Finished Pynchon's V. What a book. To sound very brief like

>>9008371
I haven't read GR but I also enjoyed the animate/inanimate contrasts in V. and I wish I could find someone writing about it. I feel like I wasn't smart enough to understand what he was saying with every one of them.

>>9008371
I just finished V like a week ago and started reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm about 200 pages in and I think I can speak about this a little.

The themes of GR are different than V so they are concerned with different things. I've seen no reference to the Inanimate/Animate theme. Instead, something that I've noticed is a constant referral to Pavlovian Conditioning.

The name of the first section "Beyond the Zero", for instance, is a reference what is done after such an experiment. I'll let this section from page 97-98 speak for itself with some edits to avoid spoilers:
>Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters the little sucker would have to be de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlovian terms, "extinguished" the [conditioned] reflex he'd built up, before he let [the subject] go. Most likely he did. But Ivan Petrovich himself said "not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned reflex, but we must realize that extinction can proceed beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can be a silent extinction beyond the zero"

Now to put this into a little more context, here is the quote at the beginning of the section:
>Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.
-Werner von Braun (chief engineer of the V-2 rocket)

Now there are more themes to GR than just this (this may even simply be a plot device) but I think this is just the way Pynchon constructs his narratives. He creates rather opaque webs of meaning that can be implied upon by the audience in their attempts to discern the signal from the noise. That's also a core element of his literature, this paranoia and uncertainty of constructing meaning from entirely too much data.

I'm excited to see how GR progresses from here but don't expect it to continue with the same themes as V. It has few similarities such as it's preoccupation with the way that war affects the human psyche and the fact the Kurt Mondaugen shows up in this narrative too but other than that functions on completely different ideas.

>>9008667
Insightful, thanks.

>>9008667

Good post

Bump for the only thread with actual literature discussion on this "literature" board.

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>>9008371

>>9008667
Please post something when you finish the book.

Rarely do we get anyone actually willing to look at one of these books in detail.

>>9010018
>""

Just finished it. Fausto chapter was lost on me although I've heard others say it's their favourite.

I lost patience in some sections of the book when it made absolutely no sense - doesn't anyone find the writing a bit gratuitous at times?

Overall did dig it though and will read again.

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>>9008371
I liked how in the ending Stencil's father just died from a shipwreck. Also how Stencil tries all his life to find informations about his father and V. and that in the end it's implied that Sidney may not be his father BUT Victoria may be his mother.

(sorry for the eventual errors, english is not my first language)

>>9011914
Yes I found that as well, that it did get a bit gratuitous in some bits, but the way Pynchon describes events, the dynamics of them if you like, in each of the settings kept me hooked, e.g. the gruesome bits in africa: the panoramic view of the chaos, also in Italy where an uprising is about to kick off- running through corridors and streets whilst hopping from the perspectives of different characters- it felt alive.

Yeah that Fausto chapter was a bit off-putting, probably because against the other chapters it felt way out, it was long-winded , however towards the end with the revelation of the"bad priest", that was worth the read- I started GR and holy, right from the get-go: humour and beauty here are divine.