Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Best book I've ever read. It has everything. It has what you'd expect from a 70s postmodern epic and more. There's seemingly no end to the scope and gravity of the ideas on display. The characters, although often criticised for being vehicles for ideas, still feel larger than life, to the extent that as I write this, nearly a year since I finished the book, I can still remember many characters' names. My favourite was easily Roger Mexico, each of his portions of the book blew me away. The book is hilarious, I've never laughed so much in my life. It's soul crushing and pessimistic. But somehow optimistic. It's everything and anything and also nothing. The book contains over 400 characters. Not all of them human or even alive. Several are lightbulbs, and the story of Byron The Bulb really encapsulates the out there and dreamlike nature of the book. Not all of it is fiction, some of it is metaphor for the countercultural movement from 1960s California, some of it is a literal depiction of some horror or clandestine operation during WW2, some is metaphor for industrial processes and advanced mathematics. Much of it blurs the lines between, which is what makes this more than just a well written emotional rollercoaster and makes it something that feel like a psychedelic experience, a peeling back of the veil.
Highly educational on topics of a whole range of things from organic chemistry, to American history, to Calvinism, to WW2, to calculus, to the physical mechanisms that guide rockets, to German imperialism and other ways of existing in this universe than what we're accustomed to.
There's this fantastic part where Slothrop, the main character, sees a friend of his that had recently died, he talks to him, everything feels normal, until he realises that it isn't normal and then the apparition of his friend fades away, did the friend fade away because Slothrop was dreaming, or did he fade away because Slothrop wouldn't let himself accept that there's stuff on the other side that we can interface with, if we just accept that we can't understand it through rationality?
The prose often gets criticism for being annoying or too convoluted or for the sentences being too long or the words too arcane. I didn't get that feeling at all. At times it does feel like Pynchon is trying to punish you for trying to read it, but it isn't punishment it's a challenge. It's as if he's saying "prove you're not stuck in your ways of thinking, open your mind or get left behind". One part of the book opens with a passage, something like, "You will want cause and effect, you won't find it". I never got the feeling that he was showing off with the prose, it felt like I was reading the words themselves having fun playing around with eachother.
My only criticisms are 1. that it ends, and 2. Slothrop is always saying "a-and", I get that he's supposed to have a stutter and an accent but it never feels quite right on the mind-tongue. Weird book though, not for the faint of heart, definitely not for anyone that thinks depiction is equivalent to endorsement. He writes about everything and he will challenge you on everything.
Highly educational on topics of a whole range of things from organic chemistry, to American history, to Calvinism, to WW2, to calculus, to the physical mechanisms that guide rockets, to German imperialism and other ways of existing in this universe than what we're accustomed to.
There's this fantastic part where Slothrop, the main character, sees a friend of his that had recently died, he talks to him, everything feels normal, until he realises that it isn't normal and then the apparition of his friend fades away, did the friend fade away because Slothrop was dreaming, or did he fade away because Slothrop wouldn't let himself accept that there's stuff on the other side that we can interface with, if we just accept that we can't understand it through rationality?
The prose often gets criticism for being annoying or too convoluted or for the sentences being too long or the words too arcane. I didn't get that feeling at all. At times it does feel like Pynchon is trying to punish you for trying to read it, but it isn't punishment it's a challenge. It's as if he's saying "prove you're not stuck in your ways of thinking, open your mind or get left behind". One part of the book opens with a passage, something like, "You will want cause and effect, you won't find it". I never got the feeling that he was showing off with the prose, it felt like I was reading the words themselves having fun playing around with eachother.
My only criticisms are 1. that it ends, and 2. Slothrop is always saying "a-and", I get that he's supposed to have a stutter and an accent but it never feels quite right on the mind-tongue. Weird book though, not for the faint of heart, definitely not for anyone that thinks depiction is equivalent to endorsement. He writes about everything and he will challenge you on everything.