This cluster fuck of words is ONE sentence from Gravity's Rainbow...

[Paradoxical]

I have made 3 attempts to read this book. Never made it past the 50th page. It's suppose to be one of the best pieces of literature ever written. I'm starting to think I'm too dumb to grasp it.

"They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals-but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke , street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year."

[CrawlingChaos]

1. And if you think that's bad

Try Finnegan's Wake. Seriously, crack any page - it makes Ulysses look like Danielle Steele.

I would look for a good reader's guide for Gravity's Rainbow. I'm not too proud to go that route, personally - it can be a huge help.

[graywarrior]

3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra ain't no picnic either

[dawg]

2. Me no understand, either.

Me think they walkin' toward a church, but me not sure.

[progressoid]

4. Lern Inglish first.

Juh.

[Chan790]

5. I love Pynchon first in the morning.

First things first. Don't start with Gravity's Rainbow, it's unwieldy until you grasp Pynchon's writing style. Start with either Crying of Lot 49 (which is as unwieldy to read but a lot shorter. If you have to read it twice, it's still less of a trial.) or Mason and Dixon (which is about the same length, but with the exception of a few sections is absolutely straight-forward.)

It's not a matter of too dumb, for most people it's a matter of too literal. Read it like poetry the first time through, be less concerned what individual sentences mean as opposed to what they convey or make you feel. You will still get the story.

As for being a difficult book? Yeah. Entire graduate level courses on contemporary lit are taught on this one novel. It's worth it though, it really is. On a serious deliberate thorough read, it usually takes me about six off-and-on months to read it. Read it the way serious literature students read it: really slow and taking notes so if you have to set it down for a while (it's mentally draining to read) to read something lighter and less mentally straining then you can pick up where you left off with less effort. Also, it's hard to keep track. It's a novel with 900 major and minor characters. Minor characters disappear for 200 pages only to return suddenly in a critical capacity (much like life, people from the past pop up unexpectedly.) leaving you scurrying back 7 chapters going "who the f*ck was X again?"

It's an awesome novel, it just takes a commitment to get through it without wanting to find Thomas Pynchon and punch him in the nose for torturing his readers. (I'm convinced this is why he uses a grainy HS-age black-and-white photo as his publicity still; so people cannot track him down and beat him up.)

Also, it's been a while but I think that sentence actually describes an industrial-age factory and the horrible lives of its' creators and "parishioners". It's a recurring theme for Pynchon, the degradation of man by fanatical devotion to industry; capitalism as the new god. He is generally considered by literary theorists and critics to be a "socialist writer" though his actual political beliefs are AFAIK unknown.

[TheManInTheMac]

7. I love *Gravity's Rainbow*

and you are absolutely correct. I tried to read it for quite a while, but couldn't get very far. After that, I started with V. and then moved on to The Crying of Lot 49. Finally, I was able to get through GR. I loved it, but didn't get much out of it until after the second reading. I would now have no trouble getting through it.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

13. I tried to read V.

however I had to stop at the description of nasal rhinoplasty (nose job) surgery. They break your nose and generally fish little bits of bone out of your nose when reshaping it from the inside.

I had that very operation way back in 1976. Did NOT want to read about it.

[TheManInTheMac]

21. Yes, he goes into graphic detail.

There are a couple of parts in Gravity's Rainbow that got me worse than that one. One was a particularly detailed account of a surgical castration.

[BrendaBrick]

6. Pat Benetar has a CD by the same name...

'Gravity's Rainbow' released 1993. (My favorite song: "Everybody Lay Down") FYI.

[MorningGlow]

8. Hmmm...

"Oh look. An old building."

There. I fixed it. :evilgrin:

[hunter]

9. If I was Pynchon I'd be thinking it's time to change my meds because I'd rather be a Dick

I much prefer Philip K. Dick

[Chan790]

11. Not to demean Dick as he was an enjoyable read...

but to even make such a comparison is base and crude. Phillip Roth maybe or Kurt Vonnegut, but Pynchon is utterly out of Dick's league.

You may as well be comparing a Big Mac to an 8oz Kobe steak.

[hunter]

16. Why are you talking about meat?

Language is the tar pit of the intellect.

wikipedia: La Brea Tar Pits

In our excavations we find some mammoths...



and some water beetles...



It's not baseball. There are no leagues.

[A Simple Game]

10. Sure it doesn't make sense if you take it out of context. n/t

[woo me with science]

12. Faulkner - Light in August opening lines:

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denium in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears."

[cemaphonic]

14. And that's a short sentence for Faulkner.

I really liked Light in August.

[Inchworm]

15. +1

:rofl:

He's my favorite

[hedgehog]

17. I wonder who was proof reader for Finnegan's Wake?

"As the lion in our teargarten remembers the nenuphars of his Nile (shall Ariuz forget Arioun or Boghas the baregams of the Marmarazalles from Marmeniere?) it may be, tots wearsense full a naggin in twentyg have sigilposted what in our brievingbust, the besieged bedreamt him stil and solely of those lililiths undeveiled which had undone him, gone for age, and knew not the watchful treachers at his wake, and theirs to stay. Fooi, fooi, chamermissies! Zeepyzoepy, larcenlads! Zijnzijn Zijnzijn! It may be, we moest ons hasten selves te declareer it, that he reglimmed? presaw? the fields of heat and yields of wheat where corngold Ysit? shamed and shone. It may be, we habben to upseek a bitty door our good township's courants want we knew't, that with his deepseeing insight (had not wishing oftebeen but good time wasted), petrified within his patriarchal shamanah, broadsteyne 'bove citie (Twillby! Twillby!) he conscious of enemies, a kingbilly whitehorsed in a Finglas mill, prayed, as he sat on anxious seat, (kunt ye neat gift mey toe bout a peer saft eyballds!) during that three and a hellof hours' agony of silence, ex profundis malorum, with unfeigned charity that his ouxtrador wordwounder (an engles to the teeth who, nomened Nash of Girahash, would go anyold where in the weeping world on his mottled belly (the rab, the kreeponskneed!) for milk, music or married missusses) might, mercy toprovidential benevolence's who hates prudencies' astuteness, unfold into the first of a distinguished dynasty of his posteriors, blackfaced connemaras not of the fold but elder children of his household, his most besetting of ideas (pace his twolve predamanant passions) being the formation, as in more favoured climes, where the Meadow of Honey is guestfriendly and the Mountain of Joy receives, of a truly criminal stratum, Ham's cribcracking yeggs, thereby at last eliminating from the oppidump much desultory delinquency from all classes and masses with directly derivative decasualisation sigarius (sic!) vindicat urbes terrorum (sicker!): and so, to mark a bank taal she arter, the obedience of the citizens elp the ealth of the ole."

[MilesColtrane]

19. Some fellow named Jameson?

[tigereye]

18. you should read some Gertrude Stein or James Joyce...

:rofl: Or Henry James!

[Fire Walk With Me]

20. You have to separate the sub-threads into the whole but yes, it does make sense.

Fantastic book. Consider it to be fractal or full of helixes and variations upon variations which may resolve and it makes a bit more sense.

[Paradoxical]

23. I'm going to have to read it like I read books for my classes.

10 or 20 pages at a time while taking notes and rereading.

I've previously attempted to read it like any other book. It's just too much material.

[Fire Walk With Me]

24. I've never been able to finish it either, it's astonishingly dense

and equally as rewarding when given the proper attention. I don't have much attention these days :(

Try his earlier, far shorter book "The Crying of Lot 49" for an overview of his style in an easy to digest form. And it's of course a great read, even if depressing. You can see where he's going with Rainbow, a bit.

Edit: The little-known but wonderful science-fiction book "Roderick" (recently reprinted as "The Complete Roderick") has similar style; similar items are mashed up and take on their own life, etc.

[Gabi Hayes]

22. Noiselight!

[Tuesday Afternoon]

25. Hemingway says:

As they approached the church, God and Satan were reflected in the architecture and surrounding landscape, and they wondered if there was any chance for mercy in the coming year.

[Demoiselle]

26. Is that really Hemingway, Tuesday?

It's been a while since I've read Ernie, and I I know I'm betraying my ignorance....but if you just made that up, you're a genius.
Aw, hell, if it's genuine and you remembered well enough to post it here, you're a genius, too.
Thank you for reminding me to re-read him.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

27. uhm...

well, I made it up. I mean, what I did was take the first sentence and tried to understand it and break it down to read the way I thought that Hemingway would have written the sentence.

genius? me? aw.shucks.

:) :blush:

[Demoiselle]

28. Ahh.... forget the false modesty...

That was VERY fine!