A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel

by Steven Weisenburger

Book Overview

Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820328073
• ISBN13: 9780820328072
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 440 Pages
• Weight: 1.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Look for the 2nd edtion

There are two editions of this book. The first was published in 1988. The second was published November of this year (2006). It contains twenty percent additional material and some corrections. Double-check. Both editions have identical titles but the covers differ.

Don't leave home without it

Indispensable. I plowed through GR in my mid twenties without the Companion. Large portions of Pynchon's encyclopedic epic were totally baffling to me. However, I've always been intrigued by GR. So, some fifteen years later, I undertook to read it again, this time with the help of the Companion. Not only did it aid in my understanding of the novel, but I actually enjoyed reading GR this time around. Now perhaps I'll tackle Mason & Dixon.

Invaluable Handbook with an eclectic Bibliography

I agree with the previous review that this book is not as comprehensive as Gifford and Seidman "Ulysses Annotated" (see my review), but it is better than Douglas Fowler's "A Reader's Guide to Gravity's Rainbow", the only other usable sourcebook to "Gravity's Rainbow" I am aware of. This book has a most helpful introduction in which the scope and instructions for use are discussed. The section "For Further Study" contains some insightful information regarding the patterns of Pynchon's borrowings, the chronology of the novel and its structure as a "Bildungsroman", which is according to Weisenburger as follows: "(1) the disclosure of the hero's miraculous gifts (2) his education (3) his testing during a course of travels, and (4) the confirmation of his powers, a revelation." (p.7) I wish this subject would have been developed further. It certainly offers another avenue for reading the novel and analyzing its structure.The "Companion" Section itself gives helpful intoductions to each episode and somewhat brief descriptions of the many allusions and references. The vast majority seem to be included, though further information about them, will in many cases require the reader to do some work.At the time I read this novel, I was conducting research at the Library of Congress, so I decided to check around fifty of the references listed in the Bibliography. I checked verything from the "History of South-West Aftrica" to "Ballistics of the Future", and Stendhal's "Life of Rossini" to Pavlov's "Conditioned Reflexes", and found that both Pynchon and Wiesenburger did the their work well. If you really want to understand the allusons in this novel, you may want to check some of these out.The Book ends with a helpful, but not comprehensive Index. I think this book is a most usable and reliable guide to the Novel. The Novel can be read without it, as has been pointed out, but half the fun is, at least to me, checking on the allusions, and coming across their often hidden and surprising meanings. Interested readers should buy this book. It is not only well-done as a Guide, but the Bibliography contains a mixture of references that can be found nowhere else.

Indispensable insights

This is an invaluable companion to a reading of Gravity's Rainbow. Without it, not only would a goodly portion of the novel be incomprehensible (especially, I might add, to those of us under the age of 40- there are a ton of references that those of us in this age bracket will not relate to or even comprehend), but the mastery of Pynchon's work would be less than fully grasped. For sheer research and grasp of subject matter I can't conceive of a companion volume that would best this one. In short, without this companion I would have recognized Pynchon's novel as creative if a bit befuddling. With this companion I learned to recognize it as brilliant and much more comprehensible (to the extent that any of it was meant to be comprehended in the first place). One final point, I take a different view than some of the other reviewers. I read 1/2 of the novel before I learned of and bought the companion volume. Reading the novel with the companion the first time was much more rewarding for me than struggling through the novel without the companion for the first time.

Read the novel first - then this one

I agree with all the above. However, to avoid the disappointment of finding out how it ends, I suggest reading the novel right through first and using this companion piece for a more leisurely second read. You should soak up the (often seemingly incomprehensible) poetry and enjoy the sheer pleasure of the language before starting the deconstruction - just like other 'difficult' greats (Wasteland, Ulysses etc..). Agree that an annotated version would be brilliant. Surely someone out there fancies a go at it ?