This is the best video you've ever done, man. I've been watching for years and you've found a great balanced between being humourous and insightful. And all without any sense of pretentiousness. These videos have primed me in a way that greatly enhanced the enjoyment of several books. Thank you for doing what you're doing!
One of the best things about GR is the way Pynchon slowly turns the reader into Slothrop - someone literally dispersing and dissolving under the weight of history, only to have that history repeat. That's why the complexity isn't a simple 'fuck you buddy' to the reader. We are all Pynchon's Preterite, living in the sewer through which Jack Kennedy's harmonica was flushed. Man, hearing anyone talk about this novel really makes me wanna pick it up again.
I still think about the passages where he talks about the entropy of history, and the golden thread in the labyrinth leading to the beginning of the world. It's brilliant.
Have been absolutely obsessed with Pynchon lately going through all of his novels. So far my favourite has to be inherent Vice, probably because doc is one of my favourite characters of his
Every time I hear the title “Gravity’s Rainbow” I think of that line from Tom Lehrer’s song about Werner Von Braun: “Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down…that’s not my department says Werner Von Braun”
It is certainly a divisive book among most, I fall into the catergory that sees this novel as a brilliant piece of maximalist fiction that completely changed the way I read, possibly forever.
One of the few books you can re-read every three or four years and still be as shocked, moved, and entertained by each time. I find that returning to Gravity's Rainbow every election year is both worrying and consoling.
After spending three years in the Marine Corps I attended graduate school in 1973 studying literature. I quickly became weary of the leafy bowers of the English poets, the Romantics’ novels of manners, and the like. In a bookstore I picked up a paperback copy of Gravity’s Rainbow on a whim as something of a palate cleanser. Other than the blurbs on the covers, I didn’t know a thing about it. When I started reading it, I was immediately struck by that “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto” feeling. I don’t mean to put down traditional literature but this was, as the blurbs had promised::insane, exhilarating, and obviously a work of genius. It renewed my love of reading -- and learning in general.
Man, couldn't click this fast enough, and the review is everything I could've wished for. GR is on my shelf and I've been terrified but I think it's about time. By the sounds of it I'll be reading a synopsis after each chapter to see what, if anything, I understood!
Mr. Better Than Food, you nailed GR. NAILED IT! I've been reading this book since high school in the late 1970s. As soon as I finish Jim Gauer's Novel Explosives, I'm due for another dive into my favorite novel. Thank you for the nudge back into the void.
Literally finished this book for the first time last night. Good timing for this review... perhaps it's not a coincidence, it's a plot! Paranoia? During the last "Descent" scene in the book, a low flying airplane flew by my house, which did make me genuinely paranoid, hah.
I haven’t read Gravity’s Rainbow yet, but so much of your praise is similar to my feelings with Ulysses, which I read around Christmas. It was the best experience I had ever had with a book.
He blows my mind with his pool of references he draws from, his ability to elaborate and pick out allusions and other literary devices. What a horrifically underrated channel.
I read Pynchon's entire ouevre last year at the beginning of the pandemic. It had been the second time for most of the books and I capped it off with Gravity's Rainbow. I read Gravity's Rainbow in 8 days. Gravity's Rainbow is beautiful on reread. It was also far less intimidating after reading his greater body of work beforehand. For those intimidated, a reading guide of my own creation below. And why. I recommend reading Pynchon's entire corpus in order of readability, setting, and timeline, a "V-rabola". Start with V. as an overture; then read Crying of Lot 49, then Inherent Vice, then Vineland. That way you get a nice little California trilogy that is easy to follow noir stories that encapsulate his style and also move forward in time (Crying is 60s, IV is late 60s/70s, Vineland is 80s). Cap it off with Bleeding edge to create an endpoint at the furthest edge of Pynchon's internal timeline (2001) and end back in New York, where V takes place. Then you read Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, and Gravity's Rainbow. You'll move from the furthest point in history - the establishment of the mason dixon line - and work through his more encyclopedic novels from that point through WW1 moving until Gravity's rainbow. in so doing, you will have a grasp of pynchon's style and you will create a narratively geometric form of V and a parabola with his more accessible novels as one tine, and his encyclopedia historical novels as the other: V starts in the 1950's after WWII and is about finding meaning after the war; Gravity's Rainbow can be read as the destruction of meaning just on the tail end of WWII right before V: A perfect circle and metaphorical parabola. Given Pynchon's penchant for narrative geometry - the structure of V being a non-linear V-shaped narrative named after its elusive subject you will act as Stencil in the first book, searching for meaning. Even more, as you read the stories, you'll find connections between them that suggest a greater conspiratorial narrative, a greater "They" such as the elusive unknowable conspirators in Gravity's rainbow who are only referred to as a capitalized "They" who is everybody and nobody. In so doing, you will become, in the meta, a protagonist of Pynchon's style: Someone constantly searching for meaning in the margins, and finding it, but never something that truly adds up to anything and ultimately going along for the absurd ride. Given postmodernism examination of the concept of narrative, you will be engaging in a voluntary postmodern reading of the series. Through this, you can truly come to love Gravity's Rainbow as the pinnacle of Pynchon's body of work, and an encapsulation of his whole style. I know it sounds nuts, but it was an enlightening, crazy experience that was the best kind of absurd. And it made GR truly a revelation. Thanks for this video my friend, keep reading good stuff.
So my grandfather basically discovered Pynchon and because of hearing about that growing up I've always wanted to try reading one of his books, but as of yet haven't gotten up the nerve. This was a great review and it's definitely helped me towards getting to that point, thanks!
You hit the nail on the head when you talk about the humor, it's what enabled me to get through the book. I started it twice, the third time worked, but after the shit eating bit I was so disgusted I put the book down for about a year, then I figured he wouldn't subject his audience to that twice, and came back and finished it. I am planning on rereading it in a couple of years, because, I have to admit, it was hard to follow. Now I know to take notes as I go.
Pynchon's family tree is really interesting to look into. He modeled Slothrop's family off of his own, especially the first generation. William Pynchon was the treasurer of the Mass Bay colony in the 1640's, and the founder of the city of Springfield, before being kicked out for herasy because of a book he wrote, the same one William Slothrop got exiled for but with a change in the name. William's son, John Pynchon was a fur and arms trader during King Philip's War and mapped the Connecticut river valley, he also married into the Holyoke family. A later descendent was one of the four magnates living in Salem who decided to close the bridge off from advancing redcoats trying to reach Lexington, effectively declaring war on Britain. The Pynchon's were so famous in mid 19th century Salem that Hawthorne made his doomed family in The House of the Seven Gables the Pynchon's. Slothrop's name is even a pun on this Salem-based descendency since it's a combination of "sloth" and the suffix "rop" shared by early preacher and head of the mass. bay colony for several decades, George Winthrop.
That was incredibly well written book but for some reason only thing I can remember is how someone put his penis on the table to flex. And rain. Lots of rain.
Someone long time ago made connection between the book and Rocket Engineer Jack Parsons. Parsons himself is like a Pynchon character, who had a crazy life which he tested rockets in the desert in the early 40s, which he was a part off a group called The Suicide Squad. He was also part off a sex cult which he thought would bring successful rocket launches. I recommend reading up on him if you have read GR
I was given the book when I was fifteen, two years after it was published. I read 22 pages and those 22 pages stuck in my head for almost fifty years! Then I watched this review. I started the book again and finished it at 5:30 this morning!
Honestly it's not that bad. It took me, a guy who works/is extremely busy with school, under a month. It's also just an absolute blast, as Clifford points out it's just extremely fun and has a real compelling paranoiac edge that keeps the plot moving forward.
@@TheUnpoliticalParty Infinite Jest was much morte grueling and while Gravitys Rainbow was close to perfection, Infinite Jest felt like a 1000 pages prologue, to a main story, that never came.
I am currently reading this, at a pace of about 5 pages pr day. For about three years. I'll get there eventually. It is absolutely amazing and genious and the most rewarding read ever. So dense, which is why it is taking so long. Thanks for the review!
I Just finished listening to Gravity's Rainbow and your video was the first hit while looking for comradery in my appreciation of it. I enjoyed this story as just a wild caper that either moved me with stunning prose or uncomfortable Freudian contemplation. I think there is a masochistic nature in the endeavor of reading or listening to this book and through that experience I found myself reflecting on the subconscious in a way I never had with any other story. There are definitely dark subjects in this story that are not for everyone but there is also high and low brow humor and beauty. It's a pretty wild ride....
Excellent video, my friend! Still haven‘t read the book though. Min Kamp Part 4 is great! Hopefully I‘ll be able to get to some more Pynchon at the end of this year! Thank you for your work, Cliff!
Only one thing to do: get it and get on the Magical Mystery Tour! As to Norwegian something-ologies, I really loved Lars Saabye Christensen's Beatles and Ketil Bjørnstad's Sekstitallet. I guess it's my hippie heart.
"i have no idea what he was on if anything" i believe he confessed to being so stoned while writing GR that when he came to editing the book he literally didn't remember writing most of the first draft . which if anything makes it even more impressive
Thanks for this. I picked up a copy of this legendary tome about a year ago or so & have been meaning to get in there. This vid pushed me to be like, okay: time to go! I discovered your channel through this review & I assuredly be back for more, so thanks again! Quite enjoyed your style & wit & evident love of coffee!
It took me months of trying to start this book before it chimed with me. The opening is bananas... I often wonder what a Wine Jelly actually tastes like.
I have been struggling for years to read Gravity's Rainbow. I even tried to cheat my way through the audio book. I was even extremely hard to listen to. The rhymes help you to dance through the misery of reading the book. They taunt and jeer you along. They even seem to read your mind and speak on it. For anyone who has read this or seriously attempted you know the muddy trenches it forces you to crawl through, how filthy you feel and how hopeless and desperate to give up and yet the fight in me to go on because I'm are still interested yet so disgusted I give up. Then you think It can't possibly get any worse and yes as a matter of fact it can. Yet the delightful side is if you read just a little farther you might run into a rhyme and have a little party in your filthiness with all your storybook croonies, because fuck it there's no escape just a deeper knotting into. The sarcasm in this book is perfect. It's like the author is challenging you to read about human suffering without enduring it personally. He even ask if you thought this was a storybook you can read to your children at night. I was like a little ashamed I did think that. The audio book is worse because the audiobook you tune out and miss alot then you are rudely shaken from you daydream by some crazy shit going on and you don't know where you're at in the story and you are afraid to back up and find out where you zoned out because you are counting that as already read, just to stay moving ahead. When you read it it surrounds you and drags you through the pages, when you listen to it the story completely engulfs you in the hell of the realms. If you are struggling to read this book don't think you can cheat your way through with the audiobook. You really just have to handle one page at a time I want to try again to survive the Naphtha Winters with more children than can possibly belong to anyone. and if you hear a screaming across the sky don't worry that's just my way of dealing with the fall of the Crystal Palace.
My approach to hard fiction like this or Infinite Jest or Mason & Dixon or Omensetter's Luck or WHATEVER is i just don't worry about 'Getting It'. If there's something I REALLY need to understand, i can look it up, but for the most part, I just like to absorb the work for its own sake. Anything that goes over my head (and a lot, admittedly, does), I just enjoy the shadow of its passing over.
Awesome video! I made it my goal for 2021 to read GR and was able to do it in about 30 days through sheer will power. In my experience, the unreadability is mostly overrated. There were only a few moments where I couldn't follow it, but piecing together WHY everything is happening is basically impossible on the first read, and it was only through the help of reddit forums and commentaries that I was able to feel like I had a good grasp of it by the end. One thing I found too is that explaining what the novel is about is probably more difficult than actually reading it, so I give you a ton of credit for tackling this, you did as good a job as getting across what this book is as any other I've seen. Would love to hear your thoughts on Crying of Lot 49, definitely my favorite of Pynchon's
Hi, thanks for the review. I have studiously avoided reading any analysis of this book until I finally (today) finished reading it. I think we must all have our very personal responses to this book, but I don't disagree with anything you say, and you reminded me of the hilarious fun that I've had in reading it. It occurred to me that Pynchon seemed not to have edited or revised ANYTHING in this book, and while this can result in lapses in characterisation and storytelling, I did begin to admire him for just turning on the tap in his mind and letting this novel pour out. There's a quote that I won't draw attention to which talks of getting EVERYTHING out of your mind, and I feel that this could be Pynchon's challenge to himself in the project of writing this book. I would argue that his reflection on the WW2 era smacks too much of the cultural codes and the language of the seventies and this looks a little dated in the light of the novelists who continue to offer continually revelatory perspectives on that conflict. However, as a work of the imagination, GR is up there with the best. For an American writer, he shows a remarkably fine-tuned of Europe, it's history and its languages. This was my fourth serious attempt to get to the end of this book and I did it. The pages are yellow and I bought it in 1978.
Nice review. your one quote is going to keep me going with this book - (paraphrasing) "so what did I like? in the beginning almost nothing, in the end almost everything."
I did the same and honestly it is a great way to get introduced to him if you're up to the task Now I love Pynchon. Except V and Lot of 49, the prose is way too knotty, flows horribly and the humour falls flat.
Cliff, been watching you since 400 subs and I love your work. Haven’t read GR, but I’m making my way through some postmodernist lit now after years of trying to ignore it. When you talk about how Pynchon articulates ideas and feelings that we ourselves haven’t or cannot that’s what I love so much about Pynchon and these adjacent writers. I know it’s a tired point to make, but Wallace’s work does the exact same thing and that’s why I’m so drawn to these authors voices and their work.
He gets erection before the rocket hits (as opposed to after) because Jamf deconditioned him "beyond the zero" hence royally fucking up all standard notions of cause before effect. This book is truly a masterpiece, great review
First time viewer here, really enjoyed your opinions on this daring novel. For GR, besides everything mentioned in the video which makes the book great, I really enjoyed the Roger Mexico passages. Maybe being a fellow numbers person, (Roger being the statistician mapping Slothrop's erections) his love affair with Jessica and his knowledge that the relationship will cease when the war ends, I liked. This book along with "Less than Zero" and Huxley's "The Island" really got me into fiction or daresay literary fiction when I graduated college 8 years ago. Obviously all different, but for me that is where my adult reading journey began. At that time, I felt like ah, now college is over, I am employed and finally I can read what I wish. I started with Nietzsche/Hesse/Kerouac then moved to three novels above reading most of Pynchon's discography, having to still circle back to the seconds halves of Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. After reading the Magic Mountain pre-pandemic and the Brothers Karamazov during the pandemic I've come to a reading lull. Maybe it's watching too much UA-cam rather than flipping a few pages. I've read smaller new works (Pizza Girl, Drifts, They both die at the end) and found them to be mainly scat or at minimum, not funny. And although I've encountered some good newer fiction (Midnight Library) and have pretty much bled Murakami dry, what has really hurt reading fiction for me has been Don Delilo. After reading White Noise and Underworld not long after GR, I thought he was Pynchon-adjacent. I then felt burned reading Americana, Mao II, Omega, The Silence. I still go to Barnes and Nobles and buy books I should read. Sitting on my shelf is The Corrections, JR and the Executioner's Song. Sadly I tried to read Delilo's Libra first and it just really burned me out on fiction. All this to say (and I realize it is on an old post) that this video reminded me of the journey that is reading Gravity's Rainbow and how funny it actually is and maybe a re-reading is my way to find my passion for the genre again.
Pynchon and Mccarthy can battle it out all they want, but as long as Joan Didion is still hanging in there, neither one has a chance, in my irrelevant opinion anyway
Not my favorite of his but definitely his most important. You should check out Mason & Dixon. It's a lot warmer and one of the few instances of him having characters that aren't just idea vehicles, which I don't mind, but it rubs some people the wrong way. You mention that you had a conversation with your wife about why Slothrop doesn't get erections after the bomb drops. That's the whole book! Reaction before the stimulus. It's everywhere throughout the novel, the most blatant being the rockets exploding and then the sound happening after. Glad you enjoyed it.
I remember reading Pynchon's Vineland in university for a postmodern lit course and thought then: "This is like watching tv on acid, and it keeps changing channels." And that kept me off his stuff for a good while. I'm reading Lot 49 now I'm surprised, pleasantly, that I'm enjoying the heck out of it. Looking forward to reading GR after this review and more of his work, including going back to that traumatic experience of reading Vineland so many years ago. You get better literary acid tolerance out of the academic milieu it seems.
Really excited to see you got to reviewing this one, its one of my favorites! Is that the new NYRB version of The Recognitions behind you? Looks just like the copy I recently purchased. Hope to see a review of that at some point as well. Thanks for the great videos.
Damn, you're convincing me to try again. That description of reading something that perfectly mirrors an ineffable experience you've had really reminds me of my experience with Proust - are you planning on reading him anytime?
Thanks for catching the humor in GR. It's both deadly serious (Nazis, V2 rockets, the Herero, etc.) and funny...black humor and slapstick. I've read the trifecta. Both Ulysses and GR are tremendous works and have humor. OTOH, Infinite Jest is a depressing book with, literally, one foot in the grave, and not anywhere close to belonging with the other two. Shakespeare also used low humor.
If you want to drill down into the absolutely obscene depths of this book, the time it was written in, the political implications and everything in between, listen to almost any episode of Death Is Just Around The Corner
So much hype for this!! Would love to see something by Thomas Mann: Death in Venice for a good short read or the Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus if you fancy something for the long haul. Love your reviews thank you for all of them!
Hi, I recently read this trilogy of books. I enjoyed the first two but I wasn't a great fan of Doctor Faustus. Found it dry and meandering with overly long exposition of German classical music and philosophy. However, I recognise that I am in a minority and this is probably the point of the novel. I just didn't enjoy reading it.
@@rhysholdaway I think that's fair enough. I really loved Doctor Faustus, but not for the reasons I thought I would. Went in for the Nietzsche comparison, but ended up staying for the historical explication of what happened in Germany in the early 20th century. Having said that I also found some of the early bits on classical music boring... The characters also seemed somewhat two dimensional at points: more of a vehicle for Mann's speeches rather than psychological beings with a heartbeat... Death in Venice is certainly much more readable, and I feel-in an abridged way-does the same thing in terms of his views on aesthetics.
@@LevSemyonovich your comparison of the two perfectly articulates my feelings, I've been struggling to articulate this for a while. It's something that I feel applies to a lot of these 'rite of passage' novels. Often their ideas are expressed more succinctly elsewhere. This probably explains why I prefer Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Normally I just chalk my reading preference up to the fact I am a heathen.
The reason Slothrop gets boners BEFORE the rockets strike, is explained to be tied up with pavlovian response and the stages that occur in the lab when pushed beyond stimulous-response. Also: like the SCREAMING from the V-2 sonic boom; it can only be heard seconds AFTER the detonation.
"Wouldn't he get erections after the bombs hit, not before?" This is one of the deepest and most fleshed-out themes of the novel! What is causality? Can it be reversed? What would that even mean? This is all tied in with the concepts of paranoia, free will, determinism. If everything is determined, then, of course, you could wind backward until you go Beyond the Zero to find out the effect before the cause. Maybe things are random and statistical (a la Pointsman). Then there is no cause and effect. Nothing can be predicted. Pavloving conditioning: the dogs salivate before the food arrives. Does the historical reconstruction of the events invent the causes or are the causes uncovered? Does the conspiracy cause the paranoia or the paranoid the conspiracy? Does art imitate life or life imitate art?
You did it! Hats off to you Cliff, taking on GR as your first Pynchon novel. Me personally, if I had a direct line into your subconscious, I would have recommended Mason and Dixon. If you like the comedy in this one, you will love it in M&D and I guarantee you will be hooked on the story from the first page. I've also started reading the Recognitions by Gaddis and am curious as to whether you will be doing a re-read. Especially because I see a copy of that beautiful NYRB edition creeping along your shelf. Thanks for all your work!
@@stephaniel5436 it is actually really good. I cant pinpoint exactly why but the characters are very interesting and the pacing of the story makes you want more, even if only for a few pages. I sit down and read it in small increments because it is challenging but not unnecessarily so.
@@ItsVyy 25 yrs? Wow I just can't imagine working on something for 25 yrs. And I mean on a creative endeavor. How would one describe this? Is it work ethic? Discipline? I feel like pedantic words can't work.
As a resource for everyone that wants to tackle GR-even if it's not your first tour-I cannot recommend strongly enough the podcast Death is Just Around the Corner. The episodes he made on Pynchon and GR in particular offer a lot of useful tools to understand the book. The Pynchon in Public Podcast is good too but it's more like the experience of hearing people just as lost as yourself trying to figure it out together, while Michael Judge-the host of Death is Just Around the Corner-really gives you the idea of knowing what he's talking about (partly because he himself is a kind of Pynchonian character-you'll know what I mean if you listen to the podcast).
When I was an undergrad, I had a summer job at a self-serve gas station from 11 pm until 7 am. I read "Gravity's Rainbow" over three long, solitary nights sitting in a kiosk with cans of Mountain Dew.
Greetings from China^^ Tonight is Chinese New Year’s Eve, I guess watching this video is one of the best ways to celebrate it, what an achievement to actually read and finish that thick book, I’ve got it sitting on my shelf for years lol. Anyway happy new year!!
Proud of this one, this is pretty much everything I'd want anyone curious about GR to hear. I'd rec Crying of Lot 49 as a breather if you're curious how he could do something just as ambitious in 150 pages. And Bleeding Edge if only to feel what it's like to actually get most of the cultural/period minutiae he packs in his novels.
Love this. Read V! first and then Gravity's Rainbow. Read V! It's also stellar. This one-two combo reminds me of reading Bolaño's The Savage Detectives then 2666. - From one Austin transplant to another
I have just finished it and came straight here. Love the fact you mentioned the humour early on. If it wasn’t so outrageously funny i would have given up long before p776.
that the NYRB edition of the Recognitions back on the shelf? pre ordered that last April, forgot about it, in the meantime swore off Difficult Books, then it showed up on my doorstep hahahah. doing Dubliners rn with an eye toward Portrait of the Artist and then ofc Ulysses afterward (so much for the no tough books resolution) so maybe Recognitions will be a natural followup. Leaf by Leaf just did a massive Recognitions vid so wanting to watch that is also motivating me here. anyway I love GR. what a freakin trip. think back on the Pokler saga all the damn time (though not as much as I think back on Mason's trip through the lost 11 days)
I own a copy. I’ve owned it for about 15 years. It sits,on a side table next to a chair that I have never sat in. I had a dog,and she sat in it. This book is one of many elephants in the room,as I have yet to read it. I have a menagerie of elephants,in many rooms,including the bathroom(don’t ask). Every day,I look at that book,sitting there,now quite dust-covered,and I say to it:”Yes!I see you there!Stop looking at me!” Hmm,I really need to do this. That’s right,not ‘read this’. Do this. I think that this video has begun the prompting process. So,Yay😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😳
Hey. Have you started it yet? I began in 2018 with a library copy. Then attempted with a pdf. Then in 2022 with my own copy. Maybe this year I'll start again. Hopefully, maybe. It's a book I want to read before I die.
5:34 That question's answered in the first section; Slothrop was deconditioned SO HARD that he now had an inverse reaction to the Imipolex-G stimuli, meaning he would become aroused in anticipation of the stimuli. This ties into the wider themes of the book to do with the Absolute Zero, in mathematics, physics, etc., but mostly to do with why mankind vies for the death drive - we want to kill ourselves so much we can't just create annihilation, we have to go BEYOND this. Clearly inspired by the Cold War, I think.
I just received a fresh Copy of Faulkner Absalom, Absalom as a Valentines Gift from my Lady. I watched your review a couple weeks ago and kept telling her about it. So your Reviews give me free great Novels!
Dude everyone talks about the shit eating, and yeah that was gross, but the scene in the book that really fucked me up was the castration. Oh my god. That whole chapter was really cool and exciting and it ends with that and it was so visceral. I thought that was really cool that he could go between those feelings. Such a great book. Plus the longest chapter about Pökler organizing his life was just so sad and good.
I think the fact that his erections precede the arrival of the rocket reflects the theme of reversal that comes from the rocket's strike preceding the sound of its arrival.
Great review! Even on my fourth read I found the first, say, hundred pages a bit difficult to get through, but once Slothrop is more in the center, it gets easier. Such a a great book though, possibly my favorite. Over on our channel you'll find a musical interpretation of the song on the last page of Gravity's Rainbow. Heck, we did an entire album with songs from Pynchon's novels, but have only made music videos for UA-cam for a few of them. Now everybody--
I was obsessed with this book all through my twenties but refused to read it because I couldn't get a copy with the Jackson Pollock-esque cover. Glad I held out because at 38 years old I feel I'm ready to take this book on.
Finally it came! This is one of my favorite novels. I'm glad you made emphasis on how fun and rewarding it is over how challenging. GR is not a torture device for the reader, goddamit! It's funny as fuck and all the paths Pynchon takes you with this novel make it worth the challenge. Pynchon's blend of science and metaphysics make his stuff read as a Borges story if his background was in chemistry and engineering. Regarding the complementary material you mention at the end, I would add to that the season the Pynchon in Public Podcast did for this book. In-depth chapter-by-chapter discussions by really passionate fans. Totally worth it as a companion piece.
I got about 50 pages in, then I never got back to it. After a few months went by I pulled out my bookmark intending to start from the beginning again some day. Infinite Jest and Ulysses are both sitting here waiting for me to get around to reading them.
I'm making my first pass through it using Audible, which I don't usually do for my more serious "reading." Audio is great for light books, in the background while I'm doing stuff. But maybe it was a good idea. When I sit down to read the hardcopy and concentrate, I won't be so shocked, afraid I'm slipping into psychosis.
You actually read it, you absolute madman.
It's not that difficult.
Pynchon's books are like Animaniacs episodes wrote by James Joyce
Wow. I loved that definition!
its time for paranoianacs!
Maddenly beautiful and psychotically alluring!!!!
best description of pynchon ever
fuck...that sounds nauseating on the real.
This is the best video you've ever done, man. I've been watching for years and you've found a great balanced between being humourous and insightful. And all without any sense of pretentiousness. These videos have primed me in a way that greatly enhanced the enjoyment of several books. Thank you for doing what you're doing!
One of the best things about GR is the way Pynchon slowly turns the reader into Slothrop - someone literally dispersing and dissolving under the weight of history, only to have that history repeat. That's why the complexity isn't a simple 'fuck you buddy' to the reader. We are all Pynchon's Preterite, living in the sewer through which Jack Kennedy's harmonica was flushed.
Man, hearing anyone talk about this novel really makes me wanna pick it up again.
I still think about the passages where he talks about the entropy of history, and the golden thread in the labyrinth leading to the beginning of the world. It's brilliant.
You absolutely should pick it up again! So much fun! So many kazoos!
Have been absolutely obsessed with Pynchon lately going through all of his novels. So far my favourite has to be inherent Vice, probably because doc is one of my favourite characters of his
Every time I hear the title “Gravity’s Rainbow” I think of that line from Tom Lehrer’s song about Werner Von Braun: “Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down…that’s not my department says Werner Von Braun”
It is certainly a divisive book among most, I fall into the catergory that sees this novel as a brilliant piece of maximalist fiction that completely changed the way I read, possibly forever.
One of the few books you can re-read every three or four years and still be as shocked, moved, and entertained by each time. I find that returning to Gravity's Rainbow every election year is both worrying and consoling.
Is he officially/lit/ approved now?
This is quite honestly the only review I’ve watched of GR that makes me want to pick it back up...
Oh my god! You're here!
The fact that I found this channel last year actually made 2020 an overall positive experience. Thank you.
After spending three years in the Marine Corps I attended graduate school in 1973 studying literature. I quickly became weary of the leafy bowers of the English poets, the Romantics’ novels of manners, and the like. In a bookstore I picked up a paperback copy of Gravity’s Rainbow on a whim as something of a palate cleanser. Other than the blurbs on the covers, I didn’t know a thing about it. When I started reading it, I was immediately struck by that “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto” feeling. I don’t mean to put down traditional literature but this was, as the blurbs had promised::insane, exhilarating, and obviously a work of genius. It renewed my love of reading -- and learning in general.
Thanks for the little shout out. Your channel is one of the main reasons I started mine.
Man, couldn't click this fast enough, and the review is everything I could've wished for. GR is on my shelf and I've been terrified but I think it's about time. By the sounds of it I'll be reading a synopsis after each chapter to see what, if anything, I understood!
Mr. Better Than Food, you nailed GR. NAILED IT! I've been reading this book since high school in the late 1970s. As soon as I finish Jim Gauer's Novel Explosives, I'm due for another dive into my favorite novel. Thank you for the nudge back into the void.
Loved GR when I first read it many years ago. I especially like the tale of Byron, the immortal lightbulb.
I've read Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying Lot Of 49 and enjoyed it very much. Great review!
Currently re-reading The Crying of Lot 49 ❤️
Literally finished this book for the first time last night. Good timing for this review... perhaps it's not a coincidence, it's a plot! Paranoia? During the last "Descent" scene in the book, a low flying airplane flew by my house, which did make me genuinely paranoid, hah.
💜lmao
Sounds like synchronicity
I haven’t read Gravity’s Rainbow yet, but so much of your praise is similar to my feelings with Ulysses, which I read around Christmas. It was the best experience I had ever had with a book.
Glad you namedropped John David Ebert. Good guy w/ a lot of helpful, interesting work.
He blows my mind with his pool of references he draws from, his ability to elaborate and pick out allusions and other literary devices. What a horrifically underrated channel.
I read Pynchon's entire ouevre last year at the beginning of the pandemic. It had been the second time for most of the books and I capped it off with Gravity's Rainbow. I read Gravity's Rainbow in 8 days. Gravity's Rainbow is beautiful on reread. It was also far less intimidating after reading his greater body of work beforehand.
For those intimidated, a reading guide of my own creation below. And why.
I recommend reading Pynchon's entire corpus in order of readability, setting, and timeline, a "V-rabola". Start with V. as an overture; then read Crying of Lot 49, then Inherent Vice, then Vineland. That way you get a nice little California trilogy that is easy to follow noir stories that encapsulate his style and also move forward in time (Crying is 60s, IV is late 60s/70s, Vineland is 80s). Cap it off with Bleeding edge to create an endpoint at the furthest edge of Pynchon's internal timeline (2001) and end back in New York, where V takes place.
Then you read Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, and Gravity's Rainbow. You'll move from the furthest point in history - the establishment of the mason dixon line - and work through his more encyclopedic novels from that point through WW1 moving until Gravity's rainbow.
in so doing, you will have a grasp of pynchon's style and you will create a narratively geometric form of V and a parabola with his more accessible novels as one tine, and his encyclopedia historical novels as the other: V starts in the 1950's after WWII and is about finding meaning after the war; Gravity's Rainbow can be read as the destruction of meaning just on the tail end of WWII right before V: A perfect circle and metaphorical parabola. Given Pynchon's penchant for narrative geometry - the structure of V being a non-linear V-shaped narrative named after its elusive subject you will act as Stencil in the first book, searching for meaning.
Even more, as you read the stories, you'll find connections between them that suggest a greater conspiratorial narrative, a greater "They" such as the elusive unknowable conspirators in Gravity's rainbow who are only referred to as a capitalized "They" who is everybody and nobody. In so doing, you will become, in the meta, a protagonist of Pynchon's style: Someone constantly searching for meaning in the margins, and finding it, but never something that truly adds up to anything and ultimately going along for the absurd ride. Given postmodernism examination of the concept of narrative, you will be engaging in a voluntary postmodern reading of the series.
Through this, you can truly come to love Gravity's Rainbow as the pinnacle of Pynchon's body of work, and an encapsulation of his whole style.
I know it sounds nuts, but it was an enlightening, crazy experience that was the best kind of absurd. And it made GR truly a revelation.
Thanks for this video my friend, keep reading good stuff.
Read the entire thing in 9 days and I felt myself literally transcending thinking about it after. So much brilliance taken in so fast.
So my grandfather basically discovered Pynchon and because of hearing about that growing up I've always wanted to try reading one of his books, but as of yet haven't gotten up the nerve. This was a great review and it's definitely helped me towards getting to that point, thanks!
I’ve re-read this one more than any other book. One of the greatest of all time.
Why?
You hit the nail on the head when you talk about the humor, it's what enabled me to get through the book. I started it twice, the third time worked, but after the shit eating bit I was so disgusted I put the book down for about a year, then I figured he wouldn't subject his audience to that twice, and came back and finished it. I am planning on rereading it in a couple of years, because, I have to admit, it was hard to follow. Now I know to take notes as I go.
Pynchon's family tree is really interesting to look into. He modeled Slothrop's family off of his own, especially the first generation. William Pynchon was the treasurer of the Mass Bay colony in the 1640's, and the founder of the city of Springfield, before being kicked out for herasy because of a book he wrote, the same one William Slothrop got exiled for but with a change in the name.
William's son, John Pynchon was a fur and arms trader during King Philip's War and mapped the Connecticut river valley, he also married into the Holyoke family. A later descendent was one of the four magnates living in Salem who decided to close the bridge off from advancing redcoats trying to reach Lexington, effectively declaring war on Britain. The Pynchon's were so famous in mid 19th century Salem that Hawthorne made his doomed family in The House of the Seven Gables the Pynchon's.
Slothrop's name is even a pun on this Salem-based descendency since it's a combination of "sloth" and the suffix "rop" shared by early preacher and head of the mass. bay colony for several decades, George Winthrop.
Really?This is great info,thank you
Will you ever review 100 years of solitude?
My personal favorite book! I've been eagerly awaiting his review
That was incredibly well written book but for some reason only thing I can remember is how someone put his penis on the table to flex. And rain. Lots of rain.
I read V in high school (too young to understand), but have been pining to get into Pynchon since. This motivates me to do so, so thank you.
Someone long time ago made connection between the book and Rocket Engineer Jack Parsons. Parsons himself is like a Pynchon character, who had a crazy life which he tested rockets in the desert in the early 40s, which he was a part off a group called The Suicide Squad. He was also part off a sex cult which he thought would bring successful rocket launches. I recommend reading up on him if you have read GR
Noted.
I remember getting this book in high school and reaching the stuff with the bananas and immediately recognizing I was not ready
was it a huge help in tackling it? I know exactly which book you're referring to. Definitely thinking on picking one up as well.
I was given the book when I was fifteen, two years after it was published. I read 22 pages and those 22 pages stuck in my head for almost fifty years! Then I watched this review. I started the book again and finished it at 5:30 this morning!
Did that happen to you or to your mother?
@@MikeWiest My name is Frederick Wemyss. My UA-cam page was created when I was working on a book titled “Things That Happened To My Mother.”
@@thingsthathappenedtomymoth2816 Thanks for your response! Forgive my silliness!
@@MikeWiest Forgiven!
I’m sure it’s a great book but “5 pages a day for a year” sounds like punishment for some kind of a crime.
I somehow managed to read the whole thing in a month. Nothing was more grueling than that.
Honestly it's not that bad. It took me, a guy who works/is extremely busy with school, under a month. It's also just an absolute blast, as Clifford points out it's just extremely fun and has a real compelling paranoiac edge that keeps the plot moving forward.
I read it twice. 15 years apart, 10 pages a day. I mean really, it was like trynna have a drink of water from a firehose.
@@TheUnpoliticalParty Infinite Jest was much morte grueling and while Gravitys Rainbow was close to perfection, Infinite Jest felt like a 1000 pages prologue, to a main story, that never came.
@@bigleciezkithe jest was on you, it seems.
perfect - another one of my favorite booktubers actually finished Gravity's Rainbow so I can put it off for a little bit longer!
Reading a great work of literature should be an experience, and there is no more unique reading experience than reading Gravity's Rainbow.
I am currently reading this, at a pace of about 5 pages pr day. For about three years. I'll get there eventually. It is absolutely amazing and genious and the most rewarding read ever. So dense, which is why it is taking so long. Thanks for the review!
Finally! Looking forward to this review since forever. It's comforting to know you too get to read this book 5 pages at a time. Next: Infinite Jest!
I Just finished listening to Gravity's Rainbow and your video was the first hit while looking for comradery in my appreciation of it. I enjoyed this story as just a wild caper that either moved me with stunning prose or uncomfortable Freudian contemplation. I think there is a masochistic nature in the endeavor of reading or listening to this book and through that experience I found myself reflecting on the subconscious in a way I never had with any other story. There are definitely dark subjects in this story that are not for everyone but there is also high and low brow humor and beauty. It's a pretty wild ride....
I've always been terrified to read this book, but this gives me courage. Thanks so much
On my list for years. Might read it now. This was a good external motivation. Thanks for your sharp no bullshit observation on the book, as always.
Do it! Read it!
The mad lad did it
Excellent video, my friend! Still haven‘t read the book though. Min Kamp Part 4 is great! Hopefully I‘ll be able to get to some more Pynchon at the end of this year! Thank you for your work, Cliff!
Only one thing to do: get it and get on the Magical Mystery Tour! As to Norwegian something-ologies, I really loved Lars Saabye Christensen's Beatles and Ketil Bjørnstad's Sekstitallet. I guess it's my hippie heart.
"i have no idea what he was on if anything" i believe he confessed to being so stoned while writing GR that when he came to editing the book he literally didn't remember writing most of the first draft . which if anything makes it even more impressive
Interesting. Do you remember where you heard this?
Thanks for this. I picked up a copy of this legendary tome about a year ago or so & have been meaning to get in there. This vid pushed me to be like, okay: time to go!
I discovered your channel through this review & I assuredly be back for more, so thanks again!
Quite enjoyed your style & wit & evident love of coffee!
It took me months of trying to start this book before it chimed with me. The opening is bananas... I often wonder what a Wine Jelly actually tastes like.
I have been struggling for years to read Gravity's Rainbow. I even tried to cheat my way through the audio book. I was even extremely hard to listen to. The rhymes help you to dance through the misery of reading the book. They taunt and jeer you along. They even seem to read your mind and speak on it. For anyone who has read this or seriously attempted you know the muddy trenches it forces you to crawl through, how filthy you feel and how hopeless and desperate to give up and yet the fight in me to go on because I'm are still interested yet so disgusted I give up. Then you think It can't possibly get any worse and yes as a matter of fact it can. Yet the delightful side is if you read just a little farther you might run into a rhyme and have a little party in your filthiness with all your storybook croonies, because fuck it there's no escape just a deeper knotting into. The sarcasm in this book is perfect. It's like the author is challenging you to read about human suffering without enduring it personally. He even ask if you thought this was a storybook you can read to your children at night. I was like a little ashamed I did think that. The audio book is worse because the audiobook you tune out and miss alot then you are rudely shaken from you daydream by some crazy shit going on and you don't know where you're at in the story and you are afraid to back up and find out where you zoned out because you are counting that as already read, just to stay moving ahead. When you read it it surrounds you and drags you through the pages, when you listen to it the story completely engulfs you in the hell of the realms. If you are struggling to read this book don't think you can cheat your way through with the audiobook. You really just have to handle one page at a time I want to try again to survive the Naphtha Winters with more children than can possibly belong to anyone. and if you hear a screaming across the sky don't worry that's just my way of dealing with the fall of the Crystal Palace.
"Bonkers" is such a delightful way to describe this book.
Gravity's Rainbow is a novel like Trout Mask Replica is an album of pop songs.
My approach to hard fiction like this or Infinite Jest or Mason & Dixon or Omensetter's Luck or WHATEVER is i just don't worry about 'Getting It'.
If there's something I REALLY need to understand, i can look it up, but for the most part, I just like to absorb the work for its own sake. Anything that goes over my head (and a lot, admittedly, does), I just enjoy the shadow of its passing over.
That doesnt sound productive at all, or a good use of time. Even if Im right there with you.
Awesome video! I made it my goal for 2021 to read GR and was able to do it in about 30 days through sheer will power. In my experience, the unreadability is mostly overrated. There were only a few moments where I couldn't follow it, but piecing together WHY everything is happening is basically impossible on the first read, and it was only through the help of reddit forums and commentaries that I was able to feel like I had a good grasp of it by the end. One thing I found too is that explaining what the novel is about is probably more difficult than actually reading it, so I give you a ton of credit for tackling this, you did as good a job as getting across what this book is as any other I've seen. Would love to hear your thoughts on Crying of Lot 49, definitely my favorite of Pynchon's
Hi, thanks for the review. I have studiously avoided reading any analysis of this book until I finally (today) finished reading it. I think we must all have our very personal responses to this book, but I don't disagree with anything you say, and you reminded me of the hilarious fun that I've had in reading it. It occurred to me that Pynchon seemed not to have edited or revised ANYTHING in this book, and while this can result in lapses in characterisation and storytelling, I did begin to admire him for just turning on the tap in his mind and letting this novel pour out. There's a quote that I won't draw attention to which talks of getting EVERYTHING out of your mind, and I feel that this could be Pynchon's challenge to himself in the project of writing this book. I would argue that his reflection on the WW2 era smacks too much of the cultural codes and the language of the seventies and this looks a little dated in the light of the novelists who continue to offer continually revelatory perspectives on that conflict. However, as a work of the imagination, GR is up there with the best. For an American writer, he shows a remarkably fine-tuned of Europe, it's history and its languages. This was my fourth serious attempt to get to the end of this book and I did it. The pages are yellow and I bought it in 1978.
Welcome to the club! and go for the rest of Pynchon (the lighter ones), definitely worth the time!
So you have now to go for Infinite Jest, right
If I recall correctly, Cliff hates it especially the footnotes.
@@jamesnilphat1148 Oh wow
That's a shame, I love Infinite Jest
He's already read it and I remember him saying that he hated every page of it.
The fact that he wrote V in his twenties is ridic. Thanks for finally reviewing this Cliff. : )
Nice review. your one quote is going to keep me going with this book - (paraphrasing) "so what did I like? in the beginning almost nothing, in the end almost everything."
You picked the hardest Pynchon novel to read first aha
I did the same and honestly it is a great way to get introduced to him if you're up to the task Now I love Pynchon. Except V and Lot of 49, the prose is way too knotty, flows horribly and the humour falls flat.
Cliff, been watching you since 400 subs and I love your work.
Haven’t read GR, but I’m making my way through some postmodernist lit now after years of trying to ignore it. When you talk about how Pynchon articulates ideas and feelings that we ourselves haven’t or cannot that’s what I love so much about Pynchon and these adjacent writers. I know it’s a tired point to make, but Wallace’s work does the exact same thing and that’s why I’m so drawn to these authors voices and their work.
He gets erection before the rocket hits (as opposed to after) because Jamf deconditioned him "beyond the zero" hence royally fucking up all standard notions of cause before effect. This book is truly a masterpiece, great review
First time viewer here, really enjoyed your opinions on this daring novel. For GR, besides everything mentioned in the video which makes the book great, I really enjoyed the Roger Mexico passages. Maybe being a fellow numbers person, (Roger being the statistician mapping Slothrop's erections) his love affair with Jessica and his knowledge that the relationship will cease when the war ends, I liked. This book along with "Less than Zero" and Huxley's "The Island" really got me into fiction or daresay literary fiction when I graduated college 8 years ago. Obviously all different, but for me that is where my adult reading journey began. At that time, I felt like ah, now college is over, I am employed and finally I can read what I wish. I started with Nietzsche/Hesse/Kerouac then moved to three novels above reading most of Pynchon's discography, having to still circle back to the seconds halves of Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. After reading the Magic Mountain pre-pandemic and the Brothers Karamazov during the pandemic I've come to a reading lull. Maybe it's watching too much UA-cam rather than flipping a few pages. I've read smaller new works (Pizza Girl, Drifts, They both die at the end) and found them to be mainly scat or at minimum, not funny. And although I've encountered some good newer fiction (Midnight Library) and have pretty much bled Murakami dry, what has really hurt reading fiction for me has been Don Delilo. After reading White Noise and Underworld not long after GR, I thought he was Pynchon-adjacent. I then felt burned reading Americana, Mao II, Omega, The Silence. I still go to Barnes and Nobles and buy books I should read. Sitting on my shelf is The Corrections, JR and the Executioner's Song. Sadly I tried to read Delilo's Libra first and it just really burned me out on fiction. All this to say (and I realize it is on an old post) that this video reminded me of the journey that is reading Gravity's Rainbow and how funny it actually is and maybe a re-reading is my way to find my passion for the genre again.
Pynchon and Mccarthy can battle it out all they want, but as long as Joan Didion is still hanging in there, neither one has a chance, in my irrelevant opinion anyway
Pynchon made it past both hyeugh hyeugh
Not my favorite of his but definitely his most important. You should check out Mason & Dixon. It's a lot warmer and one of the few instances of him having characters that aren't just idea vehicles, which I don't mind, but it rubs some people the wrong way. You mention that you had a conversation with your wife about why Slothrop doesn't get erections after the bomb drops. That's the whole book! Reaction before the stimulus. It's everywhere throughout the novel, the most blatant being the rockets exploding and then the sound happening after. Glad you enjoyed it.
I remember reading Pynchon's Vineland in university for a postmodern lit course and thought then: "This is like watching tv on acid, and it keeps changing channels." And that kept me off his stuff for a good while. I'm reading Lot 49 now I'm surprised, pleasantly, that I'm enjoying the heck out of it. Looking forward to reading GR after this review and more of his work, including going back to that traumatic experience of reading Vineland so many years ago. You get better literary acid tolerance out of the academic milieu it seems.
A friend of mine wrote a recipe for banana mead into the margin of my copy. The list might become grotesque, but that mead is goddamn delicious.
That sounds awesome. If possible, can you share the recipe?
Really excited to see you got to reviewing this one, its one of my favorites! Is that the new NYRB version of The Recognitions behind you? Looks just like the copy I recently purchased. Hope to see a review of that at some point as well. Thanks for the great videos.
Great review of a brilliant book. I personally adore the 'boiled sweets'.
Damn, you're convincing me to try again. That description of reading something that perfectly mirrors an ineffable experience you've had really reminds me of my experience with Proust - are you planning on reading him anytime?
Thanks for catching the humor in GR. It's both deadly serious (Nazis, V2 rockets, the Herero, etc.) and funny...black humor and slapstick.
I've read the trifecta. Both Ulysses and GR are tremendous works and have humor. OTOH, Infinite Jest is a depressing book with, literally, one foot in the grave, and not anywhere close to belonging with the other two.
Shakespeare also used low humor.
If you want to drill down into the absolutely obscene depths of this book, the time it was written in, the political implications and everything in between, listen to almost any episode of Death Is Just Around The Corner
Such a good review! I would love to read this book somewhere this year. Thanks for the recommendation.
So much hype for this!! Would love to see something by Thomas Mann: Death in Venice for a good short read or the Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus if you fancy something for the long haul.
Love your reviews thank you for all of them!
Hi, I recently read this trilogy of books. I enjoyed the first two but I wasn't a great fan of Doctor Faustus. Found it dry and meandering with overly long exposition of German classical music and philosophy. However, I recognise that I am in a minority and this is probably the point of the novel. I just didn't enjoy reading it.
@@rhysholdaway I think that's fair enough. I really loved Doctor Faustus, but not for the reasons I thought I would. Went in for the Nietzsche comparison, but ended up staying for the historical explication of what happened in Germany in the early 20th century. Having said that I also found some of the early bits on classical music boring... The characters also seemed somewhat two dimensional at points: more of a vehicle for Mann's speeches rather than psychological beings with a heartbeat... Death in Venice is certainly much more readable, and I feel-in an abridged way-does the same thing in terms of his views on aesthetics.
@@LevSemyonovich your comparison of the two perfectly articulates my feelings, I've been struggling to articulate this for a while. It's something that I feel applies to a lot of these 'rite of passage' novels. Often their ideas are expressed more succinctly elsewhere. This probably explains why I prefer Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Normally I just chalk my reading preference up to the fact I am a heathen.
I love Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain but Doctor Faustus was dry and didactic, I gave it up in 150 pages.
The reason Slothrop gets boners BEFORE the rockets strike, is explained to be tied up with pavlovian response and the stages that occur in the lab when pushed beyond stimulous-response.
Also: like the SCREAMING from the V-2 sonic boom; it can only be heard seconds AFTER the detonation.
It's just incomprehensible to imagine how Pynchon came up with some of those incredible sentences.
Damn Cliff every time I lax back into bad sci-fi books you push to go beyond my comfort zone.
"Wouldn't he get erections after the bombs hit, not before?" This is one of the deepest and most fleshed-out themes of the novel! What is causality? Can it be reversed? What would that even mean? This is all tied in with the concepts of paranoia, free will, determinism. If everything is determined, then, of course, you could wind backward until you go Beyond the Zero to find out the effect before the cause. Maybe things are random and statistical (a la Pointsman). Then there is no cause and effect. Nothing can be predicted. Pavloving conditioning: the dogs salivate before the food arrives. Does the historical reconstruction of the events invent the causes or are the causes uncovered? Does the conspiracy cause the paranoia or the paranoid the conspiracy? Does art imitate life or life imitate art?
Great comment 👍
You did it! Hats off to you Cliff, taking on GR as your first Pynchon novel. Me personally, if I had a direct line into your subconscious, I would have recommended Mason and Dixon. If you like the comedy in this one, you will love it in M&D and I guarantee you will be hooked on the story from the first page.
I've also started reading the Recognitions by Gaddis and am curious as to whether you will be doing a re-read. Especially because I see a copy of that beautiful NYRB edition creeping along your shelf.
Thanks for all your work!
How is the Recognitions? I have yet to start my copy.
@@stephaniel5436 it is actually really good. I cant pinpoint exactly why but the characters are very interesting and the pacing of the story makes you want more, even if only for a few pages. I sit down and read it in small increments because it is challenging but not unnecessarily so.
Mason & Dixon might have the greatest prose of the 20th century. It looks like it took him the 25 years it did to reach that state.
@@ItsVyy 25 yrs? Wow I just can't imagine working on something for 25 yrs. And I mean on a creative endeavor. How would one describe this? Is it work ethic? Discipline? I feel like pedantic words can't work.
I was gutted when I learned that the Inherent Vice movie was a flop, as I thought it was amazing.
It was good. Don't listen to mainstream critics.
As a resource for everyone that wants to tackle GR-even if it's not your first tour-I cannot recommend strongly enough the podcast Death is Just Around the Corner.
The episodes he made on Pynchon and GR in particular offer a lot of useful tools to understand the book. The Pynchon in Public Podcast is good too but it's more like the experience of hearing people just as lost as yourself trying to figure it out together, while Michael Judge-the host of Death is Just Around the Corner-really gives you the idea of knowing what he's talking about (partly because he himself is a kind of Pynchonian character-you'll know what I mean if you listen to the podcast).
i'm glad someone finally understood this book
When I was an undergrad, I had a summer job at a self-serve gas station from 11 pm until 7 am. I read "Gravity's Rainbow" over three long, solitary nights sitting in a kiosk with cans of Mountain Dew.
Gravity's Rainbow is my "one book on a desert island" read.
Absolutely agree with your approach of only reading like 5 pages a day and doing some research on the stuff he writes about.
Greetings from China^^ Tonight is Chinese New Year’s Eve, I guess watching this video is one of the best ways to celebrate it, what an achievement to actually read and finish that thick book, I’ve got it sitting on my shelf for years lol. Anyway happy new year!!
Proud of this one, this is pretty much everything I'd want anyone curious about GR to hear.
I'd rec Crying of Lot 49 as a breather if you're curious how he could do something just as ambitious in 150 pages. And Bleeding Edge if only to feel what it's like to actually get most of the cultural/period minutiae he packs in his novels.
Love this. Read V! first and then Gravity's Rainbow. Read V! It's also stellar.
This one-two combo reminds me of reading Bolaño's The Savage Detectives then 2666.
- From one Austin transplant to another
I have just finished it and came straight here. Love the fact you mentioned the humour early on. If it wasn’t so outrageously funny i would have given up long before p776.
Im currently reading against the day!! Cool
Me too😊
Same here! Most fun I’ve had reading a book in a very long time.
Loved Against the Day!
Against the day is very underrated.It is a great book.
that the NYRB edition of the Recognitions back on the shelf? pre ordered that last April, forgot about it, in the meantime swore off Difficult Books, then it showed up on my doorstep hahahah. doing Dubliners rn with an eye toward Portrait of the Artist and then ofc Ulysses afterward (so much for the no tough books resolution) so maybe Recognitions will be a natural followup. Leaf by Leaf just did a massive Recognitions vid so wanting to watch that is also motivating me here. anyway I love GR. what a freakin trip. think back on the Pokler saga all the damn time (though not as much as I think back on Mason's trip through the lost 11 days)
I own a copy.
I’ve owned it for about 15 years.
It sits,on a side table next to a chair that I have never sat in.
I had a dog,and she sat in it.
This book is one of many elephants in the room,as I have yet to read it.
I have a menagerie of elephants,in many rooms,including the bathroom(don’t ask).
Every day,I look at that book,sitting there,now quite dust-covered,and I say to it:”Yes!I see you there!Stop looking at me!”
Hmm,I really need to do this.
That’s right,not ‘read this’.
Do this.
I think that this video has begun the prompting process.
So,Yay😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😳
Hey. Have you started it yet? I began in 2018 with a library copy. Then attempted with a pdf. Then in 2022 with my own copy. Maybe this year I'll start again. Hopefully, maybe. It's a book I want to read before I die.
can anyone tell me if this review contains spoilers?
5:34 That question's answered in the first section; Slothrop was deconditioned SO HARD that he now had an inverse reaction to the Imipolex-G stimuli, meaning he would become aroused in anticipation of the stimuli. This ties into the wider themes of the book to do with the Absolute Zero, in mathematics, physics, etc., but mostly to do with why mankind vies for the death drive - we want to kill ourselves so much we can't just create annihilation, we have to go BEYOND this. Clearly inspired by the Cold War, I think.
_Ha!_ I've yet to read _Infinite Jest._ (I'd rather stick w _Finnegans Wake_ !!!!!) My fav Pynchon novel is _Against the Day._ Thanks, Cliff.
I swam halfway through this book in college before I gave up and drowned. It's a great book!
I just received a fresh Copy of Faulkner Absalom, Absalom as a Valentines Gift from my Lady. I watched your review a couple weeks ago and kept telling her about it. So your Reviews give me free great Novels!
Have you read "The kindly ones" by Jonathan Littell? I'm curious your opinion about this.
Btw great review, as always!
Dude everyone talks about the shit eating, and yeah that was gross, but the scene in the book that really fucked me up was the castration. Oh my god. That whole chapter was really cool and exciting and it ends with that and it was so visceral. I thought that was really cool that he could go between those feelings. Such a great book. Plus the longest chapter about Pökler organizing his life was just so sad and good.
I think the fact that his erections precede the arrival of the rocket reflects the theme of reversal that comes from the rocket's strike preceding the sound of its arrival.
Great review! Even on my fourth read I found the first, say, hundred pages a bit difficult to get through, but once Slothrop is more in the center, it gets easier. Such a a great book though, possibly my favorite.
Over on our channel you'll find a musical interpretation of the song on the last page of Gravity's Rainbow.
Heck, we did an entire album with songs from Pynchon's novels, but have only made music videos for UA-cam for a few of them.
Now everybody--
There is a part of the book that explains the (fictional) psychological mechanism that causes his arousal before the bomb hits and not after.
I was obsessed with this book all through my twenties but refused to read it because I couldn't get a copy with the Jackson Pollock-esque cover. Glad I held out because at 38 years old I feel I'm ready to take this book on.
Finally it came! This is one of my favorite novels. I'm glad you made emphasis on how fun and rewarding it is over how challenging. GR is not a torture device for the reader, goddamit! It's funny as fuck and all the paths Pynchon takes you with this novel make it worth the challenge. Pynchon's blend of science and metaphysics make his stuff read as a Borges story if his background was in chemistry and engineering.
Regarding the complementary material you mention at the end, I would add to that the season the Pynchon in Public Podcast did for this book. In-depth chapter-by-chapter discussions by really passionate fans. Totally worth it as a companion piece.
I got about 50 pages in, then I never got back to it. After a few months went by I pulled out my bookmark intending to start from the beginning again some day. Infinite Jest and Ulysses are both sitting here waiting for me to get around to reading them.
Never been this quick to a video!
I'm making my first pass through it using Audible, which I don't usually do for my more serious "reading." Audio is great for light books, in the background while I'm doing stuff. But maybe it was a good idea. When I sit down to read the hardcopy and concentrate, I won't be so shocked, afraid I'm slipping into psychosis.