of them—involving consensual coprophagia—essentially denied Pynchon his only real chance at winning the Pulitzer Prize. In context, though, the scene in question is quite poignant once some thought has been put into it: We have cities being bombed, children being left homeless, young men getting killed in trenches, and yet what disturbs us more than violence is a consensual act between adults.I'm not sure I would call Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon's best book; The Crying of Lot 49 is more consistently captivating while Vineland is more mature in how it conveys its themes. Yet for some people, including me and the rest of GR's cult following, it's the book's endless depth and fearlessness in how it dives into the darkest corners of human nature, shattering conventional expectations and values in the process. It's not quite The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which is a more straightforward example of essential libertarian literature, but it's clear to me that Pynchon was getting more and more intrigued with anti-authoritarianism while he was writing Gravity's Rainbow. Later works of his would explore themes established in Gravity's Rainbow with greater care, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a novel more challenging and—at the same time—more rewarding and entertaining with how much effort you put into it. For my first reading, I think I put in enough.

Impressão da capa parece uma imagem em baixa resolução impressa em um papel ruim. Lembra uma xerox.Está desalinhado em alguns pontos também e a borda das páginas parece ter sido mal cortadas

Aunque exista una versión traducida, recomiendo la versión original para comprender la idea que quiere transmitir el autor.

El problema no es la historia, sino la encuadernación: la orilla de las hojas no está bien cortada y desluce mucho la edición. Pésimo trabajo de Penguin Random House. Es cierto que Thomas Pynchon es difícil de leer, y este libro es una clara muestra al respecto; sin embargo, "El arcoíris de la gravedad" es una joya de la literatura universal, probablemente. Tiene segmentos dignos de poesía, como otros que son literatura experimental muy atrevida. A cambio de un enorme esfuerzo para leer este libro, obtenemos una cosa enajenante y canónica, una de las mejores novelas estadounidenses de todas.

A brilliant and refreshing read, very different from your usual novel. The mental acrobatics required to decipher what on earth's going on in the book only serve to further heighten the enjoyment of the read. If that doesn't sound appealing, this is not the book for you. Be ready when reading this mammoth for a long subscription to the brain gym. It's quite the workout. Also, incidentally, a good arm workout, because this book is pretty big. I finally have arm muscles.

I bought a paperback copy of “Gravity’s Rainbow” sometime in the mid-1970’s. This must have been about the time that the paperback edition first came out. I began reading it but couldn’t quite make out what it was supposed to be. I didn’t make it past the first few pages before abandoning it. That was over 40 years ago now and quite a bit has ensued in the world in the mean time and I am not the person who I was at the time. The world, as I see it, and I, as I see myself, are quite different now. That, I think, is one of the themes of the novel. People construct their own reality and people need a constructible and explainable reality.The main theme that I take from “Gravity’s Rainbow” is the need for people to create a controllable reality and the effect on them if that is not possible. WW2, in the novel, destroys the sense of control that people have. Early in the novel, the V2 rocket is an agent of that loss of control. It plummets at supersonic speed. The sound of its plunge reaches people after its explosion and destruction. The effect comes before the cause. People feel helpless in the face of it and psychologically fail. They seek new beliefs, new constructs, anything to regain that control. Science, mysticism, and anything are shown in the novel to be mechanisms whereby people seek that control. Later in the novel, the rocket is shown to have taken on mystic significance and is incorporated as part of the psychological explanation that provide people with the illusion of comprehension and control of their surroundings.“Gravity’s Rainbow” may be difficult, at times, but it is a book that rewards reading. There are passages that are laugh-out-loud funny. There are passages of profound insight and there are passages of beautiful English. It is book that entertains and instructs. It will reward many readings. I found myself marking sections and going back to read them because they are just so good. This book may be difficult but it is accessible and it is enjoyable.