Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

This eight hundred (800) page juggernut of a book is considered to be the ultimate example of a great contemporary american novel. That certainly seems to be the consensus among the more artsy and educated literati. Anyone who manages to finish this book should certainly feel proud. And if it doesn't come off looking as a Sisiphus stone, it's even better.

I was told of this book some five years ago. A great book, a really fantastic book. But I haven't finished reading it, my friends would tell me. After a year, I still didn't know a single person who managed to plow through its colourful and ponderous prose to its bloody ending. I was a young graduate student then, rather full of myself. I had to have it. Moving glacially, in a cacophony of sound and twirl of colourful characters, that seemed to exist just for the sake of strutting up and down the pages, the book went from making little sense to making even less sense. I would strain for pages and chapters and days to pull some thread through the hilarious episodes described on its pages. All to no avail.

A few years later I bumped into another graduate student, in mathematics, a stereotypical concert-attending above-mentioned literati. He saw me at my yearly attempt to put a dent in Gravity's Rainbow, and very happily proclaimed that it is a truly fantastic book, and, oh, how much he loves it. Just don't try to make sense of it, he said. It will all make sense at the very very end.

That's how I finished the book. Ladies and gentlemen, just go with a flow. It is a ridiculous glorious exercise in futility of a book, which is entirely worth reading. In Russian, such things are termed "Theater of Absurd." Don't ask me what it is about. To describe it is to a) spoil it b) say nothing about it. It's about the rocket, different angles of the rocket, mythical angle at the rocket, insane characters doing insane things with and for the rocket. It's quite whimsical, rather obtuse, but all in all quite worthwile.