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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Gravity's Rainbow

  
  

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Dee Vapr
22:54 / 07.08.01
Right. I've literally just (after 4 months plumbing it's depths) finished this immense f**ker (cue.. applause.. kudos..) and well... I really don't know what to think. In equal parts it's an incorrible, impenetrable horror of a book, and in others it seems inspired, evanescent, ridiculously intelligent, moving... does anyone else feel the same? Opinions seem divided about GR between seeing it as genius or obscure pap.

I've been scouring the net for explanations (as you do), and the best reading of GR I could find has the entire book from page 16 onwards created in the paranoid schizophrenic of mind of Pirate Prentice, mid-nervous breakdown, but this just seems dubious, I can't really find evidence for it in the text anywhere....

I was wondering if anyone could well... lend me their own understandings about what the book is actually about??? GR really does seem to lend it self to an Invisible reading, with it's musings on paranoia, the elect and the preterite etc..
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
22:54 / 07.08.01
About? It's about eight hundred pages, innit?

[rimshot]

Seriously, though - I think it's one of those novels that is alternately infuriating and incredibly rewarding. Fuck, I felt smugly satisfied when I realised the toilet-diving scene in Trainspotting is ripped from Pynchon. I think the biggest problem I've found with the book is that as great as it is, there's an amazing amount of over/underwritten stuff in there. However, such a following has sprung up around the thing that it's almost unassailable - in much the same way that Ulysses or The Illuminatus Trilogy are encased behind critic-proof shields.

Personally, I don't think Pynchon ever really had a plan; it seems very much to be a book that unfolds organically, and allows a multiplicity of readings; something that's easily masked behind its status as a paranoid book. Yes, there's a lot of obvious factchecking gone into it, and enough historical fact slightly-slanted to suggest that maybe it's a parody on the Norman Mailer-style fictionalised history field, but I'm not entirely sure.

I think it's interesting inasmuch as it maintains a very fluid reality/fantasy divide - it's difficult to tell which is which, which would be why, if you accept the "it's all in his head" thing would be why you can't finger it directly - if the character was aware of it being naught but mental machination, surely the book wouldn't be able to sustain its fucked-up reality of heroes in pig suits meeting Mickey Rooney? I do think, too, that you'll go bonkers if you try to pin down the meaning of the book. There are many, perhaps some of more importance than others, but I don't think there's one sole aim of the text, other than to befuddle the reader, or give hir a feeling of smugness when they identify something in there that makes sense. Which is no bad thing, really.

I love the book, honestly, though I think I need to reread it to refresh myself before I can enter fully into a considered debate. Feck.

Congratulations, though, on completing it. It's an impressive fucking achievement. I'm wanting to reread it, but the shithouse print quality of the Vintage version is really, really putting me off.

Actually; have you read The Crying of Lot 49, too? There are links there that I'm too foggy to recall at the moment, but it seems a more distilled paranoiac experience than GR, if only because it's so short.

Some helpful links, maybe: The San Narciso Community College Homepage is a collaborative effort to mine Pynchon's work for some kind of sense. It's not too bad, though I think that the HyperArts pages are much better - and sexier. If you're on Mac, there's a digital companion in the form of a hypercard stack available here that's written by an academic and his students.

And having said absolutely nothing, I sign off. To find some of that psychotropic sexy plastic stuff, probably.
 
 
Templar
13:30 / 08.08.01
I read Gravity's Rainbow with a companion volume, which I strongly recommend - it helps you to notice all the complex layering that goes on.
 
 
Annunnaki-9
13:32 / 08.08.01
I love this book. It's a challenge to read, and rightly so- the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. While I do believe it's able to be read on its own merits, I, as I do with everything I read, use it as a springboard for further investigation in a non-fiction sense. Same goes for the 'Invisibles,' it can be read as a slick li'l comic, but it can also be read as something of an initiation into current fringe thought of a magical, sci-fi, and chaotic nature. I learned so much about the history of pre-war Germany, even my German friends now ask me about the Wiemar Republic (although, to maintain the paranoid conspiratology of GR, I think that has something to do with the German educational system 'glossing over' their role in the twentieth century, for obvious reasons).

I sympathize with the frustration- it took me an entire month to read, and during that time, became an obsession. In fact, I was on page 280 before I realized that I had no clue as to what was going on. So I started over. The rest went well, too well; I found myself doing a lot of extra-textual research in order to stall completeing the book. Rothkoid's supplemental sites are great- I used the Hyperarts page extensively.

I do think Pynchon had a loose outline- it would have been impossible to reweave the relationships between, say, Enzian and Tchicherine, as well as Slothrop in the way he did in the end if he hadn't had a plan. Consider Roger Mexico, dissappearing for the middle of the book, and re-appearing rnear the end. That being said, he certainly allowed himself plenty of spin-off space for 'diversions.' Overall, I think it really did tie back together in the end.

Pynchon wasn't necessarily handing us a 'story,' though it was at least that. The demands of the very words he used superceded any linear narrative, and so, it is art. And a great piece at that.

And Dee Vapr, I do not think that most of the book was PP's illusion. I don't think anyone can assign any such simplistic (no, no, I'm not calling YOU a simp, read on...) interpretation to the narratology of GR. Pynchon takes great pleasure (or the work itself does, at any rate) in deliberately upsetting any possible fixity of narrator.

However, I never considered the possibility of PP as psych-narrator. Cool. Next time I read it, I'll try that coat on and see how it fits.
 
 
Annunnaki-9
13:37 / 08.08.01
Oh yaeh, one last (and brief) point about paranoia.

Paranoia has to include every possible thing, if not, then the space untouched by its black hand is a refuge.
 
 
Dee Vapr
13:00 / 09.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Rothkoid:

Actually; have you read The Crying of Lot 49, too? There are links there that I'm too foggy to recall at the moment, but it seems a more distilled paranoiac experience than GR, if only because it's so short.


Yeah, I really liked it, but thought that it was a bit more unsophisicated, really, than I was expecting. I also thought that Paul Auster's "City of Glass" kind of pulled off that whole "anti-detective" novel thing a whole let better too.

quote:Originally posted by Theo Kalypso:
I do think Pynchon had a loose outline- it would have been impossible to reweave the relationships between, say, Enzian and Tchicherine, as well as Slothrop in the way he did in the end if he hadn't had a plan. .

Gah!! What do you mean, specifically by this, please? <gets the feeling the whole book has flown over his head>
 
 
Annunnaki-9
13:43 / 09.08.01
****SPOILERS*****

Well, re: Tchicherine and Enzian (whose name means 'Gentian,' a plant which, at least in N. America, is not only beautiful, but delicious, and also called 'Explorer's Gentian'), you do know that they are half brothers, right?

My reading (anyone else can feel free to contradict this- I believe the text is malleable enough to accept multiple readings simultaneously) is that Tch. used Slothrop via the Russian girl (the one with the protective Owl) to track down Enzian, his shadow self. He (Tch.) knew that 'Rocketman' was on the quest for 00000 (the Pre-Prime Rocket), and he knew that Enzian was too, but it was easier to follow a guy in a cape than a troup of Africans in SS wear. No, really , it was, the Schwarzcommando were slick, almost invisible in the post war milieau. So, Tch. was searching out his black shadow self- Freudian/Jungian readings DO apply, just as Enzian and his crew were seeking the rocket, built by Blichero ('white'), containing, well, you know what, to fire off at the north pole, also known for its whiteness, to hasten the Apocalypse. Black seeks white, white seeks black.... Don't forget that Blichero, the Nazi, and Enzian were lovers in a day gone by.

That's one way to look at it, I guess. Others? I'd really like to discuss this book more with folks- I've never actually met anyone in the flesh who has completed this book, but then, I live in a part of the country where Eastman's Journal is the only thing read by everyone, including me.

I haven't read any other Pynchon. He's like Laurence Durrell (sp?), you need to take long, LONG breaks between diving into their works. At least, I do.

[ 09-08-2001: Message edited by: Theo Kalypso ]
 
 
Dee Vapr
14:50 / 09.08.01
****SPOILERS*****
That's pretty much how I read it, Theo, but I still don't quite see how their relationships are "reweaved" at the end (is it the black / white dichotomy you refer to?). btw did Enzian / Tch. ever physically meet? - apart from the end, I mean, when they don't recognise each other? I don't recollect it happening at all in the text.

ps. the first part of that Pirate Prentice essay is here.
 
 
Annunnaki-9
12:36 / 10.08.01
Alright, here's my reply to that. Warning- it may be extremely unsatisfactory to you, and I by no means claim to have 'the answer.' In fact, the best way would be to show you.

Go rent the movie 'Atomic Cafe.' Watch it. Turn it off near the end when the squeaky clean Amerikans are awaiting the impact of the bomb in well stocked shelters throughout the nation.

That's how I feel he (P) 'tied it together.' It's similar to Eco's 'Island of the Day Before,' in a way.

Tch. never finds Enzian. Slothrop never finds 00000. Enzian and the Schwarzcommando have fired the rocket, but, at the end of the book, have never found Apocalypse.
It might be Cold War paranoia. The bomb is up there, Brenschlauss has been achieved, but we all, ALL await the impact. And we still are.

It might also be Freudo-Jungian. We can pursue our shadow in whatever manifestation it may take, even a white bright phallic symbol in plastic if need, but we can never actually reach it.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
13:36 / 10.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Theo Kalypso:
****SPOILERS*****

No, really , it was, the Schwarzcommando were slick, almost invisible in the post war milieau. So, Tch. was searching out his black shadow self- Freudian/Jungian readings DO apply, just as Enzian and his crew were seeking the rocket, built by Blichero ('white'), containing, well, you know what, to fire off at the north pole, also known for its whiteness, to hasten the Apocalypse. Black seeks white, white seeks black.... Don't forget that Blichero, the Nazi, and Enzian were lovers in a day gone by.



Pynchon does a textbook deconstruction on this freudian dichotomy though, as whiteness throughout the book is equated with death, in opposition to the usual, um, opposition. White is death, black is life.
 
 
Annunnaki-9
18:05 / 13.08.01
Again, I don't see that as an absolute in the book. For some at some times, black IS life, for example, young Blichero in Africa. But black is also death- the Schwarzcommando's forcing the Apocalypse via the rocket. White is also both at times, Blichero is a deathly force, and Slothrop for a while believes that by locating the White Rocket, he'll recover his lost life.

I think Pynchon was really shrewd in not allowing there to be set absolutes. It keeps the conversation going.
 
 
deja_vroom
19:06 / 26.03.04
I hate this book. I'm finishing it, but already know it will take me at least three re-readings (and maybe a space of, like, one year between each of them) to get something more rewarding out of this book. I'm only scratching at the surface, just following the story-as-it-is and not going any deeper with the symbology and hidden structures, hidden meanings. Oh, the headache.
 
 
Abigail Blue
21:38 / 26.03.04
Yay for Jade! I hated GR, too. In order to force myself to read it, it was the only book I brought with me on a 2 week business trip a few years ago. The trip itself was miserable, but the reading material certainly didn't help.

I'm a fan of Pynchon, but I much preferred Mason & Dixon, compared to which, in my opinion, Gravity's Rainbow is a ham-fisted, misogynistic, pointlessly obscure and occasionally racist waste of time.

Maybe a little harsh but, also like Jade, I feel like I need to re-read it, and hope that I'll find out why everyone loves it so much.
 
 
bjacques
11:17 / 30.03.04
I first read Gravity's Rainbow in 1979 or 1980, after a friend gave me a box of books. I blew past the first 75 pages since not a whole lot seemed to happen in them. Since then I've read it a half-dozen times, getting more out of it each time. I love it, and it'll always be one of my favorite books, but I think it's dated. He mapped the American (male) psyche of 1973 in terms of a past that's even more remote.

(I barely remember World War Two in terms of The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes (music by the Mike Curb Congregation!!??), The Great Escape and A Bridge Too Far, and only when they were on Saturday afternoon TV a few years after their release.)

I've read all his books and it's true none of his characters, especially the female ones, really come to life; they're more like symbols. I read him for the intellectual entertainment and the weird physical and psychic landscapes. Mason & Dixon is sort of "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" come to life. I may re-read that next, after finishing Foucault's Pendulum. I'm on a "Jesuits from the hollow earth" theme right now.
 
 
bjacques
11:26 / 30.03.04
Actually, it's probably more like a map of the 1973 (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) WASP mind, you know, guys like Pynchon. The proportion of US citizens descended from Mayflower-era religious dissidents who had their pamphlets burned in the town square by the common hangman is small and dropping by the day.

But until relatively recently, WASPs ran things and books like Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, Gravity's Rainbow are pretty good at explaining US history.
 
 
Abigail Blue
12:44 / 30.03.04
That's what I think too, bj, but I really feel as if Mason & Dixon was a huge departure for Pynchon in terms of dropping a lot of the WASPy nonsense present in his other books. True, the female characters were still pretty two-dimensional, but there was an emotional vulnerability and reality to the rest of the characters (plus a lack of musical racial send-ups) which I took to indicate that he had maybe started moving away from the 'I'm an important White, American Male author, and I type one-handed because I'm holding my penis all the time' school of literature.

Not to highjack the thread away from discussing Gravity's Rainbow, though...

It should be noted that I don't feel as strongly about the rest of Pynchon's oeuvre as I do about GR. I quite liked V., The Crying of Lot 49, et al. Hell, I even think that the first 50 or so pages of GR are among the most beautiful, amusing, and transcendent in modern literature. I was just brutally disappointed by the remaining 600 pages or so. Again, I should give it another try.
 
 
sine
20:04 / 30.03.04
A friend of mine who I had never seen cave on a reading dropped the book at the "Banana Breakfast". Two others said they couldn't climb past the first hundred pages. I myself felt the resistance that had stopped them, but redoubled my efforts, and ,once the blockage was pushed past soared through the remainder in a week and a bit.

However, I think that it was the sheer pressure and momentum required to finish the bastard that robbed me of much of its intratextual depth. Normally, I would take my time over this kind of dense fare, chew it over a few months interspered with lighter, shorter pieces. GR would have none of this, and rode me bareback. Hence, like Abigail and a few others, I've been meaning to do a second read for some time now, but wonder if that same obsessive-bloodymindedness will be required to reach the endzone.

All that said, GR shares a place in mind mind with Naked Lunch...not always lucid, seldom pleasant, but frequently dazzling.

...the 'I'm an important White, American Male author, and I type one-handed because I'm holding my penis all the time' school of literature.

That is faacking funny. Oh, mercy.
 
 
m
20:54 / 30.03.04
I read GR twice (very slowly), and both times I found myself completely losing patience with it around the time that Tchitcherine starts going on about the fucking Kirghiz Light. It seems that all the characters in GR are frequently posessed by the spirit of some long winded inner poet, causing them to rhapsodize at length over the strangest shit. It's somewhere around page 400 that I start thinking, "OK, OK, now shut up and get back to the slap stick fucking and dope smoking."
 
 
astrojax69
21:59 / 04.04.04
GR is a densely wonderful book. the intransiencies in locating a plot are superceded by the fact of the lucid presentation of a mind - prentice's. all the ends tie up and all we get is precisely what is required. a very precise book, for all its seeming dysfunctioning.

and the very writing itself excuses all other perceived difficulties! beautiful art.

is anyone having a long labour with 'mason and dixon'? or have you not ventured there yet?
 
 
Baz Auckland
16:24 / 06.04.04
I found Mason and Dixon much more flowing and easy to read. One of his best. The 18th century English is a bit much at first, but by page 150 you can speak it yourself...
 
 
Dusto
13:51 / 20.08.07
I'm reading GR for the 4th time right now. My first time was about 12 years ago, when I was 18, and I just basically forced myself to read every word even though I wasn't always sure what was happening much less what it meant. A year later I read it with the commentary, which I didn't enjoy so much. I understood more but enjoyed less. Then I dipped into it piece by piece over the next four years for a long slow third read in which I just savored the individual parts. But this time I feel as if I'm finally starting to appreciate it in its fullness. I already know what happens (and I'm a much better reader than I was when I was 18), so I can appreciate the density without it weighing me down, but it's also a pleasure to see how one part moves into the next. Part 1 is pretty static, lots of scenes fo characters just sitting in one place and doing nothing while the narrator explores some tangents of his own, but once you get to Parts 2 and 3, I'm surprised at how much the narrative picks up. The middle of this book is probably the most focused that Pynchon has ever been in a novel. There are some non-Slothropian sections (and Mondaugen's is pretty long), but Slothrop is clearly the central character and he follows something that looks very much like a plot (however picaresque). V. has at least two main characters, and all of Stencil's impressions muddying the waters (it's my least favorite of his books). The Crying of Lot 49 is more focused than GR, but it's more of a novella so I'm not counting it. Vineland initially seems like it's focused around Frenesi, but she really isn't onstage very often, and the last time I read it I kind of felt that DL and Takeshi were the main characters. Mason & Dixon is pretty much focused around the titular characters, but they don't have much of a plot arch, and then there's also the frame story. And Against the Day, as enjoyable as it is, seems intentionally sprawling and unfocused. But yeah, anyway, it seems weird to say about a book that I'm only fully appreciating on my fourth read, but I'm surprised at how tight it seems.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
03:58 / 21.08.07
I just read this, and since then, everything seems to be about the postwar period, paranoia, secret sign systems and snakes. It's kind of odd.

I don't really have anything to say about the book itself, but I'll re-read it at the end of the year and see how it goes.
 
 
Janean Patience
08:41 / 21.08.07
My first time was about 12 years ago, when I was 18, and I just basically forced myself to read every word even though I wasn't always sure what was happening much less what it meant.

I read it at about 19 or 20. I was a student and in a period where, due to a long-distance relationship, I spent a lot of time on National Express, Gravity's Rainbow was my companion for a couple of weeks. While I understood little I enjoyed reading it. Approaching the end it was clear this wasn't the kind of book to tie everything up and make perfect sense. What I wasn't expecting was that it wouldn't end at all because the last four pages were missing.

Bastard. That's taking postmodernism too far.
 
 
buttergun
14:19 / 21.08.07
I love this book, and have read it 3 times. The tour-de-force sequence near the end (around page 600, I think), with Slothrop (in his pig costume) at Cruxhaven, hijaking the Red Cross truck with Bodine, etc, is my favorite part of the novel. Either that or Slothrop's quest for the cache of dope while in his Rocketman guise.
 
 
Digital Hermes
20:45 / 22.08.07
I just finished my second reading of this, and and it made so much more sense this time. Probably because I no longer attempted to force a sense onto it.

One way to look at the book is as an immense, free-verse, comitragic, epic poem. I don't know if that was Pynchon's intention, but it allowed me to accept where the book went, assuming that there was something worthy to be experienced.

It's full of wonderful lines that resonate long after reading, or passages that seem as though they're speaking to you directly. And in a synchronicity that wouldn't be out of place in a discussion in the Temple, often things on my mind or relevant to the world around me would be something that I was seeing, obliquely, in the text. Not enough to be direct, but more than enough to be eerie.

Some favorite parts: the adventures of Byron the Bulb, Roger's tirade and joining of the Counterforce (and the work they subsequently do), and Slothrop's trouble with English candy.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
14:43 / 25.08.07
One way to look at the book is as an immense, free-verse, comitragic, epic poem

This is certainly true of The Crying of Lot 49, in which the text is left-justified, just like most poetry (though the lines are long enough that it's difficult to notice at first glance). This does all sorts of fun things to the rhythm if you read it as poetry instead of prose.
In GR, however, I'm not seeing (or, rather, feeling) it so much. Clearly there are some similarities between GR and the classic Epic Poem, the Odyssey (war ends>guy travels, million-billion characters, reality mixed with mythology etc. Who, or what, would be Penelope in GR?), but overall I'm not seeing the poetry-ness there. I'm always willing to have my mind changed of course...
 
 
buttergun
16:50 / 27.08.07
>>Who, or what, would be Penelope in GR<<

It would have to be Slothrop's harmonica, of course!
 
 
Digital Hermes
18:04 / 27.08.07
The poetry is in the prose. I suppose what I'm getting at here is that the writing has the poetic quality of often describing particular moments in enormous levels of description, freezing those moments or slowing them down to experience them in totallity. Along with the lack of strictly realistic behaviour on the part of it's characters, the novel (to me) becomes like some of the best poems, in which the words to not give the meaning directly; it implies it through providing those frozen moments.

I'll try to remember to pull a quote I've already typed up elsewhere and put it on here later today, and that snippet might help illustrate what I mean.
 
 
Dusto
12:11 / 28.08.07
This is certainly true of The Crying of Lot 49, in which the text is left-justified, just like most poetry

My copy is equal justified (is that the term?), straight down the right and left margins. With the exceptions of paragraph breaks and indents, of course.
 
 
el d.
10:29 / 10.09.07
Maybe it´s just my limited grasp of the language, but I simply can´t read his sentences. My mind starts to wrap itself around his words in very uncomfortable ways and the vain search for sense had me re-reading the first page about five times.

I decided to sell the book and move on to some Stephenson. Phew.
 
 
Dusto
12:00 / 10.09.07
I get that. Some of his sentences just don't parse in particularly friendly ways (there are even some tricky syntactical twists in The Crying of Lot 49, which is Pynchon at his most spare). But the prose in GR does get a bit less elliptical after Part One. I know that's a big commitment to make, but I think it's worth it.

Still, I just made it to Part Four, which, if I recall correctly, is less focused than parts two and three. I hope I recall incorrectly, because parts two and three were so good. In any case, this read through has reminded me that GR is definitely my favorite novel, warts and all.
 
 
Tsuga
22:37 / 10.09.07
The syntax does pretty much always end up making some kind of convoluted sense, if you figure it out. I think if you keep on, you can get it after a while, it comes easier. Though it's rarely simple and easy, which can be annoying in a way, I think it's ultimately worth it, and often sublime.
 
 
Janean Patience
07:02 / 11.09.07
Perhaps it would help if the prose was accompanied by a picture for each page?
 
 
Dusto
13:59 / 20.09.07
Finally finished. Still my favorite book. Though reading it for a fourth time, I'm more troubled by some basic questions than I ever was before.

1. What was Slothrop supposed to do in the Zone?

In the beginning, it seems like he's there so Pointsman can observe him and figure out the mechanism for his "condition." Slothrop seems to think that he's supposed to find the Schwarzgerat, though even he wonders at one point why exactly he cares about finding it. Enzian says something like "Slothrop is looking for Weissmann, though he doesn't know it." Sir Marcus Scammony says that Slothrop was sent into the Zone to "destroy the blacks." How was that supposed to happen? It doesn't seem like They needed him to find Enzian and crew, since They manage to find them on Their own (and Slothrop actually saves the day, sort of). I guess I'm leaning towards the explanation that someone in power (Clive Mossmoon?) used Pointsman to send Slothrop to the Zone to find the Schwarzgerat (which is why he would be looking for Weissmann), even though They had no idea what it was, hoping that it would somehow help Them "destroy the blacks," who were also known to be looking for it. Or something.

2. What exactly was the Counterforce trying to do?

Roger and Katje, at least, seem to think they're trying to rescue Slothrop. But a representative of the Counterforce in later years says "We were never really interested in Slothrop qua Slothrop," and that he was "not even a rallying point." And Pig Bodine, a member of teh Counterforce, finds Slothrop a few times but doesn't try to "rescue him," really. Is there a larger goal? If so, what is it?

3. Why does Weissmann shoot Gottfried off in the rocket?

In the scene when he's deciding to do it, it seems like he's literally dying and wants to destroy Gottfried's "immortality" because it pains him too much. And also because the end of the war is coming, I guess, and he knows that they can't have what they have once it's over. But then Weissmann doesn't die. He goes to the U.S. to work in government or business ("look high, not low").

4. What, literally, happens to Slothrop?

My interpretation is that he finally breaks free of his own ego, having plucked all of the albatross feathers of his former self, no longer conditioned or under anyone else's control. He wanders the Zone for a while, but in his new persona he's all but invisible to both Force and Counterforce. At some point he goes to England and plays on a rock album. But basically he becomes a wandering Holy Fool. Happy ending for him, right? But then other people seem to think that he literally disintegrates, loses cohesion, and ceases to exist. So maybe I'm wrong.

I have other questions, too, but relatively minor ones about things like chronology. In any case, this was an extremely rewarding read on both the local and global level. It's given me plenty to think about.
 
 
Janean Patience
11:49 / 15.11.07
I've gone and bought the book I linked to above (and the link is hopefully being fixed, if not the images can be checked out online) after a couple of months of wondering what it was like. The idea of obsessively illustrating a novel like this, the sheer hubris of throwing yourself into it, had me hooked. And the drawings are pretty incredible too. The combination of those elements: the personal vision, the quixotic nature of the project, Gravity's Rainbow itself, this comic-book-influenced style, and the fact it's an art project published as a book could have been designed to appeal specifically to me.

I got it a couple of days ago and it's obviously magnificent. Just to sit flicking through it stuns you at the scope of the endeavour. And every five pages or so, and only that infrequently because it's been years since I read the original novel, there's an image which you recognise and that captures an image, a moment, a description, a riff perfectly. Not the way I imagined it, but through the prism of somebody else's reading of the novel. It's like a guide and a remake and a graphic novel and a children's version all at once, and it reminds me of the way I felt about the book more than anything else. The affection and admiration I had for GR are recreated here. It's a labour of love about a labour of love.

Not that I really know how to read it. As I said, I no longer know the book well enough to recognise all Zak Smith's reference points, and some of the pictures are so obscure I can't even work out what they're meant to be. It matches page-for-page with the Picador paperback I have. Should I reread the novel simultaneously with Smith's version, turning pages at the same time? Do I reread the novel then refer to the artwork on a chapter-by-chapter basis? It's puzzling. But amazing.
 
  

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