Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

[Amanda]

How do I describe this book...it's kind of a post-modernist smorgasbord of different narrative patterns, themes, plots, pop-culture and historical references, lapses of time, 'lewd content' meant to shock (see Pynchon's own Mason and Dixon and Infinite Jest as other examples of this on the list).

The 'lewd content' part was especially funny to me as I read that This book 'won' the Pulitzer prize for fiction according to the judges, but then the Pulitzer board refused to give it an award for indecency, so there was no Pulitzer prize for fiction that year.

Loosely speaking, the book explores things that happened around the end of WWII (outside the war as well in places like Hollywood, as sometimes time jumping in weird ways as well) as Nazi engineers seek to develop a top secret super-rocket.

It explores some themes of trauma of the exponential advance of substantial and possibly apocalypse causing technology, vs the comparatively lagging sociocultural progression. The exhausting overwhelming business of the modern era is apparent throughout.

It's a really dense book and sometimes I had trouble parsing out the intentional overwhelming nonsense from the substantial bits, but there were also a lot of gems I caught in there. I gave it 4 stars.