So I started reading this novel 351 days ago, and tonight at 8:11 pm, I finally finished it. I can stay that this reading experience has been one of the most involved and difficult reading experiences of my life, but that I am glad I made it through all 776 pages of this text. And while I can't say that I understand every single part of this book, well I did feel I have gained something even if my thoughts are still formulating. While reading this book as many of you know I have been in graduate school for my credential and Master's degree. I originally started this blog as a way to record my own struggle to develop comprehension, and I definitely feel having to write about this book, even in sparse distant spurts along the way has helped some. I will continue to write about this text in this blog as I look back and passages and work to make some meaning of this text. To all of those people out there still struggling to finish, well all I can say is that it is worth it, because the truly beautiful passages Pynchon is able to create throughout the novel are worth the confusion.
Congratulations, belatedly, on finishing! Without a doubt, this book is my favorite. I have read it cover-to-cover three times and certain sections around nine times. I, like you, could not tell someone what it is about per se, by I have enjoyed the many readings and re-readings. Again, congrats on finishing...and good luck on your subsequent readings. It is definitely "worth the confusion."
ReplyDeleteI could never get through GR as a text. I did this instead:
ReplyDeleteMake it into an audiobook using festival text to speech, a program commonly found on Linux systems. I subdued the extra-long sentences by first getting rid of em-dashes, semicolons and colons, making all of those into periods.
I found that, listened to this way, Gravity's Rainbow is actually incredibly colloquial.
I am an American who has married an Englishwoman, and I heard some British slang that seemed to be to be artfully used, and that I wouldn't have assumed Pynchon would be able to use so well.
I found that there are quite simply hundreds of voices in the book. It's a whole polyphony of narratives within narratives and voices within voices.
I don't think an actor can handle these voices, either. I listened to the original Gravity's Rainbow audiobook and could not stand the way it was rendered, mostly because he would read the long sentences without catching a breath.