1) I think the difficulty of the book may have been overstated a bit. I think that if you’re bold enough to handle House of Leaves, you can power through this as well. Only a small fraction devolves into totally confusing hallucinatory imagery – most of what you read, it will be possible to know where the characters are and what they are physically doing. Give the first 20 pages a read, you might be surprised to like it.
2) It makes sense to read V. first before this. It’s the book to delve into what happened to Blicero and the Herero in Southwest Africa, and it’ll ease you into understanding Pynchon’s style, sense of humor, and worldview by being less (mostly) insane. Or you could read V. as a sequel to GR, as Seaman Bodine appears in both.
3) Pynchon, Douglas Adams, and Kurt Vonnegut all wrote books that give voice to a very bleak view of the human condition, but leavened it all by pilling on humor and flights of science fictional imagination.
4) It’s mostly not boring. In between daring commando raids, an elderly female pirate captain, an Indiana Jones minecart chase, and the scene where Slothrop downs a plane by throwing a slice of cream pie at it, it’s really quite rollicking, in spite of lacking a normal plot.
5) My favorite parts were the sequences that read almost like normal historical fiction. The adventures of a Soviet intelligence officer in Central Asia, a rocket scientist’s time working on the V-2, they gave a human heart to the whole thing.
6) It’s something of a post-apocalyptic story. Europe has been destroyed physically by the war and spiritually by the Nazis, and the characters are all just coping with that social annihilation in their own way. The parts where Slothrop wanders through the refugee-filled German countryside remind of The Road, almost.
7) Zak Smith’s pictures of what happens on every page of the book are plenty helpful.
8) My reading experience was probably made easier by being a WWII nerd to start off with, so I was never confused by political context. If I had to name just one book, I’d point to The Good War by Studs Terkel as suitable preparatory reading – particularly for its interviews with a black German and von Braun’s US government handler. The two books that might be most useful to contextualizing Pynchon’s portrayal of postwar Germany, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 and Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, I haven’t read myself.
9) Yes, there are black Nazis in this book. I guess they’re not ideological Nazis, but you know what I mean.
10) Is this science fiction? I think there’s a case for calling it that. Pynchon extensively discusses science and mathematics, and is much more insightful about seeing literary meaning in them than most science fiction writers. Curiously, it dwells less on the physics of rocketry than on organic chemistry, the rise of which in the 19th century is described as being the inflection point when human civilization began to transform the world into something horrifically new.
11) Maybe it’s a bit overlong. I don’t know what I’d cut, but the pedophile cruise ship was tiresome.
12) Maybe the indirect free association of the book works for me because I like Wes Anderson’s movies. The leaning into the artifice of fiction he’s been doing recently in particular helps. Or maybe the more apt cinematic comparison is The Big Lebowski. The Dude being a tumbleweed rolling through life, stumbling into weird situations, it’s a very Pynchonian stories. I’ve seen people allege that Inherent Vice was written to get back at the Coens for capturing his style.
13) This whole book would make for a very entertaining television series. I’ve never seen anyone describe it as unfilmable, either.
14) It should go without saying, but insane things happen. Lesbian elephants and poop-eating and a violent altercation at the hands of 15-year-old Malcolm X and sentient lightbulbs. The crassness and stupidity of it all plays into, rather than undermining the deeper philosophical ideas, somehow.
by PM_BRAIN_WORMS