GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon

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Paperback, 776 pages
Published 2006 by Penguin Books (first published 1973)
ISBN: 978-0143039945

Table of Contents:
Introduction 00:00
Ten Assertions 4:22
Re-reading's Merits 6:58
Invitation to Post 12:52
Attempt to Sum Up 13:54
Literature Review 24:46
Incoming Mail 2:02:31
First Episode Analysis 2:03:54
Journey to the End of My Reading Notes 2:30:50
Parting Thoughts 3:28:32

#bookreview #leafbyleaf #gravitysrainbow #thomaspynchon

LIST OF SECONDARY REFERENCES USED
1. American Fictions 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation by Frederick R. Karl
2. A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel by Steven Weisenburger
3. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon by Thomas Moore
4. The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention by David Letzler
5. Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon by Stefan Mattessich
6. The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon by William M. Plater
7. Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom by Luc Herman & Steven Weisenburger
8. Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow by Kathryn Hume
9. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction by Tom LeClair
10. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History by David Cowart
11. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion by David Cowart
12. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity by Thomas H. Schaub
13. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text by Hanjo Berressem
14. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon by David Seed
15. Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World by Peter L. Cooper
16. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon by Molly Hite
17. The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon by Brian Stonehill
18. Thomas Pynchon: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom
19. The Gnostic Pynchon by Dwight Eddins

Die frau im mond by Frtiz Lang (1929):

[angusorvid]

I read Gravity's Rainbow as an English major at UCLA in the mid 90s. I loved it. But I had to disavow everything our professor told us about the book. It really has to be experienced on an individual level. I had classmates who were reading the Weisberg guide on GR. A big mistake. They held too many preconceived notions. You just have to dive in and enjoy it. If something makes you scratch your head, mark the page, underline, and do some research. But keep trucking. It was one of the greatest reading experiences I ever had. After I finished, I gave my copy to my grandfather, a very big reader and the most brilliant man I've ever known. Like me, it also took him two weeks to get through it. We arrived at different conclusions but we both loved the book. It was a subject of frequent discussion between us for the rest of his life. It's a very special book to me.

[Alex.K.Hyphen]

Appreciate the length of this review Chris! My dad and I did a group read this past spring (his third read, my first), and spent a long time talking about it. He passed away about four days ago, but would have loved this video. It was his favorite book, one he talked about since I was a kid, and it brought him great joy to be able to get into the nitty gritty of it with me—happy we were able to, as at that time his health showed no real sign of decline, and so I feel lucky to have gotten it done serendipitously when we did.

[travelthroughstories]

Good lord. You're changing the game as to what booktube can be.

[toddmaclean]

"A screaming comes across the sky..." Not a V-2 but in fact it's Santa's sleigh as Christmas has apparently come early! Over three hours on Gravity's Rainbow! What a gift! Cheers!

[GomezAddams]

“If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” - my favorite Gravity's Rainbow quote and an essential one for understanding this novel. I actually found a box of wine jellies at my local grocery store. They were less than exciting to eat.

[human.yoohoo]

This video will be watched for years and years and years. Leaf by Leaf is a miracle!

[burke]

This video is astounding.
I have had Gravity’s Rainbow on my shelf for years. This video is causing me to say that 2022 is the year I have to read this book.

[heckicusdoomicuswizardus]

Gravity's Rainbow is my favourite book ever. Not only is it unique, hilarious, imaginative and MONSTROUSLY encyclopedic, it's also probably the most vividly written novel I've ever read. The descriptions of every environment, foodstuff, schedule, map, film, weapon or cloud formation is beautifully (and often grotesquely) worded; Casino Hermann Goering will likely stay in my head until I die. It utterly defies convention and expectation. There is no book like it and there will be no book like it ever again.

[michaelmasiello]

I’ve just discovered your channel. I’m a Renaissance literature scholar (and I think I see a NYRB edition of Burton’s Anatomy on your shelves!), but I have generalist tastes, and you’ve done videos on a host of my favorite books (this one very much included). Last year I read Pynchon’s woefully underrated Against the Day for the second time—I lived in it for months, and loved it (though the math is brain-wilting), and found, just as you so rightly say in this video and others I've seen so far, that latent connections emerge, and the frisson of excitement that comes with such recognitions is wonderful. When I was younger I used to tell my students that "you haven't read a book once until you've read it twice"; now in middle age, I think that's too hyperbolic, though the goal was always to urge students to believe that the deepest relationships we can have with books (as with great art of any kind) take time to develop (and develop over time). I’m hoping you might be planning to do a discussion of Against the Day: I’d love to see what you have to say about it, especially given your love of maximalist fictions and the rather shabby treatment Pynchon's longest novel has received.

On a vaguely related note (because maximalism, encyclopedism, etc.), Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob will be available in English in the US in January—hope you’re as excited for that as I am, or that it's on your radar. She's a writer of immense gifts, and this is said to be her chef d'oeuvre.

Anyway, thanks for the existence of this channel! It does my heart good to see someone doing the proverbial Lord's work this way. Teaching Gen Z kids each semester, I’m sad to see the extent to which we are losing deep reading to the culture of wikis and memes. Literature needs all the friends it can get--and those kids need the kind of nourishment a sustaining relationship to great literature brings, the kind that illumines our solitude (and can even make us hoard it, as I have a tendency to do). Anyway, keep it up. And happy holidays!

[tboss]

This book is a ride like no other and one of the main reasons I’m still into literary fiction today. Could go on for hours (as you do, awesome!) but I’ll just say the final section completely blew my gourd off in a way I still haven’t gotten over. The disintegration of everything felt like I was on high dose LSD trying to fight my way to the end. Def need to re read in 2022!

[dylanclymer]

Good God man, a 3.5 hour video on Gravity's Rainbow? This is a treat. This was my first Pynchon novel and it changed everything for me. I'm looking forward to what you have to say.

[timkjazz]

Along with Blood Meridian, The Recognitions, Moby Dick and Huck Finn, the apex of U. S. Literature. Absolutely one of my favorite books, an absolute masterpiece that needs to be read and re-read.

[bjwnashe]

Just want to say think you for this in-depth, thoughtful presentation. As a long-time Pynchon admirer, I feel rejuvenated in my admiration.

[JohnPatt]

Much like how Gravity’s Rainbow is an upheaval of expectations, I was seriously shocked to see this video be over three hours long! Truly spectacular. Thank you for your—and I don’t say this lightly—service. Your entire channel, especially videos of this ilk, played a significant role in ripping me away from a shameful reading drought of nearly four years (!!!). I now have a fierce appetite for literature that has, and continues to, truly change my life in both my professional and leisurely endeavours. Can’t wait to dive back into Gravity’s Rainbow more (only 50 pages in). Happy and healthy holidays to you and yours.

[TheAngelofThrash]

Just finished this two days ago, definitely feels like it will be one of the seminal linguistic experiences for the rest of my life. So thankful to have a resource like this to help contextualise many of the parts of the book, and also can't wait to read it again (in like, five years haha)

[LeScenariste]

Excellent analysis, my congratulations, and thanks for the bibliography references! 

To me, Pynchon is the Cervantes of the XXst century. Just like the spanish author encapsulated in Don Quixote the literature of its time, and even future genres, Pynchon does the same, and with a similar use of irony, for our ages. GR has everything: comedy, love, sex, war, History, science, politics, esoterism, spy stories, fear and paranoia, death... Also like Cervantes, I admire how Pynchon "depressurizes" his most deep passages with touches of comic relief. Astounding how a writer on his thirties can have such control of his craft.

[OttoIncandenza]

I love what you read at 1:45:30!! That’s my exact experience with Gravity’s Rainbow. So many working class people have read and loved it. Academics sometimes underestimate the working class’ aesthetic appreciation.

[rishwiz]

Respect! You have pulled out the unthinkable. I don’t think any book but GR deserved it.

[LittlemasterL]

Thank you very much for this great video! Having read GR fairly recently for the first time, there were so many enlightening discoveries to be made listening to your video. By the way, as difficult as it was, I don't regret reading the book in English, since, being German, that gave an extra layer to it to enjoy (Slothrop sprinting over the Avus with his coat flapping made me laugh, having driven on that part many times in the past.)

One thing I was suprised about being addressed in GR (and you mentioned it briefly in your video) was the rumours (conspiracy?) about Them planning to divide up Germany after the end of the war, if I remember that part correctly. Fiction, be it books or movies, tend to make a clear cut: the war is over and by that everything is solved, with a brighter future lying ahead - while in reality history of course never stops but is an ongoing process. An American writer addressing that, especially the economical dimension which is often tossed aside for a more morally ideal picture reduced to the good/evil dichotomy, less than 30 years after the war I find a quite fascinating.

[foothillelement]

You have done an excellent job of presenting your thoughts and opinions of Gravity's Rainbow.
I first read this when the Bantam paperback came out in 1974. It still sits right here in my library along with David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann.
You have, indeed, inspired a re-read, but with something with a little larger type, like the Penguin Classic edition you're holding in your video. Thank you for all the videos you present, they have led to many new book discoveries.