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Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 0143039946
ISBN-13: 9780143039945
Oct 2006
Publisher: Penguin USA
776 pages
Deluxe
Penguin Classics Series
Language: English |
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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Synopsis
Tyrone Slothrop is an archetypal innocent abroad, but in the worst possible circumstances: he's an American on a mission to locate V-2 rocket-launching sites in war-torn Europe. On a larger level, the novel illustrates the struggle between those who perceive and rebel against the war, seeing it as an overt movement toward the obliteration of the individual, and those who suppress individual identity to serve the war machine controlled by "Them." Which side Slothrop is on remains highly ambiguous. An encyclopedic work much like Joyce's ULYSSES, this is perhaps one of the two or three most critically acclaimed and pondered novels of the 20th century. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is dedicated to Richard Farina, a young writer Pynchon met at Cornell whose promising literary career was cut short by a fatal motorcycle accident. In 1974, the Pulitzer Prize Committee recommended this novel unanimously, but the Pulitzer Prize Board rejected it as "obscene" and "unreadable." As a result, there was no prize awarded that year.
| Details | | Series: | Penguin Classics Series |
| Size | | Length: | 776 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 28.0 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "A screaming comes across the sky."
Industry Reviews
"We're accustomed to circular and linear stories, but [Pynchon's] is structured in the shape of Poisson's ratio--a bunch of unrelated fragments come together, form a cohesive arc, then scatter as they descend. Pynchon blends all manner of fact, fiction, characters, relationships, and metaphors into this metastructure."
Wired - Lisa Goldman (01/19/1996)
"I've been turning pages day and night, watching my fingers go ink black, I've been bleeding from paper cuts, reading 'Gravity's Rainbow.' Forests have gone to the blade for this novel. Don't mourn the trees; read the book. 'Gravity's Rainbow' will be compared with 'Ulysses' and with 'Duck Soup.'"
San Francisco Examiner - Geoffrey Wolff
"An event... 'Gravity's Rainbow' is bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached, and blasted.... an exceedingly complex work of art."
New York Times Book Review - Richard Locke
"An immense synthesis of modern literature and modern science--it is equally adept with Rilke and organic chemistry--and it interprets beautifully both modern history and the process of historical thought. Few books of this century have achieved the range and depth of this one, and even fewer have held so large a vision of the world in a structure so skillfully and elaborately conceived."
Yale Review - Edward Mendelson
"At thirty six, Pynchon has established himself as a novelist of major historical importance. More than any other living writer, including Norman Mailer, he has caught the inward movements of our time in outward manifestations of art and technology so that in being historical he must also be marvelously exorbitant.""
Saturday Review - Richard Poirier (03/19/1973)
"... he is searching for the same complex imitations of complexity that Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, and now William Gass use so beautifully. There is no reason to think that he will not soon succeed. The man is only 35 years old, and the language of each of his novels is more interesting than the last..."
Harper's - Earl Shorris (06/19/1973)
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