SorenKMiller

Entropy in form and story. Story told in 200 pages, lasted 760.

Revisado: 04-05-25

Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is about entropy. Not just in theme, but in form. It starts scattered and ends more so. Characters don’t develop; they dissolve. Plot threads fray. Meaning slips.

The book is a collection of vignettes. Loosely tied by war, rockets, paranoia, and sex. Each scene is a world. None cohere for long. That’s the point. Chaos wins.

Man tries to control. Through science, math, the occult, psychology, drugs, sex, systems. All fail. Entropy prevails. Meaning crumbles. That’s the message.

Roger Mexico, early on, gives us the clearest stance. Description isn’t prescription. He refuses to read patterns into statistics. He says: stop pretending there’s a plan. That’s the most honest moment in the book.

Many characters cope by indulging. In pleasure, in control, in conspiracy. Some chase patterns. Others give up. None succeed. The deeper they go, the more they vanish.

The sex is often indulgent. Overdone. Not just transgressive, but tiresome. Distracts more than it reveals. Sometimes it’s thematic. Often it’s just noise.

The book reflects its time. Post-60s hedonism. Psychedelia. Vietnam trauma. Faith in systems fading. Culture unglued. Pynchon captures that. But he doesn’t offer hope. Just collapse.

Is the book good? Depends. It’s consistent. Its entropy is intentional. That’s not failure. But it is exhausting. Pynchon makes you live the breakdown.

There’s no center. No stable ground. Not even a clear starting point. So entropy loses meaning. What order did this fall from? We don’t know. That’s a flaw.

The book critiques seeking. But it still seeks. Tries too hard. Goes too far. Around page 200, it’s said all it needs to. The rest repeats. Louder, stranger, messier.

It’s a book that dares you to finish it. Not to enjoy it. You might finish out of pride. Not pleasure.

Is it art? Yes. Is it readable? Barely. Is it honest? Maybe. But it demands too much for too little.

It’s smart. But indulgent. Like avant-garde art that tells you it’s brilliant while locking the door. Some will admire it. Some will hate it. Both are right.

In the end, it’s entropy in motion. A collapse in slow, chaotic progress. Nothing holds. Nothing saves.

That may be true. But it doesn’t mean it’s satisfying.

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A perspective

Revisado: 01-16-25

A part true. A perspective of the normal, broken captured person in the world of 1984

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Excellent Title

Revisado: 01-16-25

Expectations. Acquiring them, losing them. Thankfulness misapplied to wrong persons. Hope of redemption for low criminals. Love given, love denied. Wealth without happiness; happiness without wealth. Knowledge and bad company; good friendships with pleebs.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Surrealist attempt

Revisado: 12-19-24

Melodramatic, surrealist, dreamer poet tries to feel his feelings and escape escapism and really be something.

A guy exists. He feels tortured. He tries normal escapism. He sees the lack of value in such escapism and makes on/off effort to escape the escapism. He longs for purity and meaning, but while striving to be arriving at these outcomes, he feels hindered by factors he lists as excuses and distractions. (So, a kid figures out life is complicated and hard and not ideal.) He gets some surprises. He tries embracing those surprises in hope and feels loss and grief at not having hope sooner. He is internally honest about the degrees of meanings and awarenesses he felt along journey to what/where?!?

Because then, BANG, some surrealist epiphany-type attempt at Disney magic farts out in the last pages and the story ends. I’d have rather he hit his head falling in the gallery at the end and these last pages were all just his fever dream dying unto an unreal but happy ending.

Meh ride over 2-3 days lightly listening.

I did really enjoy the .docx aspect of a never finished thing by an idealist failure poet that tried feeling and never actually did anything.

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Creative retelling

Revisado: 10-26-24

Creative retelling. Plausible in the modern NWO, TV-neuroscience/neurolink spy thriller genre. Would’ve liked more exploration of Jeckly’s decision-making into her descent into the choices made, a la Kafka or the Russian writers—it seemed rushed and a gap. I believed the outcome but didn’t see the “how we got there” reflected to my liking in the story.

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Ever moving effort

Revisado: 10-23-24

As with all McCarthy, moving, painful and absurd moving. Direction forward through unbearable and common horrors and people just keep moving. All characters believable, meaningful.

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Hard effort in wrong directions.

Revisado: 06-22-24

Hard efforts in wrong directions. Hope and grasping at the wind. The big rock candy mountain.

Yet another empathetic, deep understanding look at the failures of the normal man, the effects of typical selfish behavior and generational traumas. It’s beautiful, honest, real, good, sad. It’s a lovely book.

Love Stegner so very much.

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Honest. Heartfelt.

Revisado: 06-06-24

Tender characters. Gruesomeness portrayed in the random way life comes, was often surprised by the chaos that presented itself in the midst of a different narrative I thought was evolving. Death and joy and pain. Different outlooks mused on the nature of man and I found them each believable, A unique view of sex as utility. A major subplot being sex, i was not a lusty book and contained no lewd sexual scenes. Forward stubborn movement, breaking points, interruptions, death, hurt, dishonor, justice, friendship, hope. A truly likable book. I see why it’d become a TV series, too, containing 101 short stories.

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Honest. Heartfelt.

Revisado: 06-06-24

Tender characters. Gruesomeness portrayed in the random way life comes, was often surprised by the chaos that presented itself in the midst of a different narrative I thought was evolving. Death and joy and pain. Different outlooks mused on the nature of man and I found them each believable, A unique view of sex as utility. A major subplot being sex, i was not a lusty book and contained no lewd sexual scenes. Forward stubborn movement, breaking points, interruptions, death, hurt, dishonor, justice, friendship, hope. A truly likable book. I see why it’d become a TV series, too, containing 101 short stories.

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Bored rich white guys chasing tail

Revisado: 05-06-24

Story old as time. For sex, for status, for conquest, for redemption …men chase after woman. In response, here, the woman, scorned by life and scorning life back, resists them in various ways, resigns unhappily to some of them in parts of herself and then doesn’t. Ultimately, having been destroyed, she destroys herself and them. Pain begets pain.

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