From: "Jim Sharkey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
And a question: Anyone here actually read Thomas Pynchon? Is it worth it to find Gravity's Rainbow, or is it one of those "great novels" taht are actaully kind of dull? :)
I read about the first 100 pages (out of 760) of Gravity's Rainbow . I wouldn't call it dull, exactly. It is *dense* with elaborate description. Scratch that; it is the neutronium of descriptive prose.
As such, the words are lovely. But I found myself needing to expend great effort to make sure I understood *what's going on*, often re-reading the same paragraph to make sure I wasn't missing it. Even with this careful poring over the text, it seemed as if very little at all was going on, and I must be missing it.
Then I found a web site titled something like "What is 'going on' in Gravity's Rainbow" or somesuch, written by an English Professor somewhere. It had a short section-by-section description of what was happening. Reading that site, I discovered that I *wasn't missing anything*, there was just virtually nothing going on. It was pages and pages of blather and imagery, with almost nothing happening: no plot, no conversation, no characterization. IIRC, there's a 10 page stretch which the site summed up with two sentences: "They make banana pancakes" and one other short sentence. After that, I put it down and lost the desire to pick it up again.
I had a conversation with someone who read and liked GR, once. He told me that the way to enjoy the book is to *not* look for a plot or any of the other stuff you'd normally expect in a novel, and instead to just read it as an experience and let the words flow over you.
Given that advice and the fact that I now know that I wasn't missing any deep plot buried in the florid text, I probably could go back and reread Gravity's Rainbow successfully and perhaps with some enjoyment, but I have many other books to read first before I'd go back to it.
-Bryon
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