Books › Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
First published 1973 · 1193 pages
A fever dream of paranoia, rocketry, and bawdy songs that spirals toward the apocalypse.
What it feels like
Reading this monumental novel feels like being strapped to a runaway rocket hurtling through a fever dream of the twentieth century. It is a wildly meandering, encyclopedic labyrinth that demands total surrender to its chaotic rhythms. The atmosphere is thick with paranoia, shifting without warning from breathtaking, poetic meditations on entropy to the lowest, most vulgar slapstick comedy. You will find yourself drowning in scientific jargon, obscure historical trivia, and sudden bursts of song, all while a creeping sense of apocalyptic dread tightens around the edges of the narrative. It is an exhausting, exhilarating marathon designed for the deeply curious reader who loves to be overwhelmed by a text, finding profound beauty in the absolute disintegration of order.
- Mood
- hallucinatory
- chaotic
- oppressive
- feverish
- Tone
- paranoid
- irreverent
- encyclopedic
- absurdist
- cynical
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- technological terror · paranoia and systemic control · the absurdity of war · entropy and disintegration · the illusion of free will
- The writing
- Dense, labyrinthine, and wildly inventive, the prose shifts seamlessly from breathtaking lyricism and scientific jargon to vulgar slapstick.
- The arc
- Begins in a state of bawdy, manic confusion and slowly disintegrates into a profound, inescapable sense of apocalyptic dread.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave massive, challenging literary puzzles and revel in postmodern absurdity, historical minutiae, and linguistic acrobatics.
Content notes
- sexual violence
- scatological humor
- graphic violence
- drug use
- racism
- pedophilia
About the book
In war-torn England, WWII U.S. soldier Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is targeted by British intelligence. His map of sexual conquests exactly matches the map created by locations of recent German rocket bombs. Slothrop flees the suspicious superpowers in an attempt to find the mysterious Rocket 00000, which may hold the answers.
Description from Open Library.
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