Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Discover Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant writing in this postmodern literature classic.
‘The greatest, wildest author of his generation’ Guardian
We could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a problem because bombs are falling across Europe and crashing to the earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that doesn’t really begin to cover it.
Reading this book is like falling down a rabbit hole into an outlandish, sinister, mysterious, absurd, compulsive netherworld. As The Financial Times said, ‘you must forget earlier notions about life and letters and even the Novel.’ Forty years since its publication, Gravity’s Rainbow has lost none of its power to enthral.
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About Thomas Pynchon
Reviews for Gravity's Rainbow
Irish Examiner
Pynchon’s masterpiece.
John Sutherland
Guardian
Thomas Pynchon gives us 20th-century fiction's finest memento mori.
John Sutherland
The Times
[A] masterpiece
Marc Chacksfield
ShortList
I read this at 19 or so and just thought, like, f
ck, wow: this is the marker, the pace-setter for the contemporary novel
Tom McCarthy, author of 'C' Thomas Pynchon, the greatest, wildest and most infuriating author of his generation.
Ian Rankin
Guardian
Pynchon is both the US's most serious and most funny writer.
Thomas Leveritt
Independent
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…[Pynchon’s] novel is in this sense a work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis that will take its place amidst the grand detritus of our culture. Its teetering structure is greater by far than the many surrounding literary shacks and hovels.
New York Times
He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy.
L.E. Sissman
New Yorker
Gravity's Rainbow is both grim and hilarious, with myriad tangled plots and subplots that all conclude in mid-sentence as the Doomsday missile falls and the convoluted little lives, dreams and industries of its 300-odd characters and (not so incidentally) the lives of the narrator and the reader as well are obliterated.
Washington Post