-----------------------------------

Earlier in this game she was ner-

vous, constipated, wondering if this was anything like

male impotence. But thoughtful Pointsman, anticipating

_ this, has been sending laxative pills with her meals. Now

her intestines whine softly, and she feels shit begin to

slide down and out. He kneels with his arms up holding

the rich cape. A dark turd appears out the crevice, out of

the absolute darkness between her white buttocks. He

spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the leather

of her boots. He Jeans forward to surround the hot turd

with his lips, sucking on it tenderly, licking along its lower

side... he is thinking, he’s sorry, he can’t help it, thinking

of a Negro’s penis, yes he knows it abrogates part of the

conditions set, but it will not be denied, the image of a

brute African who will make him behave. ... The stink of

shit floods his nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the

smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient. Mixed with the

mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the sovereign

smell of their first meeting, and her emblem. The turd

slides into his mouth, down to his gullet. He gags, but

bravely clamps his teeth shut. Bread that would only have

floated in porcelain waters somewhere, unseen, untasted—

risen now and baked in the bitter intestinal Oven to bread

we know, bread that’s light as domestic comfort, secret as

death in bed... Spasms in his throat continue. The pain

is terrible. With his tongue he mashes shit against the roof

of his mouth and ni gon to chew, thickly now, the only

sound in the room.

. There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he

has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He

prays that she'll let him drop the cape over himself, to be

allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer

with his submissive tongue straining upward into her ass-

hole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his

hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has

watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has learned

the proper style. ~

The Brigadier comes quickly. The rich’ Goer of semen

fills the room like smoke.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49642672)

Gravity’s Rainbow is a sprawling, postmodern novel set primarily during the final months of World War II, orbiting around the mysterious German V-2 rocket. The story follows Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant whose sexual encounters appear to predict the landing sites of the rockets in London. This bizarre correlation draws the attention of military intelligence, scientists, and shadowy organizations, all eager to decode—or exploit—the pattern. From the outset, the novel establishes a world where technology, desire, and power are tangled in ways that defy conventional logic.

As Slothrop moves across war-torn Europe, the narrative splinters into dozens of subplots and perspectives. Pynchon introduces an enormous cast of characters—engineers, spies, psychologists, soldiers, and opportunists—each representing different institutions and obsessions of the modern world. The rocket becomes less a weapon than a symbol: of scientific ambition, bureaucratic control, and humanity’s compulsion to surrender agency to systems it barely understands. Cause and effect blur, and paranoia feels less like madness than a rational response to overwhelming complexity.

A major theme of the novel is control—who has it, who thinks they have it, and how it is exercised through technology and data. The V-2 rocket, falling faster than sound, embodies a terrifying future in which destruction arrives before awareness. Slothrop’s own body is treated as a data source, conditioned by experiments and tracked by authorities, suggesting that individuals themselves are reducible to inputs in vast mechanized systems. Free will, if it exists at all, seems fragile and compromised.

Pynchon’s style reinforces these ideas through radical shifts in tone and form. Dense technical passages sit beside slapstick comedy, obscene songs, cartoonish episodes, and philosophical digressions. The novel constantly undermines narrative stability, refusing clear resolutions or moral anchors. This deliberate excess mirrors the information overload and moral confusion of the modern age, forcing the reader to experience disorientation rather than merely read about it.

In its final movement, Gravity’s Rainbow abandons the hope of neat conclusions. Slothrop dissolves into the narrative, and the focus turns fully to the rocket’s arc—both literal and metaphorical—as a trajectory toward an uncertain future. The novel ultimately suggests that history is not a coherent story but a convergence of forces beyond individual comprehension. What remains is the unsettling recognition that technology, desire, and power continue to shape the world long after the war ends, still falling, still accelerating, still just out of reach of understanding.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49642271)

I generally like books where I stay completely lost for most of it (Book of the New Sun, Dhalgren), but I'm having a real tough time with this one.

Going to switch to print and try to sound things out.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49642412)

But you aren’t wrong, it definitely probably has some effect, and when listening to GR I am lost.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49642898)

GR actually starts relatively tight and easygoing and then gradually spirals out and away into a sprawling maze of narrative threads and discourses. All of it is intentional obviously. It’s sort of like Catch 22 which was one of the only contemporary novels I’ve ever read that I thought was truly great.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49642516)

this is fairly straightforward, too. the focus on the parabolic arcs of the V2 rockets is a direct reference to causality bending 'beyond the zero' and back around to the observer (slothrop)'s perceived 'present.'

but slothtrop is not a magical character. he can only experience his reality via normal 3D geometry and linear time. the gap between his perception and the actual elliptical structure of his timeline seems like a more general attempt to bring 70's-era developments in physics (quantum processes; multi-dimensional universes where 3D observers can only see slices of higher-dimensional phenomena) into literature. pynchon was an engineer, after all.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49643161)

it doesn't really illuminate anything in an immediate way like a lot of great literature is capable of doing.

it's the purest of scholarly treats.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49643233)

I'm skeptical, not anti-intellectual. Enough to know that intellectuals themselves are subject to their own vanities and that extends to the literature they promote. Not everything is East of Eden.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49643326)

Mr. Bridge by Evan Connell. The companion volume, Mrs. Bridge, is worth a read too.

A River Runs Through it by Norman Maclean

Many of the Trollope novels. Especially the Barchester ones though the Palliser novels are enjoyable too. Bit of an acquired taste.

Middlemarch (referenced in this thread) isn't bad.

The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells struck me in a way I didn't expect.

Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence and Booth Tarkington's the Magnificent Ambersons.

Much more recent is The Son by Philipp Meyer. Not going to claim it's great literature but it was a good old fashioned story of endurance.

Don't have too much time to read these days, unfortunately. But from what I can tell there isn't much good new fiction being published anyway. Recently been reading Tom Holland's Roman empire histories.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49645732)

I guess I'm ultimately a Montesquieuan who is also guide by Montaigne's immanent contentment. And the good old fashioned morality of Agatha Christie's mysteries. To me, that's the answer to the meaning of life.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49643431)

Christie is straightforward old fashioned morality. No fussying around with pretend identities and being more appealed by murderers and their psychological problems than the victims. The reference to outmoded Christian morals is true, and it's something we've lost sight of in modern society to our disadvantage. Suspect you don't have a clue what you like to think you're sneering at.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49645756)

You read it to get a good sense, and then you turn back to the Western canon

and you renew your desire to genocide the jews

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5830201&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310752#49643986)