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mahervelous22 's review for:
Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Just a shade under three years for me to read GR.
A friend of mine told me that doing shrooms just once “opens a window that never closes” on one’s outlook on life. While I’ve never personally done shrooms, I imagine that this book opens a similar window on reading, as shrooms does to life. As such, I probably don’t need to read it again, even though I’ll be tempted to after a few years.
The book is filled with hilarious and discordant moments that flit in and out. Hazily, out of these quirky scenes and bizarre hallucinations emerge a wacky and paranoiac story involving rockets and erections (as Zia alluded to, what else are white men supposed to write about?) Despite the subject matter, the writing is profound. Pynchon is quite erudite in his telling and I’m confident this is the main reason people slog through and make it. And, now that I did, I suppose I can freely engage in the collective tumescence Pynchon readers seem to have for this book: a la Tyrone Slothrop to the V-2 rocket. I certainly will be reading many other perspectives on the book in the upcoming months.
Some of the more memorable moments involve Slothrop’s ridiculous costumes, like his shirt, his rocket man costume where he kicked a dude in the balls, and his pig costume he wore across northern Europe trying to flee. A few other notable moments are the pie fight in hot air balloons, the Byron the bulb story, the various encounters with Major Marvy (“Major Marvy sucks!”), and the “fucked up” pinball machines where their balls live in exile from a since passed planetoid.
Not entirely sure about the trade-off vs time spent here nor why I persisted for nearly 3 years but the preceding paragraphs in this review probably explain why.
3/5 because I don’t know how a human brain comes up with something like this.
A friend of mine told me that doing shrooms just once “opens a window that never closes” on one’s outlook on life. While I’ve never personally done shrooms, I imagine that this book opens a similar window on reading, as shrooms does to life. As such, I probably don’t need to read it again, even though I’ll be tempted to after a few years.
The book is filled with hilarious and discordant moments that flit in and out. Hazily, out of these quirky scenes and bizarre hallucinations emerge a wacky and paranoiac story involving rockets and erections (as Zia alluded to, what else are white men supposed to write about?) Despite the subject matter, the writing is profound. Pynchon is quite erudite in his telling and I’m confident this is the main reason people slog through and make it. And, now that I did, I suppose I can freely engage in the collective tumescence Pynchon readers seem to have for this book: a la Tyrone Slothrop to the V-2 rocket. I certainly will be reading many other perspectives on the book in the upcoming months.
Some of the more memorable moments involve Slothrop’s ridiculous costumes, like his shirt, his rocket man costume where he kicked a dude in the balls, and his pig costume he wore across northern Europe trying to flee. A few other notable moments are the pie fight in hot air balloons, the Byron the bulb story, the various encounters with Major Marvy (“Major Marvy sucks!”), and the “fucked up” pinball machines where their balls live in exile from a since passed planetoid.
Not entirely sure about the trade-off vs time spent here nor why I persisted for nearly 3 years but the preceding paragraphs in this review probably explain why.
3/5 because I don’t know how a human brain comes up with something like this.