Gravity's Rainbow

By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design

Narrated by: George Guidall

Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

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 20th 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.

©1973 Thomas Pynchon (P)2014 Penguin Audio

Fixed!

I'd just like to point out that as of currently (Dec 2017) the audiobook has been fixed, and the repeated sections have been edited out.

If any readers were holding out because of what other reviews have mentioned, you no longer need to worry, as the audiobook has been properly re-edited.

Perfect for A Few

There are three books that changed my life after I read them. The first was The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, the second was Moby Dick by Herman Melville and the third was - yeah you guessed it - this one. Gravity's Rainbow is funny, beautiful, gross, ridiculous, wistful, heartbreaking, evocative, rebellious ... any word you can think of describes it. Except for short. Not a day goes by where this book doesn't come into my thoughts. This audio version is very well read. One of the masterworks of American fiction. Check it out

This is a hard book to listen to it

George Guidall does a great job of narrating this complicated novel, but I found it challenging to follow the plot of the novel. If you want to really understand this book I think reading it visually is a better strategy. However, I still enjoyed the book and accepted that I would be confused a lot. It's a strange, compelling, and frequently disturbing story, and Pynchon does not tie up a lot of the threads he introduces. I found that it gets much more engaging after the war ends and the story becomes much more colorful.

Psychedelic Romp

It would take an entire book to accurately describe what this book is about. As one reviewer put it, "every sentence is a research project."

I found it nearly impossible to figure out wtf was going on most of the time without a guide; even then, you can't have a guide for every sentence.

I gave it 5 stars because it is a brilliant work of art, but that certainly doesn't mean it will appeal to everyone - many will hate it or simply give up on it.

Despite the inherent difficulties of narrating this beast of a book, I didn't care for the staccato style presentation. The chapter breaks seemed random.

Interesting and dark Cold War novel.

Sort of a mash-up of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, with maybe some Lolita thrown in.
For those who didn’t live through the era, it says a lot about how the tension and ecstasy of victory in WWII turned almost instantly into the Cold War, with a killer that would get you without warning.

70's counter culture explained with humor

Talking light bulbs and other insights
into the socio-economic structure on planet earth as the somewhat deviant characters proceed in life

Wow

This is outrageous and awesome. Good luck getting through it! I'd suggest reading along with a text and occasionally stopping to make a note or two, but just keep plowing through!

Brilliant masterpiece

This really is a brilliant masterpiece but a difficult read and disjointed. It's hard to keep the characters and scenes straight. George Guidall read it well but there was a glitch in the narration where some of it repeated toward the end of the book.

Epic in every way

Obviously the novel is amazing; I've read it several times over the years but this is the first time I used the audio too - The reader does a great job coping with the challenges of convoluted sentences and paragraphs, crazy names, multiple languages, insane science and history, and a panoply of characters who all are important - He manages to do it all - The problem with this audio though is that the chapter divisions are random and make navigation between the text, audio, and commentary extremely difficult

Great narration enlivened a long book

I had read this a few years ago, but George Guidall brings a fittingly wry, poignant, and spirited voice to Pynchon and his long epic.

You may wish to read this in tandem or before the audio book, as allusions defy easy comprehension. There is an online wiki that I recommend. Still, there is fun in letting the book carry you along its vertiginous trajectory