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robertrivasplata 's review for:
Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
What a book to finish on Valentine's day! Not really sure what I just read... My best description of Gravity's Rainbow would be: a less-fun combination of Catch-22 & Infinite Jest (although infinite jest is most certainly descended from Gravity's Rainbow).
I may have missed a lot, but the book seems to be about the fetishization of high technology (specifically high-tech weaponry), & the continuity of corporate power across time, ideology, politics, etc, & also weird sex stuff.
While I enjoyed many parts of Gravity's Rainbow, overall, I did not enjoy reading it. It was more interesting to read wikipedia articles about the topics covered by Gravity's Rainbow (e.g. the Herero genocide, the V-2 program, the Mendoza machine gun...). Most of the parts I liked, such as the Kirghizstan part, the Polker & Leni part, the Zwolfskinder part, the Dodo Hunter part, the Herero war part, &c, were flashbacks or background stories about various characters. I think my favourite episode featuring Slothrop was the part with Plechazunga, but the part where he's eating British candy was pretty good too.
By the end, I was still reading Gravity's Rainbow because I wanted to figure out why I didn't like reading Gravity's Rainbow. Part of it was that overall, I didn't find Gravity's Rainbow to be very funny. There were funny parts (some of which I mentioned above), but for the most part, I found the humor to be trying too hard, & stupid. Maybe if I'd read Gravity's Rainbow as a middle schooler, I would have laughed more, but then again, back then I would definitely have hated the musical numbers, which I in fact mostly hated (one exception being the part with Jessica's niece at the children's theatre). I think the biggest reason Gravity's Rainbow was such a slog for me was that I didn't feel a lot of emotional connection with the characters. As much of the book was about the psychic & psychological connections of all things in the world, I usually had a hard time discerning the psycho/psychic/emotional reasons that any of the characters did anything they did. The humor would probably have been funnier if I'd cared about more of the characters.
I may have missed a lot, but the book seems to be about the fetishization of high technology (specifically high-tech weaponry), & the continuity of corporate power across time, ideology, politics, etc, & also weird sex stuff.
While I enjoyed many parts of Gravity's Rainbow, overall, I did not enjoy reading it. It was more interesting to read wikipedia articles about the topics covered by Gravity's Rainbow (e.g. the Herero genocide, the V-2 program, the Mendoza machine gun...). Most of the parts I liked, such as the Kirghizstan part, the Polker & Leni part, the Zwolfskinder part, the Dodo Hunter part, the Herero war part, &c, were flashbacks or background stories about various characters. I think my favourite episode featuring Slothrop was the part with Plechazunga, but the part where he's eating British candy was pretty good too.
By the end, I was still reading Gravity's Rainbow because I wanted to figure out why I didn't like reading Gravity's Rainbow. Part of it was that overall, I didn't find Gravity's Rainbow to be very funny. There were funny parts (some of which I mentioned above), but for the most part, I found the humor to be trying too hard, & stupid. Maybe if I'd read Gravity's Rainbow as a middle schooler, I would have laughed more, but then again, back then I would definitely have hated the musical numbers, which I in fact mostly hated (one exception being the part with Jessica's niece at the children's theatre). I think the biggest reason Gravity's Rainbow was such a slog for me was that I didn't feel a lot of emotional connection with the characters. As much of the book was about the psychic & psychological connections of all things in the world, I usually had a hard time discerning the psycho/psychic/emotional reasons that any of the characters did anything they did. The humor would probably have been funnier if I'd cared about more of the characters.