GR Cliffs Notes?!

[Joshua Fruhlinger]

I found this a couple minutes ago and must relay it to the list.  I
apologize if this has been copied here before...from rec.arts.books:

A synopsis of Gravity's Rainbow ? The work of a moment !!

There's this rocket, right, which looks exactly like the rocket in
"Explorers on the Moon", you know like
Tintin, and it travels faster than the speed of sound, so you don't hear it
until after it's hit. Oh, I should've
said, this is all in the Second World War. So, starting with bananas,
there's this English officer named Pirate
Prentice who has a friend, a US Army officer, both of them based in London,
named Tyrone Slothrop, whose
name is an anagram of "Sloth or Entropy" though it doesn't say so in the
book, and Slothrop, descended from
a long line of New England Slothrops and terrified of being sodomised by
large black men ever since he got
drunk and dropped his harmonica down a toilet in which he happened, at the
time, to be drunkenly vomiting,
Slothrop, as I was saying, gets an erection every time one of the rockets
is going to fall on London. This
attracts thge attention of the scientists Pointsman and Spectro, working at
The White Visitation, a scientific
establishment on the cliffs of Dover. Pointsman is a Pavlovian and second
cousin to Burroughs' Dr. Benway
but, again, it doesn't say so in the book and since il n'y'a hors de texte
I'd forget about that line of inquiry
right now. Slothrop, distraught, having been fed disgusting sweets by the
mother of a girlfriend (incidentally,
you can still get Meggezones here and they're every bit as disgusting),
leaves for the Casino Hermann
Goering where he rescues the mysterious Katje Borgesius from a
specially-trained octopus whose name
escapes me for the present moment if Einstein was wrong and there is indeed
such a thing. Once he's there he
starts to go on a hunt for the mysterious 00000 rocket (that's it's
codenumber), all of which is linked to the
living plastic Imipolex G and the fate of Gottfried, a blond Aryan boy who
had been held with Katje in sexual
slavery by the rocket troop commander Enzian. Slothrop also attracts the
unwelcome contumely of a
malevolent US intelligence officer and full-time bigot, Major Marvy, but
fortunately eludes him by discarding
his pig outfit which Major Marvy puts on and in which he is subsequently,
having been mistaken for Slothrop
by a group of, of, I forget who they were but it's too late to stop now,
castrated. Slothrop, meanwhile, heads
further into the Zone and at one point fucks (can I say "fucks" ?) the
pre-pubescent Bianca, daughter of a
legendary German film star who's one part Dietrich and in terms of
cohabiting with Nazis, two parts
Riefenstahl. Bianca subsequently disappears and Slothrop, who's something
of a schlemiehl, if you'll excuse
the profanity, blunders on in search of the 00000, which is being operated
by (or was once in the custody of)
a group of black German soldiers called the Schwarzkommando, all that's
left of the all-but exterminated
Herero people (a real massacre, look it up) and now a demoralised group of
rocket troops. There's also a
subplot, involving Roger Mexico and his hopeless pursuit of Jessica
Swanlake, and I could've mentioned
Peter Sachsa and the rocket engineer Mondaugen who's also a character in
Pynchon's earlier novel "V", but
they're subordinate, in a sense, to the Slothrop tale, which winds up on
the back of an album cover. But, a
word of advice, the second that projector breaks down, leave the f***ing
cinema. I hope this was of
assistance.


___________________________________________
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