The Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon — along with Salinger, the "great American recluse," one of the greatest writers of world literature of the 20th, and now 21st century, unanimously recognized as a classic on par with Nabokov, Joyce, and Borges since his first publications. His "Gravity's Rainbow" is the main post-war novel of world literature, encompassing the second half of the 20th century just as Joyce's "Ulysses" encompassed the first. It is a grand postmodern epic and biting satire, a tragedy multiplied by farce and the most radical anti-war statement, a countercultural bible and an explosive mix of irony with conspiracy theory; it is, finally, a unique reading experience and a surreal travelogue through the underworld of our collective past. Without "Gravity's Rainbow," there would be neither Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" nor all of cyberpunk taken together, and the very landscape of contemporary literature would be entirely different. For almost half a century, in this book, every day new meanings are discovered, but the only correct reading remains, fortunately, unattainable. Having received the major American literary award — the National Book Award, nominated for a dozen other prestigious awards and having triggered a wave of resignations from esteemed juries due to its radicalism, "Gravity's Rainbow" remains beyond the evaluative scale and outside of time.