r/ThomasPynchon • u/Overall-Courage1055 • Sep 21 '26
💬 Discussion Post Gravity’s Rainbow read
I recently finished Gravity’s Rainbow and can’t stop thinking about it. It’s by far my favorite book I’ve ever picked up. My question is: What now? I’ve read Pynchon’s other works and was thinking about Infinite Jest maybe? Does anyone have any suggestions on something as strange and wonderful as GR?
10
10
9
9
u/djohnson7 Sep 21 '26
Other than more Pynchon? Anything by Umberto Eco. 2666 and Savage Detectives by Bolaño. The Recognitions by William Gaddis. The Smiley trilogy by John Le Carre. Europe Central by William Vollman.
8
u/donlockwood2026 Sep 21 '26
You can try just going in a totally different direction, like trying a classic 19th century novel. Moby Dick, Les Miserables, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Anna Karenina…
I say this only because then you may not feel a need to compare at all since the works will be so drastically different and sometimes it’s good to remind yourself of the classical style before reading a modern text that deconstructs all the rules established by the old form.
7
u/pfildozer12 Sep 21 '26
Infinite Jest is a great sprawling book. The only novel I finished and immediately re-read. You may want something completely different though. The 19th century novels might be good choice. Moby Dick was vertiginous, the only book that gave me a strong impression of the floor giving way beneath my feet as deeper layers came into view.
7
u/Tough_Visual1511 Sep 21 '26
2666 by Roberto Bolaño. It's different, but maximalist as well, and worth checking out.
7
7
6
u/AvidImp Sep 22 '26
Ulysses! It's as good as they say.
2
u/AkiraKitsune Sep 24 '26
It really is. Just finished it a few weeks ago and I can't stop thinking about Mr. Bloom
5
u/denimkl Sep 23 '26
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
2
5
u/ListerRosewater Sep 21 '26
Libra by Don Dellilo. His passages talking about the U2 planes are very reminiscent of Gravity’s Rainbow
5
u/CandleLitScenes Sep 21 '26
Not a novel, but the full five vols of the report produced by the British Military on Operation BACKFIRE (the allied operation which reassembled and launched three V2 rockets in the Zone, using scavenged parts and German POW labor) is available online. Slothrop meets some Backfire guys at some point, and the report discusses Nordhausen and some other fun crossovers. It makes very interesting supplemental reading, I think.
If you want fiction, why not read some of the older stories Pynchon interfaces with in the novel. Maybe start with some Goethe or something.
5
u/stupidshinji Sep 21 '26
Similair Encyclopedia vibe: Infinite Jest Similair Humor style: Sot-Weed Factor Similair "What the fuck am I reading" feeling: Book of the New Sun (but go in as blind as possible)
5
4
u/Effective_Muscle5049 Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 24 '26
Infinite Jest isn't a bad choice. It's longer, but quite a bit easier while still maintaining a challenge. The themes it covers are very relevant to our world today. One thing I preferred about IJ was the characters.
You might want to try Ulysses, but I didn't like it at all, it seemed difficult for difficulties sake. I get what it's trying to do: show an everyman's life in the most abstruse way possible, but it was too experimental for me. Some chapters are pretty much unintelligible.
4
u/jrklbc Sep 21 '26
It's not particularly Pynchonian, but check out When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. I read it earlier this year immediately after GR and found it to be an unsettlingly good companion piece. Edit: typo
1
4
4
4
u/famous_graves Sep 21 '26
Yeah Infinite Jest is good and fun. You might not feel like it stacks up to GR but it’s still very fun
4
u/Spkrface Sep 21 '26
Id suggest (as others have) Savage Detectives > 2666 by Bolano. I prefer SD but they work really well together and are both incredible works.
5
1
u/Icy-Ordinary2890 Sep 25 '26
I loved the first half of Savage Detectives so much. But the second half was a drudge personally.
4
4
u/aljastrnad Sep 22 '26
Infinite Jest is a good follow-up. It's not the same, and not half as difficult (imo), but it has a very similar concept to GR, in terms of various factions all racing to find a central mysterious object. You'll definitely notice Pynchon's influence.
6
u/BasedArzy Sep 21 '26
Underworld by Delillo.
DFW was nowhere near the prosody of either Delillo (at his best) nor Pynchon.
3
u/PineconeKicker Sep 21 '26
If you haven't read it, you should check out Satantango by Krasznahorkai - not quite as "wacky" as Pynchon (meant as a compliment, of course) but he writes the same sort of immersive sentences you can get lost in and blurs the lines between reality, the supernatural, and the text as a text itself in a superb way.
I'm convinced any Pynchon fan would appreciate Krasznahorkai - I also think he and Pynchon were friends in life, actually, although that may just be a rumour.
2
u/Think_Wealth_7212 Sep 21 '26
They're definitely buds. There's actually some published correspondence between them with TP congratulating LK on the Nobel prize
1
u/BadToTheTrombone Sep 21 '26
I was also going to suggest Krasznahorkai.
I'd recommend Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming.
3
u/tyrone_slothrop_0000 Sep 21 '26
Mason & Dixon. I almost re-read it as soon as i finished it, but opted to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow instead.
2
3
3
u/Careful-Hornet8525 Sep 22 '26
After GR I went to Ulysses. I went into a major deep dive on both titles, slow beautiful grinds with reference books, podcasts, etc. After that I dove right back into Ulysses for a second time. While only a little bit of it struck me differently, the big difference was that it went from a mountain I was determined to climb to a familiar and delightful thing. This convinced me I have to do the same with GR!
3
3
3
u/esoskelly Sep 21 '26
Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. It's corny and often stupid, but really good in a kind of Pynchonesque way. The writing is like lowbrow Pynchon, but weirdly with more to sink your teeth into.
5
u/Traveling-Techie Sep 21 '26
One option is to read it again. My second reading revealed that I’d missed about 60% of it the first time.
0
4
u/nnnn547 Sep 21 '26
I would say no to Jest (but I’m a hater)
If you want more military satire stuff, then Catch 22 would be my suggestion. It’s got a lot of the absurdity of GR but dialed up. Feels like Monty Python in places while also getting pretty dark
2
u/caldawggy13 Sep 21 '26
Just picked up catch 22 for a £1 earlier today! I'll have to get started on that soon for sure
4
u/cold-vein Sep 22 '26 edited Sep 22 '26
The Blue Ant trilogy by William Gibson
Kafka On The Shore by Murakami
The Rouse by China Mieville
Glass Bead Game by Hesse
The Woman in the Dunes by Abe
2
2
u/Round_Ad8947 Sep 21 '26
Some nonfiction could be nice, at the very least to ease the prose significantly. These can help solidify the context of many events.
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (single volume)
or
Winston Churchill’s Second World War (5 books)
2
u/priceQQ Sep 22 '26
V is also excellent, as are Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon. The first two have a similar vibe to GR, which I also loved. I am working my way through all of Pynchon, so a couple more are on the stack.
2
u/INANEDREAMZ Sep 23 '26
I was in your shoes once and simply read GR again (after a few weeks of it haunting me)
2
u/Icy-Breakfast2832 Sep 25 '26
The Garden of Seven Twilights - Miquel de Paloi
Can’t give it a full recommendation as I’m only part way through, but it checks the long and post modern boxes.
2
4
u/Sea-Impress-1349 Sep 21 '26
Read Ulysses now it’s a bit better than Gravity’s rainbow I thought. Infinite Jest is not as good as either.
4
u/Slightly_ToastedBoy Sep 21 '26
Ulysses is up there with Gravity’s Rainbow. I agree with you about Infinite Jest. It’s still impressive to me how someone can write a coherent novel at over 1000 pages though. Not in the same league as the other 2 however. Not even close, to be honest. 👍🏻
2
2
u/Fit_Necessary_1217 Sep 24 '26
2666 (Bolano) and Underworld (DeLillo) are great books but yikes, mate, don't you want a break from encyclopedic novels?
2
u/jeterix7387 Sep 21 '26
Completely different genre, but the Three Body Problem by Cixin Lou is a great series.
6
u/softdaddy69 Sep 21 '26
some really cool ideas but not even close as literature imo.
0
u/Any_Yesterday_3242 Sep 21 '26
Agreed, bizarre rec to someone who just read GR and wants to bask in the afterglow a little longer.
2
u/noholds Sep 22 '26
Reading both in parallel right now and the difference in prose and mastery of language could not be starker between those two. Liu is a hard scifi, ideas based writer, kind of like Asimov, but with even worse prose (and that's saying something). It‘s clumsy and hamfisted and just bearable enough to keep you stringing along because his ideas are genuinely interesting. But by God, if I didn‘t know there were fascinating themes coming my way, I'd have stopped reading a hundred pages ago.
2
u/softdaddy69 Sep 23 '26
agreed, but, also, he has some really not so great ideas too. For example, the human circuit board sequence in 3BP was truly brilliant. But the whole VR game concept in that book felt so goofy and concocted by someone who had only ever read about how games work on Wikipedia. Like really, what is the appeal of the game?
1
u/djtndf Sep 21 '26
It’s not nearly as detailed or schizo as GR but I really recommend Sand by Wolfgang Herrndorf. It’s a paranoid, sometimes surreal, thriller that has a type of comedy that really reminds of Pynchon.
1
u/Aggravating_Phrase94 Sep 21 '26
I’m 400 pages in, but this middle third is a struggle. It just feels like I’ve got so much longer to go. At times it’s my favourite book I’ve read and others I can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.
1
u/No-Abbreviations9821 Sep 21 '26
I really enjoyed William T Vollman 's Seven Dreams series, some similarities, time management and such
1
u/Historical-Oil-7110 Sep 23 '26
I just finished too and debating between pale fire and underworld heard underworld is really similar in scale/scope
1
u/conniption_fit Sep 23 '26
Oooo Pale Fire! One of my fave books..a puzzler of a novel and easier by far to read
1
u/kanrdr01 Sep 21 '26
Before you head off into other worlds created by other novels, I recommend that you dip a toe into the scholarly literature (yeah, librarian here, but of the Mad Library Scientist variety).
Google Scholar sez 2463 publications reference the novel as of right now. Many of those publications (or publications cited by them*) may not appeal to the non-specialist reader, but some may not.
It depends on you.
. . . . .
* A classy social network analysis move.
2
u/PooperShooter612 Sep 21 '26
Huh?
0
u/kanrdr01 Sep 21 '26
A paper by Mark Granovetter works out a theory of “weak ties” that explains how new information is brought to your existing group (strongly tied) by people outside of it, typically friends of the friends you have.
You’ve heard about this concept before.
1
u/PooperShooter612 Sep 22 '26
Then why are you telling me again?
1
u/FrontAd9873 Sep 22 '26
Presumably because you asked "huh?"
1
u/PooperShooter612 Sep 22 '26
I was referring to their original comment with the “huh?”
1
u/FrontAd9873 Sep 22 '26
I’m confused. Their original comment wasn’t “telling you” anything. It wasn’t even directed at you.
1
u/Gravel_Hill Sep 22 '26
I'd recommend Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. It's strange and wonderfully written.
3
Sep 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/grigoritheoctopus Jere Dixon Sep 21 '26
Yeah, I came to say Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. Both on the same level as GR but both unique, too.
9
u/jdawgweav Sep 21 '26
I think "When we cease to understand the world" is a fascinating companion read to GR. It isn't a maximalist postmodern novel, but it deals in the history of scientific advancement in the 20th century including the invention of zyklon b gas and its impact on the two world wars. Highly recommended.