Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon REVIEW
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- čas přidán 7. 09. 2024
- In which I offer an overview of one of history's most challenging, rewarding and problematic novels, and I conclude it by telling you a secret.
The Gravity's Rainbow Reading Project:
• Gravity's Rainbow Read...
The book I mention in the video is Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History, by David Cowart.
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12:08 "This is not the book for anyone...." A Freudian slip?
One of those books that makes you think, “Was I meant to read this?”
and that had to be Pynchon’s intended effect.
Definitely one of the funniest and most epic books I have ever read. That ending is beautiful.
I love your videos, bro.
I didnt find part 4 to be as difficult (except for that famous last Slothrop sections). Part 3 was the hardest just because it seems like nothing is happening. It is just Slothrop wandering around a ship doing drugs and having sex for 300 pages. And every now and then, it will give the backstory of some minor character's parents or something.
Ben McEvoy's reading group is doing it now.
I’m in exam season currently so I’m not able to fully commit to it but I was bored so I read the first chapter of GR in between classes and it was probably the best thing I have ever read. Context: I have yet to read any Pynchon but I’ve read plenty of other difficult authors like Nabokov and Joyce and Burroughs and Krasznahorkai and McCarthy so I don’t think it’d be that much of a struggle for me, the only thing that’s holding me back from diving in is the length as I have a tendency to lose my mojo when reading long books, I’ve quit Ulysses twice simply because of the length as well as the other brick novels of Infinite Jest, War and Peace, Les Mis, etc.
I plan on rereading it too, after I finish Bleeding Edge. Thanks for your insightful views.
I really disagree with your take that the early parts are easier/more entertaining. The first 200 pages of Gravity's Rainbow for me were like fighting against a raging current where I almost drowned alive. I barely made it through. Once I reached the casino everything from there just opened up for me and I had an absolute blast with the rest of the novel, I felt I was really able to learn the writing style so that The Counterforce was one of the most batshit and entertaining things I've ever experienced in my life.
I truly believe as you get older and re read it it will keep pushing for it’s zenith place in the Pynchon canon.
P.S: I also thought Chabon’s Moonglow was basically a lighter companion piece of GR.
Thoroughly enjoyed your read along. There's little discussion of the Kabballa, nor the Tarot, in the Fourth and last section, the ending, and I'd like to get into all that, more. What are we reading next?
I've read the book perhaps ten times and that happened about thirty years ago. But I cannot recall that it is overwhelmed with pornography, as you keep on insisting. I think, one of the crucial scenes is when they discuss the supremacy of Beethoven or Rossini in the rubbles of Berlin. Perhaps, that could be one key scene for understanding the book; and it's a lot of fun
I am so glad to stumble across your channel! Subbed straight away.
Amazing book and love your review Bookchemist
Throughout the last quarter of the book, I kept thinking, "This is interesting, but where is it going? Where in the HELL is all this going?" Then at those final few pages, that question gets answered, and HOLY SHIT!
I love Pynchon but still haven't read GR. I plan on going back and watching your read-along videos this Summer when I finally have time to read it. Thanks again for the reviews
What other Pynch novel did you enjoy? I'm hesitating to start GR
Edit: I read your question wrong. The other TP novels I've read are Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, The Crying of Lot 49 and Slow Learner. Loved it all.
ww wifi I started with Bleeding Edge actually, and I loved it. I've heard that Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge are good intro books and I'm inclined to agree. I've since read more and I feel the later novels are the most 'accessible' while still being very good.
On the highest shelf of Fiction, only 'Ulysses', 'Remembrance of Things Past', 'The Magic Mountain', 'Sea of Fertility', 'Moby Dick', 'Blood Meridian', a very few others attain the superlative level 'Gravity's Rainbow' reaches.
Have you read all of them?
Yes, avid, constant reader.
@@timkjazz Great! How long did it take you to finish Remembrance? I have it but plan to read it some day when I have enough time. Ive read Moby, Gravity and Magic. (I was disappointed in Magic). My personal list would include The Tin Drum, Infinite Jest, Underworld, Midnight's Children, The Brothers Karamazov, The War of the End of the World, One Hundred Years, The Unbearable Lightness, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and a few others which havent come to my mind.
About a month for Remembrance, read it while in the Army stationed in Germany, One Hundred Years also on top shelf with The Sound and the Fury, To the Lighthouse, War and Peace, Life and Fate, The Stranger, The Brothers Karamazov, loved Ricardo Reis by Saramago - also Blindness and The Stone Raft, Crime and Punishment, Beloved, The Color Purple, The Things They Carried, Underworld and White Noise, Bellow's Augie March, Call It Sleep, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, Jesus' Son, John Crowley's Little, Big - a huge favorite of Harold Bloom and myself - many others, love Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, V and Mason & Dixon, Pedro Paramo, Cane by Jean Toomer, Middlemarch, The Savage Detectives and 2666, 1984, have not read Unbearable Lightness, The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman, The Recognitions by William Gaddis - masterpiece.
@@timkjazz thats a mini library! Ive read some of them. My next 3 reads are Middlemarch, The Names of the Rose, and The Magus. Im about to finish Don Quixote. Im glad to come across an avid reader of lit (which seems to me a rarity these days). If I may ask, are you a male or female?
Excellent review. My undergrad course in Ulysses met on the beach with Guinness and pan-fried kidneys. For my first lit class at UC Santa Cruz we read omnibus fiction: Gravity's Rainbow, Absalom Absalom, Portrait of the Artist, and To the Lighthouse. Good thing they left out Moby Dick.
Fortunately my roommate knew where to find mushrooms in the Santa Cruz mountains. The second semester we read Under the Volcano. 😂
I’m late as fuck to comment on this but who cares -
My experience with GR was a strange and unexpected one. I’d heard time and time again of how extremely difficult and disturbing it was. So I was totally unprepared when I started for how absolutely hilarious, fun, thrilling, and at times quite beautiful an experience it would be: by far the funniest and most absurd book I had ever read. I used to be obsessed with silent film era slapstick when I was little, but had never encountered that kind of comedy translated into literary form, except maybe in of some of Vonnegut’s writings. My favorite authors include Umberto Eco, James Joyce, William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, and Henry Miller, to name a few. And I think I have a pretty dark sense of humor- so suffice it to say that I seem to have been perfectly primed to absolutely love Gravity’s Rainbow. I found myself blown away by the mythical, sort of poetic style of the prose, in combination with the spy thriller and detective novel parodying, and the way it merged science, mysticism and the humanities into a single continuum. I probably have a pretty grim view of American history and society already (though I always try for optimism) so I found most of its reflections to just be echoing thoughts that I have already had on my own. I personally didn’t find the more disgusting passages so much disturbing as just unpleasant. I found In the Zone to be quite possibly the most fun part of the book (I loved the Potsdam Pickup part and the whole way Major Marvy and Pointsman’s story was concluded with that great and messed up twist of very dark humor) except for the whole stint aboard the Anubis, which for me was probably the most difficult part of the first three sections. I could handle Margarita’s and Slothrop’s paranoia, psychosis and sadomasochism/S&M, but when they were combined in the unhinged perversion of the passages just prior to and aboard the Anubis, I found it to be deeply unsettling. But I think my difficulty with the book (from what I gather from other people’s reading experience) took a somewhat different form.
I bought the book (my first Pynchon novel) and started it just as you coincidently began your GR project, so I decided to read along with your videos. I quickly became so amused, thrilled and fascinated with it however, that I had to read ahead, wanting to finish it as quickly as possible, to see how the story progressed, while absorbing as much as I could on every single page. So when I reached part 4 and suddenly the story dispersed, the characters vaporized or dissolved, and I was left with a nuclear missile hovering above my head, well that is when the crisis for me hit. The nihilism I experienced in Gravity’s Rainbow was not while reading it at all, but only after, as the last page left me reeling amidst deep existential dread. Where did all the characters go?! What happened to them? Where is Slothrop? How will the firing of the 0001 conclude!??? And now it is not the characters at all that are facing crises of mortality and self-destruction, but the reader themself with a nuclear missile hanging over their head, but never quite arriving! That for me was the profound genius of this book, something I had never and certainly will never experience again in any other book I read. Pynchon has definitely become my favorite author, and Gravity’s Rainbow my favorite book (maybe along with Foucault's Pendulum), though the end still makes me kind of sick every time I think about it. It is one of those books I have to reread a little every time I think about it.
P.S. Sorry about the essay here, I just thought I should share my own journey while reading this book because I haven’t talked to anyone else who has had that same experience with it, and I think that is one of the most fascinating and fun things about Gravity’s Rainbow; how it seems to affect each person that reads it in a unique and special way, and it is fun to share our different experiences with it and compare notes! So hopefully this is interesting to some, and not just a banal waste of words! Anyways, thank you so much for your work and a terrific project: It’s been one hell of a ride!
Thanks to you for a great comment, I truly appreciate it! Especially with this type of long and daunting novel, it's always good to connect with others who were hit and awed by it :)
I can absolutely relate with your final reaction and with the existential dread the novel engenders; I do believe its ending is among the very best feats of narrative ever pulled off, in literature or outside of it. I am glad you discovered Pynchon and I'm sure you'll have lots of fun with his works ;)
I would highly recommend "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman. Funniest post-modernist book of all time, in my opinion.
You should check out Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino.
I'd really like to! I've read about it in texts on postmodernism but am still to read the actual thing ;)
@@TheBookchemist It stares at me ominously from my book case imploring me to read it!
I can't wait to hear want you have to say about "2666" . Great video, thanks man. I will read GR at some point I'm sure. Also thanks for the honesty.
Do a review of 2666 next, please.
Did you read it?
Its not worth the read - I read it when it came out and the on!y thing I remember is the part about the German guys footsteps coming - literally, that's all and I can't even remember it verbatim.
My Pynchon ranking
1 Mason and Dixon
2 Against the Day
3 Bleeding Edge
4 Inherent Vice
5 Gravity's Rainbow
6 Crying of lot 49
You forgot V
@@rubeng9092 I didnt read V.
@@arthursannazzaro866 I guess do that then. Although I don't think it will be your favorite pynchon.
Been watching your videos for centuries, still don't know your name 😔
Alfred
Norbert
Was john Shade Thomas Pynchon
can you do a read along of "Finnegans Wake"?
Big Hard Books & Classics is a Joycean...
That may be the most challenging book I've come across.
Hey! Now we should do a "Against the Day" re-read project!!
(it's in the works ;)! Watch out!)
Is that a Paul Auster picture on the left?
br34 I’m fairly certain it is Luis Buñuel.
Yes it's Auster!
@@JackTorrenting That's Luis Bunuel in the picture on the right.
@@JackTorrenting I thought it was Bunuel too!
Does GR needs secondary material to get along?
can you review herman hesse, steppenwolf
My Pynchon ranking:
1. Gravity's Rainbow
2. Pretty much everything else
3. The Crying of Lot 49
V's near the bottom too, for me. Like a bad imitation of GR. Don't like Crying of Lot either
@@uniquechannelnames Why do you think that? V isn't similar to gravity's rainbow at all imo.
I failed, couldn’t finish it. I was just lost but I might come back to it one day
nice
I tried reading this book - I got to page 94 and didn’t understand what the hell I was reading. Anyone have any tips? There were a few memorable quotes and interesting passages I remember but it didn’t make any sense. Help anyone? Lol
Mostly I recommend keep going keep going. Because it is very detailed and dense and if you stop you can always lose lots of time on details that dont affect the full meaning of it. Also...chapter summaries.
Shit - read into what historically happened during the last months of WW2 and the first year of the peace. Its more disturbing than Pynchon's novel.
Is it harder than Ulysses?
I don't think so, but they're really up there in terms of complexity/ermeticism ;)
Hahaha funny that you said you'd never read it again. I felt the same way after finishing it the first time. Then it kept bugging me and I read it again. I guess you had the same thing
Have you read House of leaves??
He has:
czcams.com/video/nJvXX36zzNY/video.html
Literally explained nothing. You are just talking about the reasons you read it from a literary fashion standpoint rather than explaining the content of the book
u da man
Am I a complete psycho if I think Gravity's Rainbow is rather tame
It was shocking when it came out, but the populace has been progressively exposed to kinky sex and violence so it does not have the same effect as it did 50 years ago.