A key theme in the book is the relationship between power and technology. Pynchon explores the idea that those who control technology also wield immense power, and that this power can be both destructive and corrupting.
Super befitting to the current discussion around AI.
There are some hilarious and memorable scenes that make it a classic for me. Things like the Banana Breakfast were laugh out loud moments for me.
As for being influenced by psychedelics, it seems plausible. Lots of scenes are portrayed in a way where you can't distinguish what is reality and what is a dream/hallucination/whatever else it might be that Pynchon has in mind. The shifting perspectives across characters within a scene and the continuous struggle to figure out what's happening, what's really happening, and what's a dream can make for a challenging read. Overall I found it an enjoyable read but I can understand it's not for everyone (but that's Pynchon in general - you either love him or his books are an unpleasant slog).
I tried re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion by Kesey when I moved to Oregon a few years ago. I had read it 20 years ago and loved it, at a time when I plowed through fiction. This time, though, the passages that were clearly written when the acid kicked in were so terrible that I had to move on. Scenes from the dog's perspective (that were also clearly unreasonable, such as the dog associating the feeling of a snake bite with fire, which most dogs have never felt, vs. getting cut or some other feeling that dogs have actually experienced), etc. Cool story, with topical themes in the 2020s, but... we have the internet, we aren't so bored around the house that the opportunity cost to reading this shit is low enough to make it worth it.
And the only thing that might have influenced it more than actual drugs were the drug-infused subcultures of the sixties and early seventies. It's a book nominally about WWII and its immediate aftermath which devotes more time to a subplot where one of the characters going on a road trip to look for a big bag of weed for the cool Germans he's been hanging out with than the resolution of the war...
It's verbal jazz, or literary expressionism. Riffs and tone poems. Look for recurring themes and symbols.
We aren't taught (in American schools, anyway) a lot of how to ingest these genres of media. Hence the refrains (about abstract art, e.g.) "my 5 year old could paint that!"
I've noticed that a lot of people expect books like this to be a puzzle, but they really aren't.
When Pynchon writes about Slothrop naked in a barn getting attacked by a witch's owl you can just laugh at it, you can just be disgusted by Captain Blicero, etc. No mystery solving required.
It is definitely a book I would dread having a test on after reading it.
I think its status as "serious literature" does it a disservice in this regard. School teaches us that literature must be carefully scrutinized in order to not miss the obscured meaning packed into each and every passage. But treating Gravity's Rainbow with this level of scrutiny leads only to madness.
Yeah, the idea that great literature is great because it has a bunch of secret messages encoded in it is as crazy as Gravity's Rainbow and kills a lot of people's interest in literary fiction.
Funny enough GR does have a bunch of secret messages (Tyrone Slothrop -> Sloth Or Entropy), but they aren't why the book is good (closer to why the book is bad) and aren't necessary to enjoy it.
explodes your mind tbh, if you give it a chance it will that is. A lot of great art does ask a lot from the reader, viewer, listener. I would usually agree that's not all that fair and artists' are asking for too much, but when something is such a consensus pick for words like "greatest," "most," "best," I can many times eschew my own self give much benefit of the doubt/have lots of patience. It has been very very rewarding for myself, as in I have a lot of fun trying to figure out why people liked Charlie Parker or Captain Beefheart or Twin peaks.
I imagine I'm not the only person whose strongest association with this book is the reference in "Knives Out":
Benoit Blanc : Harlan's detectives, they dig, they rifle and root. Truffle pigs. I anticipate the terminus of Gravity's Rainbow.
Marta Cabrera : Gravity's Rainbow.
Benoit Blanc : It's a novel.
Marta Cabrera : Yeah, I know. I haven't read it though.
Benoit Blanc : Neither have I. Nobody has. But I like the title.
I bought a stack of Pynchon novels on sale, I've been meaning to work up to Gravity's Rainbow (mostly because of its length, not complexity). I did read "The Crying of Lot 49", but having finished it only a month ago, I'd be hard-pressed to give you a coherent summary of what the hell happened in that book.
Clearly Pynchon is not an author I should be reading right before bed.
Don't psyche yourself out over it. GR is more challenging and has less of a clear plot than The Crying of Lot 49, but it's still just a book. For a first read, you probably want a very light guide for each section (you can read it before or after each section so you never feel like you've completely lost the plot - I found this one helpful personally)
I wrote my undergrad thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and the book has stuck with me more than perhaps any other. It's a post-modern retelling of Ulysses, for one, but not just that. It's a post-apocalyptic novel but also a novel incredibly concerned with reconstruction following WWII. It's a critique of industrialization, but also a critique of the pop movements resisting industrialization.
It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.
I think it's worth trying again--it has a story, but its plot structure is in direct conversation/opposition to the modernists, so it's looser, more chaotic, and more deconstructed. As such, I read GR forcing myself to let go of the pressure to comprehend the plot and rather to focus on the impressions the book was imparting on me.
It would be interesting to listen to the book where the narrator does a different voice for every character, since so often the character speaking (and also the time and location) changes somewhere in the middle of the sentence and it is up to the reader to figure out when. I bet there are a lot of different opinions as to where it happened and how much overlap there is.
That's interesting, I tried Gravity's Rainbow on audiobook and came to a conclusion that written copy would be better due to sheer amount of detail and different characters. I'm no stranger to large tomes (tackled GR right after getting through Infinite Jest audiobook), but it was the first one I gave up on about a quarter to a third in. At one point I realized that I'm really not enjoying the process and barely following the storyline. Maybe will try again in ten years.
I love Infinite Jest with all my heart, and I also tried to read GR shortly after as I was on a “big book” kick (had also read Underworld in the same time period and loved that too).
Gave up on GR after about 200 or so pages realizing I couldn’t ultimately describe a single thing I had read.
I really want to finish it at some point but I also want to enjoy it. Maybe at a different point in life.
Every few months I check out the library's audiobook copy of Gravity's Rainbow and listen to the first chapter or so while running errands, then give up. I've heard a lot of the banana breakfast :)
I read the first few chapters of the book then skimmed and read some more. Pretty grim stuff in there...
This book is my white whale. I read "V" straight to the end in a few sittings and love it and think about it a lot when I'm in NYC or the eastern seaboard or Malta or Florence. I read "The Crying of Lot 49" straight through in one go and loved its paranoid charm.
But despite having lived in London and thought a lot about what it was like for people there during the war I just can't finish Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe a real life reading group or something would help.
> Maybe a real life reading group or something would help.
This is what it took for me - having a few other people agreeing to a schedule and meeting to talk about what we had read. I ultimately very much enjoyed GR but it is really difficult to read alone for the first time. Both the social pressure to keep at it and the ability to have "what the hell was that" conversations with other people really helped.
(My father's favorite author is Pynchon, so while he slightly prefers Mason & Dixon to GR, it's been in my awareness for a very long time; I think my first attempt was in my teens and I didn't succeed at finishing until my mid twenties)
first third was the most difficult and least rewarding section on my first (and so far only) read. I literally finished it, realized I understood exactly none of it, and restarted the book. Took me 6 months to read the entirety of GR (I was taking my time with notes and references and such) and it was entirely worth it.
I like challenging books but found Gravity's Rainbow annoying and tedious, although I made it to the end. I got halfway through Mason & Dixon before giving up. I figured Bleeding Edge would be better because it's about computers, but it wasn't. So my recommendation is if you don't enjoy Pynchon's books, don't read them :-)
I must have missed this in my reading. Who parallels Stephen or Leo or Molly? Tyrone didn't seem to be to be in search of a father figure or a father figure in search of a son. I enjoyed both books but must have missed the ways in which GR is a post-modern retelling of Ulysses (I saw the post-modern part). It sounds like you've spent a lot more time with it so I'm curious how you saw it.
Ulysses parallels The Odyssey, which is also a father and son story. I understand how those books are connected. I'm not sure that I understand how GR is a post-modernist retelling of either. Seems like I'm missing something so I'd love to understand in what way GR is related to either.
Perhaps I snuck in a bit of a hot take I had when doing my thesis ;) I find that GR’s cadence and vibe follow Ulysses; the psyche deconstruction that occurs alongside physical meandering through mundane locations are so similar (to me) as to be inescapable.
Sure. I think GR was probably heavily influenced by Joyce and Ulysses specifically. I don't think it's a hot take. I just don't know that I personally would characterize it as a re-telling. GR even goes as far as having mixed format story telling (lots of songs/lyrics in GR) which feels a lot like what Joyce was doing with each chapter of Ulysses (but GR is much less extreme there and isn't as obviously experimental with completely different prose styles or text styles). I think there's a reason why they're often compared and considered the Modernist and Post-Modernist books that define each category.
> It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.
This is excellent advice, especially for Gravity's Rainbow - I'm certain that a lot of the novel went over my head, but I think even if I'd understood all the references and concepts explored, this is a book that I still wouldn't fully grasp. It actively resists being understood.
I still loved it and got a ton of value out of reading it. There are brilliant sections of prose, amazing imagery, hilarious jokes, and concepts that I think back on all the time.
It took me several aborted attempts to finally finish the thing, because I kept losing the thread, and the logical part of my brain wanted to understand everything. Once I gave up on that and accepted that sometimes I just couldn't understand what was happening or what the relevance of a section was, the book became easier to read, and much more enjoyable.
This is very silly. I don’t think private correspondences ought to be held to the same standards as a writer’s published fiction; even bringing them up is nonsensical.
Beyond that, I’d encourage you to look up the definition of “puerile”, which is as much about being juvenile or silly as it is about sexual or scatological - say what you will about those letters or Joyce (or Nora’s!) particular fetishes, there’s nothing that suggests that they weren’t in earnest.
As a sibling comment at least alludes to, it’s much fairer to point out that Ulysses has plenty of its own sexual or scatological humour, and that someone might easily describe it as puerile. And fair enough; as to why it doesn’t personally strike me that way compared to Pynchon, all I’ll do is rest on the de gustibus defense.
As far as Joyce goes, I haven't read Ulysses. Dubliners, however was very approachable and enjoyable. It's is a collection of descriptive short stories of people in turn of the century Ireland. The final story, "The Dead" is haunting.
Dubliners is a great little book. Probably the most approachable Joyce? He’s just playing with sounds and rhythms and images. The characters are interesting too but what I got from it was a lot of experimental and playful descriptions.
despite the fact that by reading a text you are actually rewriting it (i.e., borges: "All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare"), maybe reading should be like listening to music: to let it flow through you, at least for the first few readings or so, and then, if you wish, read with a more critical eye
e.g., from finnegan's wake: "The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the sowftzing at the stir of the ver grossO arundo of a long one to midias reeds; and shaes began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing,duusk unto duusk, and it was sas glooming as gloaming could be in the wst of all peacable worlds."
> maybe reading should be like listening to music:
Massumi's introduction to his translation of A Thousand Plateaus (selected paragraphs by me, it's a lot longer than just this of course):
> This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would listen to a record?
> Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.
> The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that happens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off buying a record.
Reading can (and should!) serve many purposes. I, for one, don’t really like the experiential reading mode. Poetry is fine, but for most books I want to understand it intellectually.
(Not a criticism, just a refinement of what you said)
reminds me of roland barthes' conception of readerly (straightforward; reaffirms our ideology/offers no transgressions) versus writerly (complex; requires some leap/myth busting) texts
> It's a post-modern retelling of Ulysses, for one, but not just that. It's a post-apocalyptic novel but also a novel incredibly concerned with reconstruction following WWII. It's a critique of industrialization, but also a critique of the pop movements resisting industrialization.
I've noticed most modern classics that people describe as being about a bunch of themes are usually absurdly overrated.
Most of the really great books, people describe, "It's about this character who..."
Not, "It's a commentary on..."
The first type of book is good, the second type of book usually just panders to an audience and MFAs...
How would you describe works of Douglas Adams, Pratchett, Gaiman? The question you refer to discloses more the disposition of a person, but not really the quality of the book.
Motorboats are for people who want to get to the destination, Sailboats are for people who want to enjoy the journey.
It's funny though, James Bond books don't illicit the same ire that Pynchon does and I'd argue the two are very similar - reading between the lines, that is. As another reader mentioned GR was just "yet another scene ending in kinky sex or the characters getting inebriated".
I don't have much of substance to add as I haven't read Gravity's Rainbow yet. Except perhaps that Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino already held the same spot in my mind's eye as the last sentence of your comment. Not difficult like the other two, but seemingly similarly composed and having a similar mark left upon me.
I was grinding through Finnegans wake. Took ages! Dropped my book on the floor of the train one day and the bookmark fell out. Worst day of my life, I couldn't find out where I was up to and just gave up and stopped reading it.
That seems like a fine argument for writing in books--just flip forward until the marks run out. And actually, based on my own long-ago (and very brief) experience with FW, I can't imagine reading it without marking it up.
Having read the Odyssey and Ulysses, I don't exactly see it. Slothrop leaves no wife and child, and does not return to family. There are aspects of the Odyssey in it, I guess, the irresistibility of the main character, the ready sacrifice of bit players--but one could say the same of Star Trek.
Bleeding Edge might be of particular interest to the crowd here because it blends perspectives from at least 60 years of engineering, from the slide rules and rolled up sleeves of Pynchon's younger days to open source and web 2.0.
I might recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over it though. It is weirder but also much faster moving.
I really liked TCoL49. It’s a weird feeling, reading I constantly felt like the author was making fun of me, like someone telling an elaborate lie just for the fun of knowing that people are falling for it. But I had so much fun that I just didn’t care; I wanted him to trick me into believing the whole meant something, because the trip was worth more than the destination.
That book really opened up history for me, it would be interesting to pair that with 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' since so much of our knowledge of world history is based on third or fourth or fifth hand accounts.
> like someone telling an elaborate lie just for the fun of knowing that people are falling for it
I believe Pynchon is the grand master of telling Shaggy dog stories. Norm MacDonald was a huge fan of Pynchon, it feels like they had/have very similar humor.
Bleeding Edge is amazing. I think it gets some flak for being a bit more surface-level than his better known works, but his prose is great as ever and some parts are genuinely chilling.
Also one of the few novels where I feel like the pop culture references help instead of hinder it. I love the idea that this ancient ex-Navy guy knows enough about Metal Gear Solid to reference it in the context of DARPA and the internet as a tool of the cold war.
... why's it bad? I've repeatedly put in the work to appreciate things that weren't initially appealing, and it's been rewarding pretty much every time.
Uh, because it's an obvious status-game with a pretense of intellect that fails to garner approval from normal likable people as well as the kind of person who likes literature, who will in turn feel obligated to out-Pynchon you?
It says that a lot of uneeded assumptions and other baggage regarding "wanting to like something" as it relates to social pressuse was hurled at the grandparent, based on an simple suggestion for which work to get if you want to ease yourself in to a writer's body of work.
The intention of the grantparent was simply to suggest some accessible work a new reader of said author might better appreciate.
Regardless of that, wanting to "get" an artist and dig deeper into their work should be lauded, not scolded. "Social pressure made me read Shakespeare or listen to Miles Davis" would probably count as one of the best uses of social pressure.
We could use more of that, and less of "I only consume whatever I feel like at the moment based on myself alone, I will never consider artists and writers well-liked by others, praised by critics, or part of a canon, and try to get into them". Which is solipsistic, besides being impossible in general.
The shorter later novels are not difficult but don't bring the full banquet. I still really enjoy them. As a character my wife and were quite fond of Maxine in Bleeding Edge. I immensely enjoyed Against the Day, which is big enough to get the full effect but not quite as anarchic. As with Ulysses, I hated it when it 'ended'. Keep going, the ride's fantastic! Mason & Dixon has got the dialect problem, which has to be mastered to grok what's going on.
I didn't find The Crying of Lot 49 that difficult. However I am still annoyed after 4 decades I notice post horns too easily.
my coworker begged me to read gravity's rainbow with him so i did. it was a slog. there are so many nuggets of interesting ideas and brilliant prose but the utter hostility to the reader made it possibly one of my least favorite reads in recent memory. i don't recommend it to anyone.
Doesn’t that mean it’s just a bad book? If the intention of art is to communicate a message it fails miserably. I have no patience for the college-kid “grand mystery of it all” thing. Like how so many festival films just cut to black unresolved. 99 times out of 100 it’s just lazy film making. The artist hiding behind a robe of impenetrability has no clothes on underneath.
I think of critique in two ways: 1) Did the author, filmmaker, etc. effectively achieve what they were trying to do? and 2) Did I like it?
So, in the first sense, I don't think it is "bad" because I believe this is exactly what the author was setting out to do in writing it. In the second sense, yes, it is a bad book in that I don't like it.
> the intention of art is to communicate a message
That might not be the intention.
Given the chaos of life, and especially the chaos of WW2, isn't it a little ridiculous to tell stories about it that are neat and clean and have a coherent logical flow? If humanity was like that there never would have been a WW2 to write about.
I wouldn't want to only read Pynchon, but given how often we dream it makes sense to read a book that follows dream logic sometimes.
It captures a very real part of the human experience that more plot or message focused literature leaves out.
> The artist hiding behind a robe of impenetrability has no clothes on underneath.
With Gravity's Rainbow, when yet another scene is resolved with kinky sex and the overriding narrative arc turns out to be an elaborate dick joke, you get the feeling this might literally be true!
(Really, GR frequently reverting to the trying-too-hard to shock or the scene resolving by the protagonist getting laid or inebriated is much more annoying than the stream of consciousness style narratives, flowery language, inability to suspend disbelief or general mystery about what's supposed to be going on, which are more widely used literary devices...)
> Doesn’t that mean it’s just a bad book? If the intention of art is to communicate a message it fails miserably.
There are whole genres of music that are often characterized as "just noise" or "boring" or whatever by people who haven't put in the work to learn how to appreciate them. Some genres seem to be much easier to learn to appreciate than others. Some are famously difficult.
I tried reading it years ago and gave up after a few pages. I might try again one day, but I don't like being actively confused when I'm trying to consume content via reading. It just frustrates me. Movies I can handle, like Adaptation is one of my favorite films of all time, and it "actively resists being understood" to quote another commenter here. Yet that approach translates much better to film than to literature IMO.
Adaptation is a great movie but I wouldn't really say it resists being understood - it tells a fairly straightforward narrative (the only catch, I guess, is the question of how much of the climax and denouement is "real" and how much of it is "cinema"). Even Charlie Kaufman's most recent film, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things", fits that bill an awful lot more I think.
My attempt at GR was humbling. It took months, and like the author of this piece, I came away wondering what it was even about.
Most advice I read insisted that I shouldn't get hung up on the details. Indeed, this and V. both kind of read like a dream to me, where I could subconsciously tune in and out and focus on certain details, but not all of them.
That probably was the best tact for me, though I got to the end, frustrated at how many loose threads I was holding.
Oh I also really didn't enjoy the constant song inventions- there probably were 50 of them and I had a hard time appreciating them
> put it down, and thought, like hundreds of thousands of other readers, I suspect, What The Hell Was That About? Oh, there was a story, there were characters, and it was possible to say what the book was “about” in banal terms. But I didn’t understand it at all.
That's how I felt after reading the "The Illuminatus! Trilogy". Wikipedia says it's also postmodern so maybe that's why.
Every time I read a description of GR I think Robert Anton Wilson was probably inspired by that when he wrote The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Illuminatus is probably easier to understand though. Lots of references to Joyce in Illuminatus also. It's probably good prereq reading to GR.
I powered through Illuminatus! -- it felt like a beach read version of Foucault's Pendulum to me.
I loved it, but it's kind of astonishing that only a few things have stuck with me
* Posters signed "The MGT"
* The charming Rand satire
* The idea of the word "fnord"
* The feeling of the counterculture -- a kind of sheer weird paranoia where magic can be real.
I have a paper copy I still leaf through but what stuck with me is that there was a time and place where it made perfect sense to go out and levitate the Pentagon. This book explains, or purports to explain, a certain kind of weirdness that underlies a lot of the stories about the 60s and 70s.
> No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected...
That's totally normal for the first couple hundred pages. Just keep reading. Infinite Jest was sort of similar in this regard. But eventually you and the book come together and it really begins to flow. There's some really good stories and ideas in there, even after all these years.
Having enjoyed infinite jest, I was looking for comparisons trying to determine if I could make it through GR as well. Reddit says Gravity's Rainbow makes infinite jest look like twilight in comparison...
I posted about it above, but I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow right after Infinite Jest. While the latter was a bit confusing to follow early on, once you make sense of characters, it's pretty easy to keep going. The writing was fairly straightforward (even including the million side notes). I cannot say the same for GR. I gave up a third to a quarter in, having realized that I have no idea what's going on and that I can only follow the story line based on the Wikipedia summary. It definitely felt like a different level of convoluted compared to IJ.
I think you may have dropped GR right when it started to pick up a thread. You have to be willing to page back here and there when you pick up a reference you think you heard earlier to get clarity, but I had this with IJ too.
Trust me, GR really starts to flow and becomes really funny. It’s literature crafted at a super high level of skill.
I guess my point is you start to follow certain characters, certain other ones pop up again and again, and some come and go. It isn’t unusual to page back and reread a bit to refresh. But it really becomes a page turner eventually.
I never yet to read Gravity's Rainbow, but I did read Pynchon's first novel V as well as Infinite Jest.
Infinite Jest is much more approachable in my estimation than V, which I understand is itself more approachable than Gravity's Rainbow.
Aside the foot note gimmick, Infinite Jest is pretty easy to follow. The difficulty as such is mostly just the length.
I like DFW quite a bit, but I think Pynchon is the better author. So far I just haven't managed to start Gravity's Rainbow, I was scared off by the hype.
That's completely normal. Rocketry and especially parabolas feature prominently as themes in the book, and the structure of the narrative itself is part of that. The beginning is chaotic, and I think even the fact that many readers will give up on it or require several attempts to get a successful launch, as it were, is intended.
I wrote a paper on Gravity's Rainbow without reading it, and got an A- on it, from which I conclude the professor either had not read my paper, or had not read Gravity's Rainbow. Either are possible. I prefer to believe that nobody has ever actually read Gravity's Rainbow.
I've only ever read the wikipedia summary. And from that much I actually wonder if the professor having read Gravity's Rainbow was more likely to have given your paper an A- than another professor who hadn't. Like the book sounds like if you were to truly understand it then you would no longer understand reality.
And this suggests an interesting thought experiment in human comprehensibility. Does there exist some media where a totally ignorant analysis becomes more compelling once you have actually experienced the media being analyzed versus before you have experienced the media.
I read it, decades ago. I have to confess that i skipped some of the dryer parts, so I probably read 80% of it. There were parts that were just amazing, and other parts not so much so. It was well worth it.
I must admit that I have, in fact, actually read Gravity's Rainbow.
On the other hand, I do think it's likely to be high on the list of books most admired by people that read about it instead of reading it...
(Atlas Shrugged is another. In certain business and political circles, the book about the business leaders going on strike to prove how much value they really create sounds like the one you want to cite as your inspiration, but whenever you open it, it just seems like 1000 pages of weirdness about trains, philosopher pirates and genius scions of self-made conquistadors peddling stock scams as an unlikely act of heroism, with drive-by digs at Christianity, marital fidelity and nuclear weapons and an 80 page speech in which the world is inoculated against socialism by the revelation that 'A is A'.
Bet there's lots of high fantasy lovers that loved works influenced by LOTR but never quite got past Tom Bombadil in the actual book too, but then there's others that will know the appendices off by heart!)
Atlas shrugged even contains a part where it complains of rentier capitalism, and only paints people that are truly genius deserving of their fruits of labour.
It’s a horribly written book that also I didn’t finish, but at least it’s ideology also goes a bit against the people that think it’s about them not getting enough.
i've read both gravity's rainbow and atlas shrugged, and found both to be worth reading, but gravity's rainbow was immensely denser and commensurately more intriguing, if also frustrating. atlas shrugged is as straightforward as to kill a mockingbird or the handmaid's tale in its plot and messaging, and worth the read in for similarly straightforward reasons. gravity's rainbow seems like it was strained through the multiverse of everything, everywhere, all at once and spit out linearly fractalized. it's challenging to say the least.
tolkien, on the other hand, i found so boring as to never have been able to finish even a fraction of any of his books.
Having read about half of LOTR when I was a kid, then seeing the movie trilogy, to reading it now to my son, I have to say I actually enjoy it more having seen the movie already.
Knowing the general plot from the movie makes reading everything that happens in between the major story beats much more interesting since I have a sense of where in the story we are. It’s also fun to notice the differences when they adapted the story for the screen.
I’ve also told my son the general plot several times beforehand (when he wanted me to tell him a story and I couldn’t think of any other) and I think he’s much more into it because of that as well. He knows where we are overall and what generally comes next.
I always find it interesting when Ayn Rand is discussed. I'm not from the US and I got The Fountainhead as a present and without any knowledge of who she was or what her books were about. I quite enjoyed it. There is something appealing about the idea of people who are excellent at what they are doing and stick to their ideals no matter what life throws at them. I then bought and read Atlas Shrugged but it wasn't a great read as it drifted off into the rambly and preachy. But again the idea of someone starting a society somewhere remote where things are right is appealing in some daydreaming romantic kind of way.
It then boggled my mind when I learned that people take this seriously. And it means something. Rather than it just being a work of fiction.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this comment. But if you haven't read The Fountainhead and you can mentally distance yourself from the political side of everything around it, it's worth a read.
(Saying that as someone who read The Lord Of The Rings and thought it was okay but couldn't get through The Simarillion because it was just a bit too odd)
Any Rand was a Russian expat Jew whose family fled the Bolsheviks. She wanted to create a kind of anti-Marxism to inoculate America and succeeded I think to a very limited extent.
In the end I often compare her to Marx. Both were great critics but their work breaks down when you get to the “and then what” part. And then… magic happens and utopia! You just need the enough unicorns.
Followers of these two tend to criticize a lot. Marxists can pen deep critiques of capitalism and Randians of socialism. But they start sounding magical when it comes to solutions.
I’ve come to be skeptical of criticism and its value. Doing things is way harder than criticizing them.
The way I think of it is that The Fountainhead is a novel that was informed by Rand's philosophy. Atlas Shrugged is Rand's philosophy in the form of a novel.
One of my professors in grad school was extremely liberal but loved Fountainhead and would defend it on the rare occasions that it came up.
> The way I think of it is that The Fountainhead is a novel that was informed by Rand's philosophy. Atlas Shrugged is Rand's philosophy in the form of a novel.
Oh yes, that describes it perfectly! Thanks for mentioning it, for some reason that makes me feel much better about the whole thing.
Tip to help you get through Rand's works: When the characters start making speeches, skip ahead about 50 pages. She tended to beat subjects into the ground, with her characters repeating the same concepts again and again, until it was time for her to change the ribbon on her typewriter (I'm joking .. but maybe?)
Yeah you're describing me. I found Tom bombadill incredibly cheesy and just could not get past it.
I can appreciate the Lotr film trilogy as a fun war epic. And the cavalry charge was filled to the brim, with a kind of grace.
Opened Atlas Shrugged and a couple pages in, instantly knew I would intensely 'unenjoy' that book. There is a sharp, weaponized dryness to her style of writing. I watched a documentary about her life later on and her troubled love life made an equal amount of sense.
The Fountainhead made a good film though. The emphasis on excellence and images of skeletal verticality were fun. I am guessing cutting down her books to fit a film length helped to make a more friendly viewing experience.
I think the other thing about Tom Bombadil apart from the character himself being a but cheesy is that you've actually had to read quite a long way into a book supposedly about heroism and a final reckoning between good and evil to get to the point where they've just left home and are now being rescued from a tree by a singing spirit!
(I think it's probably less disconcerting to people whose introduction to Tolkein was the tweeness of the Hobbit rather than Peter Jackson's films and high fantasy in general)
Well to be fair, when I first read LOTR I was young and was still in the social semiotics hang over of the 60s-80s. Any emotions that did not strike an easy balance with my pre-existing senses, was a tough sell.
Now I can appreciate it a bit more, knowing something about Tolkein's 'faith' and the connections he was making. The cheesy, soppy-and-sternness is not so bad with a deeper understanding.
I've read the first third of the book, at some point I'll make another attempt. Pynchon's writing style is rather interesting in that reading it, for me at least, requires dedicated concentration for multiple pages until the point when I get 'sucked into' the book and then it flows. The only person I know that has read through it did so on a road trip and just plowed through without trying to make sense of entire chapters.
Gravity's Rainbow is also more challenging because it spans a lot of different characters and subplots. The Crying of Lot 49 is much easier, and Vineland is an aberration. I know one person who thinks that Pynchon hired a ghost writer for Vineland because the writing style is so different.
> Pynchon's writing style is rather interesting in that reading it, for me at least, requires dedicated concentration for multiple pages until the point when I get 'sucked into' the book and then it flows
Yeah, my problem was that I'd get into the flow when there was action and things happening, and then zone out during the more descriptive/sensationalist passages, but not zone back in until I'd missed a bunch more action.
I tried just reading it without worrying if I was zoning in and out but I found that I was missing so much that it wasn't holding my interest.
I loved the book when I was able to really sit and focus hard on what I was reading but at the moment most of my reading happens in bed as I'm falling asleep and it's just not the kind of book that works for me for that kind of reading. Hopefully some day.
I enjoyed the german translation of Gravity's rainbow. Elfriede Jelinek (one of the translators) is a famous austrian writer (though I don't like her plays).
Quite a few years later I tried "Mason & Dixon" in English and gave up after maybe 20 pages. I bought the german translation and gave up after maybe 50 pages.
I read it but was possessed by a certain motivation that I have never had for another book. Ulysses and Infinite Jest have both beaten me multiple times and I doubt I could finish GR again. It was just a stars aligning moment where headspace and lifestyle and beliefs all combined to make it an enjoyable read.
I never read the book Gravity's Rainbow, but I had an art book that had a drawing for each page of Gravity's Rainbow, which makes me both want to read the book, and certainly not want to read the book,
At eighteen and a student of Civil Engineering in Cork, I got a J1 student visa to work in the USA for the summer. I recollect that I came across Gravity's Rainbow in a random bookshop in New York. It was lionized and it looked difficult so I bought it.
I was staying in Far Rockaway and working on East 52nd Street in New York so the overall daily commute time was about 5 hours with numerous changes. I finished the book in the three months I was in America. When I came home, most people I spoke to about the book assumed that I'd lost my mind. I've never yet met anyone that has read it. I should add that a lot of it went over my head. I also managed to crack Rubik's Cube that summer. Heady days. That's over 40 years ago.
In a powerful, if indirect, way Gravity's Rainbow changed my life. The idea that V2 rockets pockmarked London in a Poisson distribution blew my young mind. How could randomness be predicted?! It prompted me later to take a number of courses in statistics and probability, which deeply informed my academic career.
Also, the sheer myth making of Thomas Pynchon as a literary hermit (rarely photographed or interviewed) proved influential on how I have chosen to live, albeit at a very different level of fame.
Power is pathological and is a systemic thing. There are not conspiracies - it gains function from itself and the incentives it brings along with it, which go back into the system of power and make it even more powerful. Everyone just sort of goes along with it because it's just the way things are. Pavlov's dog is brought up often to sort of illustrate this.
Of course like many post modern works of fiction and philosophy it blames just about everything on capitalism, which I don't agree with for a number of reasons, #1 being we haven't really had capitalism since the 1930s. We've had something far worse which is this managed economy and governance - a system of managerial elite that we call capitalism, but it ins't. But, the type of system doesn't matter in this book. The point is wars and things as crazy as an ICBM (the book really made me think of how insane it is to have designed a missile that destroys random people 100's of miles away) exist not for political reasons so much as money and acquiring power/money. Politics hardly matters and is a distraction to get people to buy into the stupidity of it all. In essence, a condemnation of consumerist culture which has taken the world by storm since this was published.
It's actually a prescient book today with AI as it's also a critique of technology and how it doesn't free us, quite the opposite, and will probably end up in the destruction of man. Either with nukes as the book is obsessed with or climate, or naughty AI.
Now the best part of the book and saddest is that all this is happening. It's the natural state of mankind. But there's no way to avoid it. It's inevitable. You can't change the world. Because anything you do that you believe is changing it will just be co-opd. We see this in everything today. Any kind "Revolutionary Change" is immediately used up by corporations that see to march in lockstep as if it's a conspiracy. But it's not - it's a numbers game based on incentives.
The advice granted in the book is to fly under the radar, it is all you can do. Do not participate in society at large. Do not try and change it as anything good you make will just be used for evil eventually. (like the rockets in the book. invented initially by hobbyists who wanted to go to space; co-opted by politics to make bombs) Simply avoid it and find love and friends and happiness apart from the hideous system that strangles us.
Read GR yonks ago, and it nearly killed me, but I still remember laughing til I cried at his description of being fed candies by the roommate of the woman he was pursuing. And growing bananas. I have no plans to read it again.
OTOH I re-read V and The Crying of Lot 49 every decade or so and always have good time. But I liked Infinite Jest and have never made it cover-to-cover on anything by Joyce or Beckett.
I read it when availability was a huge virtue in the summer about forty years ago, it was either read it or reread something else. All I remember is the V2 development story and the guy who got off by eating excrement.
Gravity's Rainbow was supposed hard for me to read I thought COVID might have permanently damaged my brain. The whole work has this meandering dream-like quality that only achieves some semblance of a normal narratove for a few moments in the middle (the tip of the parabola I suppose). I would read several paragraphs and wonder how the hell we'd got to wherever we were, because it didn't seem related to where we were a page ago and I couldn't even remember what happened in between. I sometimes feel asleep mere sentences into a reading session. It took me nearly a year to work through.
It is a fascinating work though, full of nuances and themes and connections everywhere you look. I probably only caught about a tenth of them. In that way it makes sense that Jonathan Blow referenced Gravity's Rainbow when talking about The Witness.
good god. reading all these comments of how most have rarely made it past a small part of the book, how it is incomprehensible, how it is just like 2 other incomprehensible books, simply because the author decided to bury the reader under obscure and occult references to make them feel stupid instead of putting the book down and saying what crap. the book clearly sucks but you can't say that in polite company and must use a throwaway account. but you all know it is true.
if that style was actually writing it could support writing short stories. why are these incomprehensible train wrecks of words always thousands of pages long? what is the author hiding behind the verbal gush?
The book is 760 pages. That’s slightly less than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It is a standalone book, too, so no need to read a series of books to prepare (each of those could be 100s of pages as well!). In terms of plot-per-page, Pynchon is extremely efficient, if what you want is content. There are tons of characters and many subplots.
It certainly isn’t “thousands of pages” long. Novels are by definition long-form stories. If what you want is a short story, a novel is never going to be a good fit.
I don't think the page count is a good metric here. For me, to comprehend something like this, I have to read, pause, ponder "what is going on?", reread etc. Sentence by sentence. For something easier, I can read fluidly.
As a contrast, picture Neal Stephenson novels. Long! But I can read them ~5x faster than an equiv length of GR.
I agree, page count is a bad way to judge books. I was using the parent comment’s logic, which disparaged Pynchon for writing long novels and implied that long novels are less valuable.
I echo your point. Neal Stephenson is an equally deep thinker and leans into the hard-sci side of things but his prose is very lucid. Reading his works is less arduous than you expect. The more I read the more I grow to dislike unnecessarily elaborate writing.
I've read the book twice, decades apart, and it gave me great joy each times in very different ways.
I can see how this text causes some to experience the opposite of joy.
Both experiences are valid. But like there's not some big conspiracy of people who claim to like this book or this writer as a facade. They say it's great because, for them, it's a wonderful and meaningful experience.
the author decided to bury the reader under obscure and occult references to make them feel stupid
The author lays on a banquet of fascinating, hilarious, and horrifying episodes to astonish and entertain the reader, and maybe inform them about some things they might not know about. It's not a test, if this style doesn't appeal to you, you don't have to be anxious or defensive about it.
170 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 552 ms ] threadA key theme in the book is the relationship between power and technology. Pynchon explores the idea that those who control technology also wield immense power, and that this power can be both destructive and corrupting.
Super befitting to the current discussion around AI.
What?! GR is very clearly an acid inspired book. Lots of wild ideas and very visual scenes, but I found it tedious to read.
As for being influenced by psychedelics, it seems plausible. Lots of scenes are portrayed in a way where you can't distinguish what is reality and what is a dream/hallucination/whatever else it might be that Pynchon has in mind. The shifting perspectives across characters within a scene and the continuous struggle to figure out what's happening, what's really happening, and what's a dream can make for a challenging read. Overall I found it an enjoyable read but I can understand it's not for everyone (but that's Pynchon in general - you either love him or his books are an unpleasant slog).
We aren't taught (in American schools, anyway) a lot of how to ingest these genres of media. Hence the refrains (about abstract art, e.g.) "my 5 year old could paint that!"
When Pynchon writes about Slothrop naked in a barn getting attacked by a witch's owl you can just laugh at it, you can just be disgusted by Captain Blicero, etc. No mystery solving required.
I think its status as "serious literature" does it a disservice in this regard. School teaches us that literature must be carefully scrutinized in order to not miss the obscured meaning packed into each and every passage. But treating Gravity's Rainbow with this level of scrutiny leads only to madness.
Funny enough GR does have a bunch of secret messages (Tyrone Slothrop -> Sloth Or Entropy), but they aren't why the book is good (closer to why the book is bad) and aren't necessary to enjoy it.
Clearly Pynchon is not an author I should be reading right before bed.
http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/links/culture/rainbow.be...
it is very re-readable.
i don't remember a thing about it.
It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.
To be entirely clear: it's weird as hell.
Allow me to recommend the audiobook version. It helps keep you moving forward during portions that are disgusting, boring, or jibberish.
Gave up on GR after about 200 or so pages realizing I couldn’t ultimately describe a single thing I had read.
I really want to finish it at some point but I also want to enjoy it. Maybe at a different point in life.
I read the first few chapters of the book then skimmed and read some more. Pretty grim stuff in there...
This book is my white whale. I read "V" straight to the end in a few sittings and love it and think about it a lot when I'm in NYC or the eastern seaboard or Malta or Florence. I read "The Crying of Lot 49" straight through in one go and loved its paranoid charm.
But despite having lived in London and thought a lot about what it was like for people there during the war I just can't finish Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe a real life reading group or something would help.
This is what it took for me - having a few other people agreeing to a schedule and meeting to talk about what we had read. I ultimately very much enjoyed GR but it is really difficult to read alone for the first time. Both the social pressure to keep at it and the ability to have "what the hell was that" conversations with other people really helped.
(My father's favorite author is Pynchon, so while he slightly prefers Mason & Dixon to GR, it's been in my awareness for a very long time; I think my first attempt was in my teens and I didn't succeed at finishing until my mid twenties)
I can say I easily devoured (and enjoyed) "The Crying of Lot 49". That might be a compromise.
I must have missed this in my reading. Who parallels Stephen or Leo or Molly? Tyrone didn't seem to be to be in search of a father figure or a father figure in search of a son. I enjoyed both books but must have missed the ways in which GR is a post-modern retelling of Ulysses (I saw the post-modern part). It sounds like you've spent a lot more time with it so I'm curious how you saw it.
This is excellent advice, especially for Gravity's Rainbow - I'm certain that a lot of the novel went over my head, but I think even if I'd understood all the references and concepts explored, this is a book that I still wouldn't fully grasp. It actively resists being understood.
I still loved it and got a ton of value out of reading it. There are brilliant sections of prose, amazing imagery, hilarious jokes, and concepts that I think back on all the time.
It took me several aborted attempts to finally finish the thing, because I kept losing the thread, and the logical part of my brain wanted to understand everything. Once I gave up on that and accepted that sometimes I just couldn't understand what was happening or what the relevance of a section was, the book became easier to read, and much more enjoyable.
There was a young fellow named Hector...
https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nor...
Beyond that, I’d encourage you to look up the definition of “puerile”, which is as much about being juvenile or silly as it is about sexual or scatological - say what you will about those letters or Joyce (or Nora’s!) particular fetishes, there’s nothing that suggests that they weren’t in earnest.
As a sibling comment at least alludes to, it’s much fairer to point out that Ulysses has plenty of its own sexual or scatological humour, and that someone might easily describe it as puerile. And fair enough; as to why it doesn’t personally strike me that way compared to Pynchon, all I’ll do is rest on the de gustibus defense.
Would you be so kind as to elucidate the very particular spelling of your handle?
Yours, conehead
despite the fact that by reading a text you are actually rewriting it (i.e., borges: "All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare"), maybe reading should be like listening to music: to let it flow through you, at least for the first few readings or so, and then, if you wish, read with a more critical eye
e.g., from finnegan's wake: "The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the sowftzing at the stir of the ver grossO arundo of a long one to midias reeds; and shaes began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing,duusk unto duusk, and it was sas glooming as gloaming could be in the wst of all peacable worlds."
Massumi's introduction to his translation of A Thousand Plateaus (selected paragraphs by me, it's a lot longer than just this of course):
> This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would listen to a record?
> Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.
> The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that happens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off buying a record.
(Not a criticism, just a refinement of what you said)
Basically how I read Gravity's Rainbow and I honestly don't feel like I missed out on too much.
I've noticed most modern classics that people describe as being about a bunch of themes are usually absurdly overrated.
Most of the really great books, people describe, "It's about this character who..."
Not, "It's a commentary on..."
The first type of book is good, the second type of book usually just panders to an audience and MFAs...
How would you describe works of Douglas Adams, Pratchett, Gaiman? The question you refer to discloses more the disposition of a person, but not really the quality of the book.
I find this sentence preposterous, not only is it not true about great books, but people don't say that.
It's funny though, James Bond books don't illicit the same ire that Pynchon does and I'd argue the two are very similar - reading between the lines, that is. As another reader mentioned GR was just "yet another scene ending in kinky sex or the characters getting inebriated".
I might recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over it though. It is weirder but also much faster moving.
I believe Pynchon is the grand master of telling Shaggy dog stories. Norm MacDonald was a huge fan of Pynchon, it feels like they had/have very similar humor.
Also one of the few novels where I feel like the pop culture references help instead of hinder it. I love the idea that this ancient ex-Navy guy knows enough about Metal Gear Solid to reference it in the context of DARPA and the internet as a tool of the cold war.
It says that a lot of uneeded assumptions and other baggage regarding "wanting to like something" as it relates to social pressuse was hurled at the grandparent, based on an simple suggestion for which work to get if you want to ease yourself in to a writer's body of work.
The intention of the grantparent was simply to suggest some accessible work a new reader of said author might better appreciate.
Regardless of that, wanting to "get" an artist and dig deeper into their work should be lauded, not scolded. "Social pressure made me read Shakespeare or listen to Miles Davis" would probably count as one of the best uses of social pressure.
We could use more of that, and less of "I only consume whatever I feel like at the moment based on myself alone, I will never consider artists and writers well-liked by others, praised by critics, or part of a canon, and try to get into them". Which is solipsistic, besides being impossible in general.
Not just in that the individual gains status, but also in seeing status-seeking as a motivation for improvement, better social cohesion, and so on?
Perhaps not all kinds of status-seeking are good (e.g. seeking status as mafia mob), but your dismissal throws the baby with the bathwater.
It's a knee jerk reaction to dismiss status-games as bad. Evolutionary and socially they certainly serve a purpose.
I didn't find The Crying of Lot 49 that difficult. However I am still annoyed after 4 decades I notice post horns too easily.
So, in the first sense, I don't think it is "bad" because I believe this is exactly what the author was setting out to do in writing it. In the second sense, yes, it is a bad book in that I don't like it.
Also: for those who like Pynchon, and would like another author whose work requires chewing, give William Gaddis a go.
That might not be the intention.
Given the chaos of life, and especially the chaos of WW2, isn't it a little ridiculous to tell stories about it that are neat and clean and have a coherent logical flow? If humanity was like that there never would have been a WW2 to write about.
I wouldn't want to only read Pynchon, but given how often we dream it makes sense to read a book that follows dream logic sometimes.
It captures a very real part of the human experience that more plot or message focused literature leaves out.
With Gravity's Rainbow, when yet another scene is resolved with kinky sex and the overriding narrative arc turns out to be an elaborate dick joke, you get the feeling this might literally be true!
(Really, GR frequently reverting to the trying-too-hard to shock or the scene resolving by the protagonist getting laid or inebriated is much more annoying than the stream of consciousness style narratives, flowery language, inability to suspend disbelief or general mystery about what's supposed to be going on, which are more widely used literary devices...)
There are whole genres of music that are often characterized as "just noise" or "boring" or whatever by people who haven't put in the work to learn how to appreciate them. Some genres seem to be much easier to learn to appreciate than others. Some are famously difficult.
Books work the same way.
Joshua Cohen's "Book of Numbers" feels sometimes pynchonesque.
It's easier to read and set in the 90s.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240498/book-of-numb...
I wrote about a personal connection to this book - also touching on the idea of the preterite and paranoia - here: https://rooneymcnibnug.github.io/writing/2022/05/19/The-Watc...
Most advice I read insisted that I shouldn't get hung up on the details. Indeed, this and V. both kind of read like a dream to me, where I could subconsciously tune in and out and focus on certain details, but not all of them.
That probably was the best tact for me, though I got to the end, frustrated at how many loose threads I was holding.
Oh I also really didn't enjoy the constant song inventions- there probably were 50 of them and I had a hard time appreciating them
That's how I felt after reading the "The Illuminatus! Trilogy". Wikipedia says it's also postmodern so maybe that's why.
I loved it, but it's kind of astonishing that only a few things have stuck with me
* Posters signed "The MGT"
* The charming Rand satire
* The idea of the word "fnord"
* The feeling of the counterculture -- a kind of sheer weird paranoia where magic can be real.
I have a paper copy I still leaf through but what stuck with me is that there was a time and place where it made perfect sense to go out and levitate the Pentagon. This book explains, or purports to explain, a certain kind of weirdness that underlies a lot of the stories about the 60s and 70s.
No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected...
That's totally normal for the first couple hundred pages. Just keep reading. Infinite Jest was sort of similar in this regard. But eventually you and the book come together and it really begins to flow. There's some really good stories and ideas in there, even after all these years.
It's worth it.
Trust me, GR really starts to flow and becomes really funny. It’s literature crafted at a super high level of skill.
I guess my point is you start to follow certain characters, certain other ones pop up again and again, and some come and go. It isn’t unusual to page back and reread a bit to refresh. But it really becomes a page turner eventually.
Infinite Jest is much more approachable in my estimation than V, which I understand is itself more approachable than Gravity's Rainbow.
Aside the foot note gimmick, Infinite Jest is pretty easy to follow. The difficulty as such is mostly just the length.
I like DFW quite a bit, but I think Pynchon is the better author. So far I just haven't managed to start Gravity's Rainbow, I was scared off by the hype.
And this suggests an interesting thought experiment in human comprehensibility. Does there exist some media where a totally ignorant analysis becomes more compelling once you have actually experienced the media being analyzed versus before you have experienced the media.
On the other hand, I do think it's likely to be high on the list of books most admired by people that read about it instead of reading it...
(Atlas Shrugged is another. In certain business and political circles, the book about the business leaders going on strike to prove how much value they really create sounds like the one you want to cite as your inspiration, but whenever you open it, it just seems like 1000 pages of weirdness about trains, philosopher pirates and genius scions of self-made conquistadors peddling stock scams as an unlikely act of heroism, with drive-by digs at Christianity, marital fidelity and nuclear weapons and an 80 page speech in which the world is inoculated against socialism by the revelation that 'A is A'.
Bet there's lots of high fantasy lovers that loved works influenced by LOTR but never quite got past Tom Bombadil in the actual book too, but then there's others that will know the appendices off by heart!)
It’s a horribly written book that also I didn’t finish, but at least it’s ideology also goes a bit against the people that think it’s about them not getting enough.
tolkien, on the other hand, i found so boring as to never have been able to finish even a fraction of any of his books.
Knowing the general plot from the movie makes reading everything that happens in between the major story beats much more interesting since I have a sense of where in the story we are. It’s also fun to notice the differences when they adapted the story for the screen.
I’ve also told my son the general plot several times beforehand (when he wanted me to tell him a story and I couldn’t think of any other) and I think he’s much more into it because of that as well. He knows where we are overall and what generally comes next.
It then boggled my mind when I learned that people take this seriously. And it means something. Rather than it just being a work of fiction.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this comment. But if you haven't read The Fountainhead and you can mentally distance yourself from the political side of everything around it, it's worth a read.
(Saying that as someone who read The Lord Of The Rings and thought it was okay but couldn't get through The Simarillion because it was just a bit too odd)
In the end I often compare her to Marx. Both were great critics but their work breaks down when you get to the “and then what” part. And then… magic happens and utopia! You just need the enough unicorns.
Followers of these two tend to criticize a lot. Marxists can pen deep critiques of capitalism and Randians of socialism. But they start sounding magical when it comes to solutions.
I’ve come to be skeptical of criticism and its value. Doing things is way harder than criticizing them.
One of my professors in grad school was extremely liberal but loved Fountainhead and would defend it on the rare occasions that it came up.
Oh yes, that describes it perfectly! Thanks for mentioning it, for some reason that makes me feel much better about the whole thing.
I can appreciate the Lotr film trilogy as a fun war epic. And the cavalry charge was filled to the brim, with a kind of grace.
Opened Atlas Shrugged and a couple pages in, instantly knew I would intensely 'unenjoy' that book. There is a sharp, weaponized dryness to her style of writing. I watched a documentary about her life later on and her troubled love life made an equal amount of sense.
The Fountainhead made a good film though. The emphasis on excellence and images of skeletal verticality were fun. I am guessing cutting down her books to fit a film length helped to make a more friendly viewing experience.
(I think it's probably less disconcerting to people whose introduction to Tolkein was the tweeness of the Hobbit rather than Peter Jackson's films and high fantasy in general)
Now I can appreciate it a bit more, knowing something about Tolkein's 'faith' and the connections he was making. The cheesy, soppy-and-sternness is not so bad with a deeper understanding.
I should probably go finish it.
I've read the first third of the book, at some point I'll make another attempt. Pynchon's writing style is rather interesting in that reading it, for me at least, requires dedicated concentration for multiple pages until the point when I get 'sucked into' the book and then it flows. The only person I know that has read through it did so on a road trip and just plowed through without trying to make sense of entire chapters.
Gravity's Rainbow is also more challenging because it spans a lot of different characters and subplots. The Crying of Lot 49 is much easier, and Vineland is an aberration. I know one person who thinks that Pynchon hired a ghost writer for Vineland because the writing style is so different.
Yeah, my problem was that I'd get into the flow when there was action and things happening, and then zone out during the more descriptive/sensationalist passages, but not zone back in until I'd missed a bunch more action.
I tried just reading it without worrying if I was zoning in and out but I found that I was missing so much that it wasn't holding my interest.
I loved the book when I was able to really sit and focus hard on what I was reading but at the moment most of my reading happens in bed as I'm falling asleep and it's just not the kind of book that works for me for that kind of reading. Hopefully some day.
Quite a few years later I tried "Mason & Dixon" in English and gave up after maybe 20 pages. I bought the german translation and gave up after maybe 50 pages.
https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gra...
I was staying in Far Rockaway and working on East 52nd Street in New York so the overall daily commute time was about 5 hours with numerous changes. I finished the book in the three months I was in America. When I came home, most people I spoke to about the book assumed that I'd lost my mind. I've never yet met anyone that has read it. I should add that a lot of it went over my head. I also managed to crack Rubik's Cube that summer. Heady days. That's over 40 years ago.
Also, the sheer myth making of Thomas Pynchon as a literary hermit (rarely photographed or interviewed) proved influential on how I have chosen to live, albeit at a very different level of fame.
It goes absolutely no nowhere and I'm immensely glad I didn't waste my time.
Power is pathological and is a systemic thing. There are not conspiracies - it gains function from itself and the incentives it brings along with it, which go back into the system of power and make it even more powerful. Everyone just sort of goes along with it because it's just the way things are. Pavlov's dog is brought up often to sort of illustrate this.
Of course like many post modern works of fiction and philosophy it blames just about everything on capitalism, which I don't agree with for a number of reasons, #1 being we haven't really had capitalism since the 1930s. We've had something far worse which is this managed economy and governance - a system of managerial elite that we call capitalism, but it ins't. But, the type of system doesn't matter in this book. The point is wars and things as crazy as an ICBM (the book really made me think of how insane it is to have designed a missile that destroys random people 100's of miles away) exist not for political reasons so much as money and acquiring power/money. Politics hardly matters and is a distraction to get people to buy into the stupidity of it all. In essence, a condemnation of consumerist culture which has taken the world by storm since this was published.
It's actually a prescient book today with AI as it's also a critique of technology and how it doesn't free us, quite the opposite, and will probably end up in the destruction of man. Either with nukes as the book is obsessed with or climate, or naughty AI.
Now the best part of the book and saddest is that all this is happening. It's the natural state of mankind. But there's no way to avoid it. It's inevitable. You can't change the world. Because anything you do that you believe is changing it will just be co-opd. We see this in everything today. Any kind "Revolutionary Change" is immediately used up by corporations that see to march in lockstep as if it's a conspiracy. But it's not - it's a numbers game based on incentives.
The advice granted in the book is to fly under the radar, it is all you can do. Do not participate in society at large. Do not try and change it as anything good you make will just be used for evil eventually. (like the rockets in the book. invented initially by hobbyists who wanted to go to space; co-opted by politics to make bombs) Simply avoid it and find love and friends and happiness apart from the hideous system that strangles us.
OTOH I re-read V and The Crying of Lot 49 every decade or so and always have good time. But I liked Infinite Jest and have never made it cover-to-cover on anything by Joyce or Beckett.
It is a fascinating work though, full of nuances and themes and connections everywhere you look. I probably only caught about a tenth of them. In that way it makes sense that Jonathan Blow referenced Gravity's Rainbow when talking about The Witness.
if that style was actually writing it could support writing short stories. why are these incomprehensible train wrecks of words always thousands of pages long? what is the author hiding behind the verbal gush?
It certainly isn’t “thousands of pages” long. Novels are by definition long-form stories. If what you want is a short story, a novel is never going to be a good fit.
As a contrast, picture Neal Stephenson novels. Long! But I can read them ~5x faster than an equiv length of GR.
I can see how this text causes some to experience the opposite of joy.
Both experiences are valid. But like there's not some big conspiracy of people who claim to like this book or this writer as a facade. They say it's great because, for them, it's a wonderful and meaningful experience.
The author lays on a banquet of fascinating, hilarious, and horrifying episodes to astonish and entertain the reader, and maybe inform them about some things they might not know about. It's not a test, if this style doesn't appeal to you, you don't have to be anxious or defensive about it.