If you must read Gravity's Rainbow, and I think it's a pretty good idea to do so if you're the type that reads a blog like this, I'd recommend you book a plane ticket from wherever you live (like, say, Atlanta, just for example) to some exotic destination (Nepal, if you have the urge to see some crazy Hindu [or "Hindoo" as Pynchon would spell it] stuff and the world's tallest mountain), with a layover in Germany. Here's why: planes serve you coffee all night, you will be surrounded by Germans, odds are in favor of a war movie, and as you lift off, you'll start to get a strange vertiginous feeling that you have lifted away from the rigid immediacy of your surroundings into some unknown cultural void.
In this hypercaffeinated, timeless traverse from Atlanta to Germany, you begin reading. Here's the opening paragraph:
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."
A screaming? you think, as your plane hums, vibrates, eases its way over the Atlantic.
You read on, hoping to learn what screams across what sky, when, over whom, and who the "he" is who flees beneath wherever the story is going.
Then, when Pynchon's characters start using words like, "Kraut," and "Nazis," you really start to squirm. You're in his world now, his war, his America, his London, his raging, spinning, spanning, ejaculating brain. I hope you stay there for a while. It's worth the difficulty.
That opening sense of wonder, of violent mystery holds throughout the book. Some passages are remarkable in their immediacy, their vulgarity, their hilarity, their poignancy. Most of the time though, you'll be haunted by the nagging question of what in Pynchon's world is going on?
I will attempt to summarize. There are a lot of bombs going off, and there's rumor of one particular bomb that's the sort of platonic bomb, the ultimate design. The perfection of bombness. And almost everyone in the story is after some variation of this ideal.
Once you get to Nepal, assuming that you stayed with it for the bulk of the trip, only taking breaks to drink coffee, watch The King's Speech, which actually connects to parts of Gravity's Rainbow in surprising ways, and talk to your neighbor, the book will stay with you, since it is so fiercely entertaining, in the highest sense of the word. It engages. It truly, deeply entertains. It haunts you and flares up, even among the lurid, grainy streets of Kathmandu.
Only in the last pages, which you read somewhere in the jetlagged days after you return to the States, after he has rattled, shocked, confused, teased, aroused, dodged, lost, riddled, and ensared you, does he begin to unravel his symbols. And when he does, you realize that the math is deeper than you thought, and that it was easier not to understand than to do the work to follow the trails that his expositions offer.
It's one of those books like Ulysses or Infinite Jest, where you can't always be sure who is saying or doing what, where, and to what end. However, since you were disoriented by the trip anyway, and had a lot to think through upon your return, why not toss this masterpiece into the mix? It has a lot to say. It seems to ring out with a lot of the other madness you see in this strange place you've returned to where everyone seems to be chasing a vaguely defined, incinerating dream for reasons ranging from its inscrutability to its platonic perfection to its raw unattainability.
