Gravity's Rainbow

By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design

Narrated by: George Guidall

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

©1973 Thomas Pynchon (P)2014 Penguin Audio

70's counter culture explained with humor

Talking light bulbs and other insights
into the socio-economic structure on planet earth as the somewhat deviant characters proceed in life

Epic in every way

Obviously the novel is amazing; I've read it several times over the years but this is the first time I used the audio too - The reader does a great job coping with the challenges of convoluted sentences and paragraphs, crazy names, multiple languages, insane science and history, and a panoply of characters who all are important - He manages to do it all - The problem with this audio though is that the chapter divisions are random and make navigation between the text, audio, and commentary extremely difficult

Great narration enlivened a long book

I had read this a few years ago, but George Guidall brings a fittingly wry, poignant, and spirited voice to Pynchon and his long epic.

You may wish to read this in tandem or before the audio book, as allusions defy easy comprehension. There is an online wiki that I recommend. Still, there is fun in letting the book carry you along its vertiginous trajectory

Wow

This is outrageous and awesome. Good luck getting through it! I'd suggest reading along with a text and occasionally stopping to make a note or two, but just keep plowing through!

Brilliant masterpiece

This really is a brilliant masterpiece but a difficult read and disjointed. It's hard to keep the characters and scenes straight. George Guidall read it well but there was a glitch in the narration where some of it repeated toward the end of the book.

Narrator was in

I’ll just say the narrator did a fantastic job with this one. The book is a fun filled adventure to boot

the GOAT

amazing, confusing as all hell a beautiful meditation on death, duality ,spirituality, choice and rockets,

What happened to me.

Was I in dream? I was swept away and I can’t a thing what the book is about. It is that good.

Monumental & complex

Formula to explain what Thomas Pynchon' Gravity's Rainbow is:

Take Joyce's Ulysses and mix with Faulkner's Sound and the Fury.

Shake well, then add a spy novel, explicit sex, and technical manuals for rocketry and chemistry.

To finish, write it in post-modernist stream of consciousness style.

Then you have Gravity's Rainbow.

Like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp

At last George Guidall has re-recorded Gravity’s Rainbow, and the result is magnificent. The tempo is a little slower, which is altogether to the good, but he recites instead of singing the songs, a loss (though thankfully he does vocalize the melody to Cielito Lindo recognizably (Ja, ja, ja ja! In Prussia they never eat p?ssy…)). Please, audiobook producers, have him record V., Pynchon’s first novel. And don’t skimp on Pynchon’s hilarious take on the Colonel Bogie March, let ‘er rip.

Concerning the novel itself, I’ve known intelligent people of good taste who simply couldn’t get through it. It’s very challenging, and not for everyone. I suggest trying Inherent Vice, or even The Crying of Lot 49 (which was my first), to test the waters. Just as one should read Portrait of the Artist before trying Ulysses. Then, prepare to be absorbed: study of this book will surely knock out a couple months of your life. In a good way.