At the ripe old age of 46 I sat down late last year and read Gravity's Rainbow for the first (but I don't think last) time. It was breathtaking. Crazy-funny, but then gaspingly dark. Confusing as all get-out, but I managed with the help of online resources (eg this excellent, concise summary), which at least was able to clue me in to what was going on in some of the weirder passages (I was very pleased to learn that the bit with [Possible Spoilers here] Slothrop falling into a toilet in a jazz club, and sliding through the plumbing system, noting the grisly detailed stuff attaching to the inside of the pipes, was a hallucination he saw while under the influence of drugs. At first I wasn't sure, which no doubt says more about my own poor reading skills than anything else.

I loved the book, though. It did my head in, but it was just marvellous.

But then, I listen to old scratchy recordings, too, because that's where the music is.

for probably unrelated reasons, i never read those, despite having lapped up each of crying, v, and g.r. as soon as they came out (and they were huge events).

g.r. is an amazing book. it also, i think, shows why ellison's invisible man was an even greater book.

Wasn't the novel itself a cartoon version of The Crying of Lot 49?

Don't get me wrong, I think it is one of the best works of a living U.S. American author. But I'm just saying...

Avram, Gravity's Rainbow is an incredibly rewarding book. I read it at 16, in college, and have re-read it at intervals since. It continues to hold up well. (Vineland, however, I thought was weak.)

I've really got to get to Against the Day.

It made perfect sense, then.

I'm not sure it would have at any other time. Damn good book, though.

It's been a while since I've seen Tamala 2010, but from what I remember it's not really what you would call a must see sort of experience. The movie turned out to be surprisingly boring for something that inherently weird and visually over the top. The audience I saw it with boggled at the first half and then were nodding off in the second. Admittedly, I haven't read Pynchon so there may have been wonderful, insightful allusions that were flying over my head the entire time, but I kinda doubt it. So, yeah, I wouldn't recommend going to too much effort to track a copy of the movie down.

I started reading Gravity's Rainbow not long after it came out, got to the toilet scene mentioned above, and thought to myself -- Wow, this is a lot like Ulysses: he takes too many words to say what he has to say; he gives me too many details about things I really don't care about; and because the plot takes so long to unfold there's no beginning-middle-end, only a vast and undifferentiated middle.

Some people like big sprawling books they get can lost in. Some of us prefer tightly-written books that clearly move from beginning to end. Some people like Dhalgren, while others of us much prefer The Ballad of Beta-2.

Gravity's Rainbow isn't as bad as the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, where you get halfway through the first huge book, and the characters haven't even made it to the first inn as they set forth on their quest. Nevertheless, for me GR is a perfect example of bookbloat.

(Similar to Illuminatus in this respect.)

Unfortunately this can become, at its worst, an excuse not to resolve the plot.

Recent issues of Locus talked about Gravity's Rainbow and how some people in 1973 felt it should have won the Hugo, but it didn't, thus robbing SF of its chance of being recognized by the more literary spheres. Or words to that effect. I never read Pynchon's book, but, based on your comments and others, I get the idea I should be glad that SF has remained pulpy trash.

In common:
The idea that the main characters can't really know what's going on because messing with their mind is part of the Plan;

Stream-of-consciousness-style writing;

Love of puns, obscure literary allusions, and all that stuff;

But different in this respect:
Pynchon seems crueler; the story line naturally leads to brokenness as inexorably as thermodynamics leads to entropy, and you end up wondering what happened in a giving-up-hope kind of way; it's a tragedy and you feel like he doesn't care that it's a tragedy.

Shea and Wilson on the other hand take you to a place where although you still don't know what messed with your head you are in a better place for it; the characters come out more hopeful, more adapted, more enlightened, having grown.

Maybe not so much after all?

Love, C.

Serge @20, I don't read Locus, but I wish the SF community would grow out of the feelings of inadequacy we've collectively got about "literature", presumably brought about by the trauma of having our grade school English teachers sneer at that rockets-and-ray-gun stuff way back when. We've conquered the world, the culture is ours. Who cares what Ms Crabapple thought forty years ago?

This seems to accept that novels have messages, like telegrams do. A large part of GR is simply there for its own sake. You either think it's funny or you don't.

he gives me too many details about things I really don't care about;

Ever read Balzac?

and because the plot takes so long to unfold there's no beginning-middle-end, only a vast and undifferentiated middle

Think about the pun in "plot" and you will have an idea of what GR is very deliberately trying *not* to do.

I'm cool with anyone's disliking GR -- de gustibus etc. -- but disliking it for its failure to be something it is not at all trying to be, seems like a possible misunderstanding, rather than aesthetic distaste.

BTW, does anyone know if there's a term for the L/R sound that the Japanese use? Well, I suppose there has to be a term, because otherwise linguists would go insane, but does anyone know what that term is?

(Also, I enjoyed Last Exile through to the end.)

Break it into 4 volumes and you have a wonderful quartet of novels that would be like John Crowley's Aegypt books, only with more adventure and dirtier jokes.

Jurer vf Fybguebc jura gur obbx raqf?

I was disappointed when I arrived at the end of such a long flight of fancy not sure where it landed.

You can also derive other consonants by modified shifts, including one which has aspects of both "l" and Semitic(?) "r"; I often wonder if this is the original "liquid" sound.