/lit/ - Literature

Considering some "Great American Novel" types.

Currently considering:
>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
>Lolita
>Gravity's Rainbow
>Great Gatsby

Did you like any of these in particular? Or, are there others you would strongly recommend?

For context, I've recently enjoyed:
>East of Eden
>The Tartar Steppe
>Blood Meridian
>The Fortress
>Journey to the End of Night

What do I need to read before GR?
People say that Lot49 and V are prerequisites, but really? Or can I just jump to GR?

>calvinism is... LE BAD
Uh, okay?

>>22975767
Pynchon tells you to go check out Ishmael Reed in Gravity's Rainbow.

when i read this book it just gives me a feeling no other book gives me. it just has so much soul and character. i don't know what it is.

I've had it sitting in my closet for a few years, and I'm kind of tempted to go at it.

Wait i thought you guys were memeing, this fucks

>The greatest American novel ever written
>It's unsurprisingly 800 pages of shit-eating and schizo word soup
Laugh at Americans as they have no literature. Y'all seriously make your high-schoolers read this? LMAO no wonder so many go rampage at their schools.

favorite episode in gr?

>A creaming cums across the guy.
Ummm... gay much?

Can we have a Pynchon general? Discussing themes, motives etc. from his works.

I read V., Slow Learner and now I'm some 60% done with Gravity's Rainbow. What's with this fixation on weird shit? Like, the main theme of the the two World Wars decimating all cultural norms and ways of living, hence people becoming more and more disturbed.

I think I even picked up the Pavlovian ideas he has in the book. Oh and for sure the way he writes Slothrop actually makes me feel paranoid. When he mentioned Imipolex when Katje was getting raped by n*zis in the castle I actually wondered what the fuck is going on with the story.

What's the big idea behind GR, /lit/? You're literati, you should be able to answer this.

IG Farben and General Electric did WWII, wake up sheeple!

>>20988819
>MGS and Deus Ex
Read Pynchon.

why the fuck are copies of gr with this cover so hard to find reasonably priced and not totally fucked-up-level used
idgaf if its hardcover or paperback just want this version
any anons got links to sales / copies for sale

Just started reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm really enjoying the prose but I also I feel I'm not grasping it comepletely. What are /lit/'s thoughts on it?

>>17050045
For me? It's the original cover of GR or bust

"His cramps alleviated when he finally gave to his captor’s struggle, to seize like a feral caught in the maw of a terrible beast’s an unsavory way to spend one’s final moments alive… but the terror now afflicting his neurons, a distress signal sent to frenzy the quartz within his heart to implode, pushes his system to do things he’s never done before—the skin flush, wet with sweat all of sudden, hot then cold, and his colon, careless to his plight, just unleashes… oh no, the dread tenfold… just so helpless, callow in the face as it contorts in pleads, images of youth… dragged through scenes of urbanite decay, concrete chipped by Lord knows what, urine-scent stabbing through his swollen nose, hallways and antechambers lacquered by the wet feet of comings-and-goings, lecherous red lights in iron-latticed fixtures. Slothrop’s crying. He’s regressing further… helpless as a dumbfounded college kid, new to a dorm, slightly confused by the seething testosterone he can feel in the air, in the shapes of those freshman lads, as they struggled so with their cardboard boxes, their pulsating forearms sure to be sore, and oh, the Big One… The Black One, the athlete, lean, the light just sliding off his wild skin-kissed complexion, and how he could throttle young Slothrop, deliver the impassioned might of the whole continent of Africa directly inside him: the bruteness, the brashness, the filth and dirt and smearing of sclera upon naked bodies in Bacchic rites, the sweet reverse colonization… helpless in the arms of these brutes."

Why are American writers so obsessed with being sexually humiliated? Is it an American thing?

"The sacrosanct pillars erected just before the last fall, upon the precipice of a new epoch, are plotted to crumble just before the great recalibration… the luminous year ingrained in the stone of some certain buildings that appear in every town, like nodes of a system of flux that powers the gnarled hand who so freely plucks from both the Prince and the pauper, in which the great arbiters did descend upon a new and frantic plane… and now a framework so vast it’s best seen from Sirius to grasp the maddening nature is built, caustic to the soul-essence of those who once basked in the amber vials of sunlight and slept amidst a copse and fire under the platinum calligraphy of the stars; a huckster’s sleight of hand and limp smile led a once-merry race of hairless apes to a great game of trading ghosts and betting against Death’s card being drawn… all for naught, now as the necks bend skyward and maws open slack, a chicken’s reckoning under a callous blade, in anticipation for a cosmic power to fuse sinew to blackened pavement, in a hot flash of white, an end… the choir of contorted souls float up in sprites, and the feedback of the transferal feeds a sweet melody suffused all around, whose words spread clear all the Mysteries abound, and all they sang–

Is it worth it? Let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it
Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup
Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup
If you got a big, let me search ya
And find out how hard I gotta work ya
Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup
Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup."

>the shit eating scene

Bros... was Pynchon trying to tell everyone he, hell, dare I even say it, was m-made for BBC? Bros...

"The ironclad wastes of the Eagles Nest atop Kehlsteinhaus was a portent to the Zone’s grip; 3rd Infantrymen flowing from the burned façade with whatever sensible treasures sans soot they could get their hands on. Slothrop sits on a tree trunk glaring at the mountainside air, hawks encircling above while fawns inspect craters below, mother deer projecting a plea to follow her, a bid away from the people and their silly war… and the Spring seeps from all the hollowed streams underground, bestowing waters like the Styx for consumption to forget this terrible time… and the celebrations of hops fueling the carnal conquistadors, supposedly on the good side, shouts pangs at the unfolding sky, as clear now as the crystalline waters of some private beach where eyes cannot gaze upon the perdition of Men Of Folly—a chance flight out to cremate the care of pernicious beings. A net gain nowhere in sight to him. A dawning of some terrible truth… imagined marionette strings dangling from the fingertips of some gnarled wizard’s hands, placating the disgust of spilling viscera upon the green aisles of Europe, warding off the Angels who now float, watching, stretched spread-eagle in the penumbra of the Moon, wallowing as their wings are clipped and spinal fluid fills the space like plasma… the Farben techocrates, whose chants and sigils were spread across the Atlantic, can now feast upon five-course celebrations at black-tie events. The Burnt Offering accepted. All Theater. Terrible Theater."

Are you among the desperately redpilled few who know that the whole war was nothing more than a power grab by the elite, using the bodies of military as a sacrifice to their Gods? That IG Farben was a company with no clear nationalistic allegiances?
What say you, /lit/?

"A dire hit, and a new advent calendar to collocate the sins of all, as it fell like a strange angel from the sky, heating the air just above, and the flux of the human bodies singed like shadows upon the beaten concrete; and now they walk in the most dreadful daze, sinew unfolding from their faces, faces feeling the tingle of the invisible, passing pillars afflicted by heat, burning the untold number of eyes upon the deathly plane … domes meant to command the sky now seep into waste, their latticed ironwork exposed like the bones of a beast after the hunt, cut and torn by a butcher’s deft hand, wallowing in the awful atmosphere… children whose flesh is now sliding off, mothers in an obsidian death grip, clawing at the air, bloodying their throats with a banshee’s howl… all caught in an unforeseen light… and how was this all worth it? how in God’s secret name did the will of Caesars unfurl into the soft minds of civilians to fight and tear until their last nail is ripped from their fingers, to formulate a trance far-reaching like a virus across our Nations, and how they seem so bewildering in the strata of the cosmic bomb. There are no more answers from now on.

A new life where one Saturn return is
More than enough to bruise the rinds of us
Before we slip into an awful sleep.
Centuries will slog, continuing in
Awful affect, time’s maladies will
Become more apparent, more resentful,
As the imprisoned God will shake his cage.
We will no longer know calm days of saffron
Sunsets that guide into the wild of night.
Perpetual blackout, defiled karma.
Let us rest above the thunderstorms while
Choronzon’s maw moves its way across the
Wasted planes of the nuclear winter."

Was the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? Or were the men in suits merely playing with their new toys?

You guys weren't lying when you said it was amazing. Good but confusing as fuck, should I reread it next year or something?

It's really good but confusing/hard as fuck sometimes. I wish pinecone could take some extra time to actually explain most of the lore he
's chucking at me and expects me to understand it. I was cringing so hard at the youknowwhat scene.

>The formulations of the priest class unseen by uncalibrated eyes, forming the bleeding humanity, forced to the edge of so much horror for so long, in to vessels of light; how so many souls fell into the furnace all this time, smoltified and sublimated back to Earth. Into the tangled orchids of Apolloyon for so long, basking in the secret gnarls of time suspended, as we can spill into the stars with spirited Will, gone from the days of forlorn Gravitation and clockwork; A Rocket; A Great equalizer to the taunting sky so far above… how squabbles rooted in the toils of conquest and carnal passion, a competition of shame-inducing rituals to keep with you at home… oh please, rise above the failures of this taught flesh; come back and align us to a middle way; our failures of definition come to crumble like the stone pillars of old, and then forever free to see your fellow as a true equal; Hermaphroditic Humans and a descent upon chariots; New tablets, schematics… Trismegistus Timex in jeweled emerald; An Everyman’s Time Piece, now and forever.

What did he mean by this? Is Tom secretly a tranny?