Status Updates From Gravity's Rainbow

waited until i got a few pages in to update my goodreads. book makes faulkner seem like dr. seuss so far

Perhaps, though, tomorrow night ... perhaps then. He can’t see how he can hold out much longer. But perhaps, in the hours just before dawn...

Cold air hits Pudding like a blow. He sobs, bent, alone, cheek resting a moment against the rough stone walls of the Palladian house. His regular quarters have become a place of exile, and his real home is with the Mistress of the Night, with her soft boots and hard foreign voice.

“you cannot ask a woman to reveal her last mystery, now, can you?”

Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth. .

But tonight he lies humped im the floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane, bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves.

“At Badajoz,” whispering humbly, “during the war in Spain ...a bandera of Franco’s Legion advanced on the city, singing their regimental hymn. They sang of the bride they had taken. It was you, Mistress: they-they were pro- claiming you as their bride. ...”

He is on his knees again, bare as a baby. His old man’s flesh creeps coarse-grained in the light from the candle. Old scars and new welts group here and there over his skin.

She wants a cigarette desperately, but her instructions are not to smoke. She tries to keep her hands still. “What are you thinking, Pudding?”

In these war years, the focus of a woman’s face is her mouth. Lipstick, among these tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood. Eyes have been left to weather and to tears: these days, with so much death hidden in the’ sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and smears of recco photographs, most women’s eyes are only functional.

“Domina Nocturna..shining mother and last love..your servant Ernest Pudding, reporting as ordered,”

I’ve been in more wars for England than I can remember... haven't I paid enough? Risked it all for them, time after time.... Why must they torment an old man?

In here, the more disturbing Whig excesses have been Chiseled away or painted over. No point disturbing the inmates. All is neutral tones, soft draperies, Impressionist prints on the walls. Only the marble. floor has been left, and under the bulbs it gleams like water.

But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—

Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die.

One of PWD’s classic propaganda leaflets these days urges the Volksgrenadier: setzr V-2 Ein!, with a footnote, explaining that “V-2” means to raise both arms in “honorable surrender”—more gallows-humor—

It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a,

that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom:

Glazed now but with their presences. Their spirits, Or memories I kept of where they were, Are canceled, for this moment, by the flame: The reach toward the frail and waiting flower...

Jobber på

Denne boka er så slitsom å lese, men når du først forstår hva som skjer så er den veldig avhengighetsskapende... Så går det over da når boka starter på en ny, sprø tirade.