Review: Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gravity's Rainbow is one of those books that I'd have to reread again to really understand it, except I'm not entirely sure if I want to reread it again. Or at least not anytime soon. It's hard enough to try and make sense of what's happening on each page, let alone what it actually means in the big picture. For many good chunks of the book I felt like I was reading words and sentences that looked like they should have made sense but they didn't. And this would still hold true after rereading the same page several times. Sometimes the point of view just changes on you mid-para-sentence and all of a sudden you have no idea what's going on anymore.

Luckily it becomes a bit easier to follow once you get past the first quarter (if you're that patient), when the action decides to focus around [arguably] the main character, Slothrop. Even then the narrative digressions and obscure references (which require their own companion encyclopedia) are still hard to follow sometimes. But I have to admit, those few moments where I did understand what was going on, it was like having a light bulb turn on in my head and realizing, "woah, this novel is actually kind of brilliant." In its own way.

I guess as another way to put it, I found that there were a lot of seemingly nonsensical moments that actually somehow... made sense. Ironically. Kind of similar to how when you're daydreaming you end up thinking a lot of nonsensical or irrational thoughts that make sense to you at the time and then later on you're wondering what on earth you were thinking. Only this was essentially the reverse process of that.

And even some of the really random episodes- like the one about the extinction of the dodos, or the history of Byron the light bulb, or the dream sequence with the attacking giant adenoid, or the technical jargon about Poisson distributions and an aerospace engineering equation and the chemical properties of a molecule that somehow triggers hallucinations, or the random argument about the semantic use of the term "ass-backwards" where "ass" might be a exaggerated modifier except that "backwards-ass" would make more sense in that case and so on- were really entertaining, even if I couldn't quite figure out why the author was writing about them.

But yeah, I might come back to this novel someday... If I find the time and patience to.