Gravity's Rainbow

Paperback | 20 July 1995 | Edition Number 1

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Winner of the 1974 National Book Award

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), 'a screaming comes across the sky,' heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again.

Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. Gravity's Rainbow, however, doesn't follow such a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension.

Gravity's Rainbow is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes.

About the Author

Thomas Pynchon is the reclusive author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974. He maintains a private life away from mainstream attention.

Industry Reviews

"The best seller described as the kind of Ulysses which Joyce might have written if he had been a Boeing engineer with a fetish for quadrille paper." - Irish Examiner

"Pynchon’s masterpiece." - John Sutherland, Guardian

"Thomas Pynchon gives us 20th-century fiction's finest memento mori." - John Sutherland, The Times

"This stunner is already classed with Moby Dick and Ulysses. Set in Europe at the end of WWII, with the V2 as the White Whale, the novel's central characters race each other through a treasure hunt of false clues, disguises, distractions, horrific plots and comic counterplots to arrive at the formula which will launch the Super Rocket... Impossible here to convey the vastness of Pynchton's range, the brilliance of his imagery, the virtuosity of his style and his supreme ability to incorporate the cultural miasma of modern life." - Vogue

"Pynchon leaves the rest of the American literary establishment at the starting gate... the range over which he moves is extraordinary, not simply in terms of ideas explored but also in the range of emotions he takes you through." - Time Out

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