"A Screaming Comes Across the Sky"

Gravity's Rainbow. Read this book. A hilarious, infinitely inventive, post-modern, impeccably researched transgressive historical fiction that features drug dealers, soldiers, scientists, smugglers, displaced persons and shady government operatives on a mission to impose global industrial hegemony, set in "the Zone" or Western Europe during the closing months of World War II as recreated by Thomas Pynchon.

Talking light bulbs, "crazy kamikazes", a super-intelligent octopus, sado-masochistic pedophile Nazis, megalomaniac statisticians, a ballooning enthusiast with a sweet tooth, Major Marvy (a "capitalistic frontier killer"), double agents, porn stars, ghosts, monsters and a half-man, half-mechanical Russian Intelligence Operative by the name of Tchitcherine are just a few of the more than 400 characters populating the pages of Pynchon's magnum opus.

Unfortunately, this book is surrounded by a myth of impossibility, mainly propagated by those not familiar with Pynchon's work. One of his prodigious gifts is the ability to draw from an almost overwhelming number of topics (everything from biochemistry and drug fabrication to Freud's commentary on the sexual aspects of death to Rilke and Nazi-era German military hardware) and tie them all into his (admittedly very loose) narrative.

He challenges you to keep up, which doesn't appeal to everyone.  As one reviewer put it, "[It] is bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached and blasted". The allusions and technical science and math jargon have inspired/necessitated several extensive guides explaining origins, usage and contexts. But don't let that daunt you; there is enough information, wisdom, wordplay and imagination in this one book to last you a life time.

Pynchon is a prose mathematician whose talents and encyclopedic knowledge allow him to create a sort of dystopic past; a re-imagining of the events, people, inventions and reasons surrounding the Second World War. He takes full advantage of the wealth of possibility implied by setting the novel during the final months of the most cruel and violent episode in human history, which in turn gives way to a credibly eery  foreshadowing of the future greed, pain and violent control struggles to be found throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century. He does so through a selection of short stories and story arcs that eventually delineate the main arc/trajectory of the novel.

In an attempt to entice any potential readers, here's a scene referred to as, "one of the finest extended surrealistic excursions in modern American fiction." It involves the novel's protagonist, Lt. Tyrone Slothrop sliding his way down a toilet into the sewers below, only to find that which brought him there in a glistening Alpine stream some seven years later.

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