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Conrad's Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow
Gravity’s Rainbow
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This might be my favorite novel. I read it over the course of around three months, on my fourth attempt, when I was living in Tallinn, Estonia. Something about residence in a very small European country heightens one's sense of the absurd. I would bring it to lunch at the bars where I dined and start crying into my club sandwich when the book was sad and laughing into my kebabs when it was funny (which is nearly always) and there are a lot of bartenders who probably thought I was crazy.
The first rule of Gravity's Rainbow is you do not talk about Gravity's Rainbow. Just read it and don't worry about all the things you don't get. You could spend the rest of your life in graduate school of various sorts and not be as smart as Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, so don't sweat it.
There are swaths of this book that I definitely don't get. Pointsman, the psychologist? Didn't get it. Tchitcherine? Didn't get him, as a character, didn't understand why he did what he did, almost ever. But hidden inside all the dross is literature of unparalleled terror and beauty: the chapter in the very middle of the book about Pokler and his daughter, which left me literally bawling in public, the only time I can think of I've ever done that. Oddly, the description of U-boat latrines. The dejected Slothrop wandering Germany in a pig suit. Pirate Prentice's romance. The overgrown adenoid that invades London. The dogs grown intelligent. The sad allusions to Webern's death. The notorious scat sequence that people get all worked up over. The Proverbs for Paranoids interspersed throughout ("You will not touch the Master, but you may tickle his creatures..."). Blicero's carnival of torture, better than anything Gonzalez could devise, and more honest, too.
Gravity's Rainbow is a quick guide to all the ways you could have lived your life but did not; all the injustices you have not had to face; all the ridiculous theories of the afterlife you can't bear to accept. It teaches you how to read itself. It's been copied relentlessly, by Trainspotting and Kurt Cobain and reading it means there's a certain voice that will inhabit your brain forever. It's like going on Samhain vacation from reality with nothing but a crate of bananas and a load of S&M. Caveat emptor.
The first rule of Gravity's Rainbow is you do not talk about Gravity's Rainbow. Just read it and don't worry about all the things you don't get. You could spend the rest of your life in graduate school of various sorts and not be as smart as Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, so don't sweat it.
There are swaths of this book that I definitely don't get. Pointsman, the psychologist? Didn't get it. Tchitcherine? Didn't get him, as a character, didn't understand why he did what he did, almost ever. But hidden inside all the dross is literature of unparalleled terror and beauty: the chapter in the very middle of the book about Pokler and his daughter, which left me literally bawling in public, the only time I can think of I've ever done that. Oddly, the description of U-boat latrines. The dejected Slothrop wandering Germany in a pig suit. Pirate Prentice's romance. The overgrown adenoid that invades London. The dogs grown intelligent. The sad allusions to Webern's death. The notorious scat sequence that people get all worked up over. The Proverbs for Paranoids interspersed throughout ("You will not touch the Master, but you may tickle his creatures..."). Blicero's carnival of torture, better than anything Gonzalez could devise, and more honest, too.
Gravity's Rainbow is a quick guide to all the ways you could have lived your life but did not; all the injustices you have not had to face; all the ridiculous theories of the afterlife you can't bear to accept. It teaches you how to read itself. It's been copied relentlessly, by Trainspotting and Kurt Cobain and reading it means there's a certain voice that will inhabit your brain forever. It's like going on Samhain vacation from reality with nothing but a crate of bananas and a load of S&M. Caveat emptor.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
March 24, 2007
– Shelved
April 15, 2007
– Shelved as:
masterpieces
April 15, 2007
– Shelved as:
owned
April 15, 2007
– Shelved as:
pomo
July 17, 2007
– Shelved as:
fiction
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The first few times I tried to read it, I hauled the concordance around all the time, but I found that if I just used that every 50-100 pages to go back over what I'd just read, it made the rest of the book a lot more satisfying.I think a lot of the reason GR has such a fearsome reputation is that people are accustomed to understanding everything that happens to the characters in the books they read - but part of the point of GR is that the people in it are nexuses for all kinds of bad shit that even they don't comprehend. I think it's no accident that the book is so incompletely organized - the characters struggle to make meaning out of the world around them just the way the reader does, and vice versa.
Sorry, I've been on a soapbox about this book ever since I read it five years ago, I just think it's fantastic and so worth the anguish, bewilderment, and (sometimes) boredom.
My son is a huge fan of Pynchon and has the best bumpersticker on his car, which reads: "My other car is a Pynchon novel." Don't you love it?
Conrad dude, I love you so very much but I could not even get through your review (not your fault, mine!) So I can pretty much safely say there is zero chance of me getting through Gravity's Rainbow. I did get through Ulysses, but it took a whole summer and I don't know that I'd care to repeat an exercise like that.
I tried it once, about 10 years ago. I got too fed up with myself for not being able to understand it all, especially since at times I was completely captivated. But after reading your review I'm thinking maybe I'll give it another shot. Someday.
Hi Conrad,I see you're getting feedback on Gravity's Rainbow. I tried to respond to your quote but will say what I want to say here. If you had to go through 590 pages to get to that quote it doesn't seem worth the effort. Nothing personal just a matter of taste.
Monica Mc
Monica, you should try reading the book. Thanks for your opinion anyway, though.
Someone I really respect recommended it highly and I did try a long time ago and the style was way too odd for me.
So I guess no one picks this novel up and just reads it. Pretty amazing when EVERY SINGLE review says that!
I don't know, Adam, I really think it's best approached as a casual read, like I did - the less you worry about all the references you're not getting, the more likely you are to get all the way through to the bits that really make up the heart of the novel.That's not to say it doesn't require a bit of commitment. It does, but I think people overthink it a little.
It was when I kept trying to read it alongside a concordance that I kept stalling.
Nice review, Conrad!
I'm glad you liked it, Megha.
I agree that it is sort of irrelevant to agonize over whether or not one gets the various references in the book. I could read a fucking car repair manual for a 79 Pinto hatchback written by Pynchon, and I would still be laughing and crying all the way through. Gravity's Rainbow is just all kinds of wonderful.
Jimmy wrote: "I could read a fucking car repair manual for a 79 Pinto hatchback written by Pynch..."hah! couldn't agree more.
Nick wrote: "Jimmy wrote: "I could read a fucking car repair manual for a 79 Pinto hatchback written by Pynch..."hah! couldn't agree more."
Thanks, man. He just basically makes it all seem okay. I'm being vague for the record...but...fuck...it's a lot to deal with. The man is the epitome of how accessible "difficult" writers are. I love Pynchon, and Gaddis, especially Gaddis.
So glad you agree, Jimmy, and well said, also.
Awesome review (and I still haven't even read this book, for shame). However, I'm confused by the Trainspotting and Cobain mentions at the end. Is this something I need to read the book to understand? If not, could you elaborate?
Thanks!There's a scene in Trainspotting that was pretty clearly ripped off of a memorable sequence from GR that involves Malcolm X, a part involving a hallucinatory trip down a toilet.
Kurt Cobain was a big fan of Pynchon's, and he may or may not have based "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on one of the songs toward the end of the novel:
I'll tell you it's just --out, --ray, --juss,
Spirit is so --con, --tay, --juss,
Nobody knows their a-ges...
Walkin' through bees of hon --ney,
Throwin' away --that --mon, --ney,
Laughin' at things so --fun --ny,
Spirit's comin' through --to, --you!
Nev --ver, --mind, watcha hear from your car,
Take a lookit just --how --keen --they are,
Nev --ver, --mind, --what, your calendar say,
Ev'rybody's nine months old today! Hey,
Pages are turnin' pages.
Nobody's in --their, --ca,--ges,
Spirit's just so --con, --ta, --gious--
Just let the Spirit --move, --for, --you!
When I read GR, there were other parts of the book that reminded me of Nirvana songs, like Cobain might've stolen short phrases or something, but this may just be the power of suggestion - I think someone told me SLTS had been ripped off of GR before I read it.
Wow. I had no idea Cobain was a fan of Pynchon and I thought I knew every biographical detail about him from my extremely obsessed fan-boy days. I always thought he acted less intelligent than he really was in interviews and such, but I thought that his intellectual heights were reading William Burroughs not big brained guys like Pynchon. Interesting stuff. I don't want you to think I have no trust placed in your word, Conrad, but this is such a surprising fact about him to me that I wonder where exactly you heard this?
I just noticed, someone elsewhere in the Internets pointed out that a mulatto, an albino, and the main character's libido all feature heavily in the book. I'm sure it's very 5th grade of me to make the comparison, but there's just something ineffably Cobain-esque about Pynchon's diction and delivery in a lot of places. Or, I guess, there's something Pynchonic about Nirvana. It's hard to describe but if you read it you might see it, too. At the very least they have similar concerns.
I can't remember where I first heard it, no, but if you google it, people mention it all over the place. Sort of like how they mention Bigfoot and remote viewing... oh well.
I'm finding a lot of mentions of it through Google, they all seem to be couched as "apparently" and "supposedly." I'm trying to find a direct quote or something more substantial. (Gah! I have such A.D.D.! I need to study, not google "cobain pynchon" all day. This is me giving myself a scolding.)
Thanks for the interesting info though. And I can totally see what you and others are talking about with those similarities above.
You know, now that I actually look for it, I can't find where this rumor started. Interesting.
"'I don't think Cobain ever read Gravity's Rainbow,' said Michael Azerrad, the author of 'Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana.' 'It's probably a coincidence, but it sure is freaky.'http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/01/boo...
It seems like this whole thing has been spread by idiots like me, as well as The Biography Channel, which repeats the SLTS-GR connection several times as fact on their site.
A Amazon review said the black cover ed has typos, is it true?
I should try again. Your review of it is certainly convincing enough to make me think it's worth trying again.