GRAVITY'S RAINBOW [First UK edition - wrappers issue]

Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 10: 0224009621 / ISBN 13: 9780224009621

Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1973

About this Item

First impression of the true first edition, published in the UK as a paperback original (PBO) with a smaller hardcover issue intended mainly for libraries. ***A very good copy in glossy illustrated card covers priced at £1.95 on the back flap. The covers are unmarked, and largely uncreased, with just minimal edge wear. There is a light crease to the top corner of the front cover, and there are light vertical reading creases to the spine. The orange colour is faded to near-white on the spine, and to a yellow on the back cover near to the spine. There is slight marking and wear the bottom edge of the page block. Internally the book is near fine with no inscriptions. No foxing. No creases. Pages clean and bright. There is no cracking to the binding [which is often found with this huge paperback] and the binding is nice and square. [Please see scans] ***760 pages. 204 mm x 138 mm. ***'If I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would have to be one of them.' - New York Times. ***'It is a funny, disturbing, exhausting, and massive novel by a remarkable mind and talent.' - Time [Review quotes taken from the back cover] ***'"Gravity's Rainbow" is a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät ("black device"), which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000." Traversing a wide range of knowledge, Gravity's Rainbow transgresses boundaries between high and low culture, between literary propriety and profanity, and between science and speculative metaphysics. It shared the 1974 US National Book Award for Fiction with "A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories" by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Although selected by the Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Pulitzer Advisory Board was offended by its content, some of which was described as "'unreadable,' 'turgid,' 'overwritten' and in parts 'obscene'". No Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction that year. The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel. Time named "Gravity's Rainbow" one of its "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels", a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and it is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written.' [Wiki] ***First impression of the true first edition, published in the UK as a paperback original. There was also a much scarcer simultaneous hardback edition, aimed mainly at public libraries. Both first editions are very hard to find now, and the paperback issue is especially prone to damage, as it is so bulky. Most copies have damaged covers and sometimes cracked bindings. This copy is one of the better-preserved of the surviving copies. Scarce thus. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc. Seller Inventory # 8144x

Bibliographic Details

Title: GRAVITY'S RAINBOW [First UK edition - ...

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London

Publication Date: 1973

Binding: Soft cover

Illustrator: Marc Getter [Cover design]

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, as Issued

Edition: First Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

This Penguin Classics deluxe edition features a specially designed cover by Frank Miller along with french claps and deckle-edged paper.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Review:

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.

Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.

That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.

Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo