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Message Subject GRAVITY´S RAINBOW IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER - READ HERE
Poster Handle Anonymous Coward
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"Gravity´s Rainbow" is definitely the most bizarre and challenging book I´ve ever read. One can´t just sit down and read it; it demands the most concentration you´ll ever have to muster to read a work of fiction (if you´re going to try it, by all means get Steven Weisenburger´s companion book). Pynchon´s writing is at times like a prose-poem told through a wandering camera lens; indeed, that´s one facet of what the novel´s about--the mediation of our consciousness by photography and cinema. At other times it seems like a mad sloppy party between an "underground" history book and a Warner Bros. cartoon, or a pornographic physics textbook (a la Burroughs). Stylistically, Pynchon is the most brilliant digresser you´ll ever encounter. His technique of using ellipses and multiple clauses and constantly interrupting himself succeeds in capturing the multiple dimensions of whatever he is trying to describe. And all of it is couched in an American voice which directly winks at the reader, as if the cogs are showing, yet it is a very serious book (all benzene-ring jokes aside)...This book seems "pre-deconstructed", which is sure to confound literary critics in their quest for any final interpretation (another of Pynchon´s apparent goals--although all his works have created a cottage industry of scholarship).

Poor Tyrone Slothrop! Thirty years after being rented to a chemist for experiments as a baby, it´s discovered that wherever he makes a bird in wartime London, a V-2 rocket hits that spot minutes later--a weapon which happens to contain the same material the evil Laszlo Jampf used in his Pavlovian experiments on him. And even now, while a lieutenant in the US Army, he still has to suffer truth-serum and post-hypnotic suggestion sessions by his psychological "handlers". And battle hypnotized octopi. And Dutch women. And deal with the long fingers of the I.G. Farben-G.E. nexus whose fingerprints he finds at every turn in his quest to discover the mysterious cargo of the V-00000 rocket...Every character in the book--except Slothrop himself--seems to know what happened to him as the famous Pavlovian Infant Tyrone, and that he may be the center of an ongoing experiment. Which makes "Gravity´s Rainbow" a tragedy and a farce at the same time. Slothrop´s is the epic journey of self-discovery. He is seeking solace in symmetry, or a reality beyond Their control, beyond Their systems but where can you find that in war-torn Europe? Something strange about this epic World War II novel is that the death camps and Nazi ideology are hardly mentioned in Pynchon´s 760 pages. He´s trying to get at something which, I take it, he finds even uglier: a matrix of supposedly "neutral" technologies and the attitudes constituted by them which are the grounds for the possibility of the "banality of evil". "Gravity´s Rainbow" explores the collision between mythology and technology. Our imaginations are compelled to re-assemble the pieces of the scientifically parceled world, and Pynchon´s take is that it goes into default setting: paranoia and skepticism towards absolutely everything. "We have no home," hence his running theme of the preterite and those "who are passed over" and the many refugees and diasporas presented in the novel. A key to the whole thing is that the book´s narrative structure completely fragments on August 6, 1945, when hell was unleashed on Hiroshima by the U.S. government and its mil-indus-com subsidiaries. After this, Slothrop becomes a specter of the Quest, the person who lives on in our memory only as readers, when the book turns into vignettes which parody of how media "remember" the events of history.
 
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