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Gravity's Rainbow | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £4.36
You Save: £4.63 (52%)
New (28) Used (10) from £4.05
Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 18947
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 912
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 2.2
ISBN: 0099533219
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780099533214
ASIN: 0099533219
Publication Date: January 3, 1998
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Ulysses or Not? August 28, 2008
D. Jackson (Switzerland)
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Begob Sir, says the dear reader, God send you don't make them in the one book. (Mix and match)
He can and does write sublimely, but if there's anything challenging in Gravity's Rainbow Rainbow, its the challenge of a kid kicking the back of your seat through the whole of Parsifal.
 Gave up after 500 pages March 12, 2008
Mike Hogan (London)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far as I am concerned. Its not worth reading in my view. I took up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" afterwards and got more satisfaction of the opening page of that book than i did the 500 pages of this book. Be warned :-)
 worth the effort; it all comes together in the end - brilliantly and hilariously December 15, 2007
Jm Leven (London)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Most seem to agree that this is THE Pynchon book. Definitely not a quick,light read, but there IS a plot which picks up pace after a while. The writing style is stunning - practically every page would shame the entire oeuvre of most modern poets - but it does, as some reviewers have noted, make it heavy going sometimes, especially at first. For the first half, or even two thirds, of the book the focus shifts between different characters and locations who, at first, seem to have no connection but WWII, but they all start coming together in the most entertaining way as the location shifts to newly, partly,liberated Europe, and it actually becomes quite gripping. For a finale, he brings all the characters together in a scene so hilarious and brilliant it's the only time I've ever felt like giving a book a round of applause. That scene is obviously his homage to James Joyce, being very reminiscent of the famous chapter in Ulysses where Joyce introduces a series of disparate characters going about their business, apparently unconnected, and then ties them all together by having a character take a coach trip through Dublin and encounter them all. Pynchon does it with a slapstick balloon chase.
Many writers have tried to advance on, or just emulate, the early modernist experimental writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner; most seem contrived and pointless,without any real reason to be, but Pynchon is a real original, inspired and authentic - also a bit awe-inspiring. Gravity's Rainbow is so good it could persuade me to try 'V' and 'Mason and Dixon' again. THAT GOOD!
Awful! September 25, 2007
Mike Bostock (London)
3 out of 14 found this review helpful
Maybe it's just me, but have my fellow reviewers gone mad?! How can you describe a book as great and give it 4 stars, then advise people to skip the first 215 pages as they're incomprehensible? How can you decide that a book which took you 5 attempts to get through is the best you ever read? How can you love a story, when you don't even understand it?
A great book should suck you in and hold you there, you should love the characters, you should be desperate to find out what happens next, you should miss it when you've finished. Above all it should be enjoyable. Gravity's Rainbow is none of these things.
Imagine you watched a film that had been chopped up so that every single sentence was out of order. Would you enjoy it? - of course not. Even if you watched it 20 times and managed to figure out the basic storyline it still wouldn't be good, you've just managed to understand it a bit better.
Don't listen to all the other reviewers giving it 4 or 5 stars - they just want you to suffer as much as they did!
A tough start but once it gets going its great August 27, 2007
David Hampson (Reading, Berkshire United Kingdom)
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
I can understand a lot of the reviews here - a lot of beard-stroking professors have waxed lyrically about how great this and people want to get into that beard-stroking professor club to impress young females. Thankfully there are a few other reviewers here who don't have a beard, don't have a problem impressing young females or who are not professors who point out that the first section of this book is messy, badly written and close to incomprehensible unless you are writing a thesis on it and can read it 50 times to understand it. Once you are into the second section it becomes much more readable and fun, though I think the first sections incomprehensibility drags into this section as you try to match up what has happened before.
My recommendation would be to skip to page 215 and understand that the characters are all part of a odd mix of paranormal and pseudo-scientist types who form a department of the British military in 1945 trying to counteract German V2 flying bombs: the American, Tyrone Slothrop is the main character who has had experiments performed on him when he was a child by a mad scientist (Dr Laszo Jamf who happens to have developed the plastics that the flying bomb is constructed from) and whose sexual exploits are followed by a V2 in the vicinity; the mad Pavlovian scientist Pointsman who manipulates the members of his department in his quest for a Nobel prize, particularly Slothrop; Roger Mexico, a junior mathematician type who has a girlfriend Jessica who he is paranoid will leave him for some toff officer at the end of the war; Pirate Prentice, a military type whose Dutch double agent Katje Borgesius is about to defect from the other side; these are the main characters who form "the white visitation" whereas on the other side we have "the black wing" with Weissman/Blicero a mad German officer and his boyfriend Gottfried developing the V2's successor, plus the Afro-Germanic suicide tribe Herero that forms the Schwarzcommando.
There is not much more you need to know, from there its pretty straightforward! Good luck!
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