Gravity's Rainbow
First edition cover design
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| Author | Thomas Pynchon |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical novel, satire, encyclopedic novel |
| Published |
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| Pages | 760 |
| 813.54 | |
Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon.
Lengthy, complex, and featuring a large cast of characters, the narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II, and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the "Schwarzgerät" ("black device"), slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000".
Traversing a wide range of knowledge, Gravity's Rainbow transgresses boundaries between high and low culture, between literary propriety and profanity, and between science and speculative metaphysics. It shared the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Although selected by the Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a single passage involving coprophilia offended the Pulitzer Advisory Board, which rejected the selection. No Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction that year. The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
TIME named Gravity's Rainbow one of its "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels", a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and it is considered by some critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written.
[...] a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it [...]
The novel's title declares its ambition and sets into resonance the oscillation between doom and freedom expressed throughout the book. An example of the of meanings characteristic of Pynchon's work during his early years, "Gravity's Rainbow" refers to:
Gravity's Rainbow is composed of four parts.
The name "Beyond the Zero" refers to lack of total extinction of a conditioned stimulus. The events of this part occur primarily during the Christmas Advent season of 1944 from December 18–26. The epigraph is a quotation from a pamphlet written by the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and first published in 1962: "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."
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