Chris Via’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

In Pynchonian fashion, part 4, "The Counterforce," begins with a bathetic device: namely, this terse quote attributed to Nixon: "What?"

Thomas Pynchon, you are simply bonkers!

Well, I reread the episode I got bogged down on and it was much easier. Then I was rewarded with a thoroughly enjoyable experience for the next two episodes!

Almost halfway through, and I've hit a sort of snag on the analeptic episode regarding Tchitcherine. I had to take a peak at the next episode, and I see that I'll be back with Slothrop, so that gives me enough steam to get through. It's not so much that it's hard to read (especially with the help of the companion text); it's that I was having so much fun at the present and wasn't ready for a flashback.

Just finished the second section, entitled "Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering," and this whopper of a book is only getting better. Packed with hilarious ballads, poems, songs, and puns--not to mention an encyclopaedic minutiae of knowledge from Pynchon's research--I'm finding Gravity's Rainbow more enjoyable and more readable than the preceding V. and The Crying of Lot 49!

Just finished the first section "Beyond the Zero" and I am completely blown away by Pynchon's genius.

Just finished the first section "Beyond the Zero" and I am completely blown away by Pynchon's genius.

"Imagine a missile one hears only AFTER it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out...a few feet of film run backwards...the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound--then growing OUT OF IT the roar of its own fall, catching up to what's already death and burning...a ghost in the sky...." (p. 49)

I have been preparing for this book for a long time, and, finally, I shall inaugurate 2013 with my first reading of Gravity's Rainbow!