Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon – alongside Salinger, the “great American recluse,” one of the largest writers of world literature of the 20th, and now the 21st century, after his first publications unanimously recognized as a classic at the level of Nabokov, Joyce, and Borges. His “Gravity's Rainbow” is the main post-war novel of world literature, absorbing the second half of the 20th century just as Joyce's “Ulysses” absorbed the first. It is a grand postmodern epic and a caustic satire multiplied by farce, tragedy, and the most radical anti-war statement, a countercultural bible and an explosive mix of irony with conspiracy theories; finally, it is a unique reading experience and a surreal travelogue through the depths of our collective past. Without “Gravity's Rainbow,” there would be neither Umberto Eco's “Foucault's Pendulum” nor the entirety of cyberpunk, and the very landscape of modern literature would be completely different. For almost half a century, this book has been revealing new meanings almost every day, but the only correct interpretation remains, fortunately, unattainable. Having received the main American literary award – the National Book Award of the USA, nominated for a dozen other prestigious awards, and causing a wave of resignations from esteemed juries with its radicalism, “Gravity's Rainbow” remains outside the evaluative scale and outside of time.