The Great German Novel

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"... Yes, sort of German, these episodes here. Well, these days Slothrop is even dreaming in the language. Folks have been teaching him dialects, Plattdeutsch for the zone the British plan to occupy, Thuringian if the Russians happen not to drive as far as Nordhausen, where the central rocket works is located. Along with the language teachers come experts in ordnance, electronics and aerodynamics, and a fellow from Shell International Petroleum named Hillary Bounce, who is going to teach him about propulsion ..." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 240)

> ... On its first page, “Gravity’s Rainbow” seems to make a sly reference to Mann’s Naphta, who claims in “The Magic Mountain” that terror is “what our age demands.” (...) But I would have no qualms about staking this book’s claim to be the Great German Novel; not in the sense, obviously, of being the best novel written by a German, but rather as a work in which the historical trajectory of German literary culture — the progression through Idealism and Romanticism to Nazi-fringed ­techno-mysticism and beyond — attains both its apex and its most spectacular cloudburst. I kept thinking, as I listened to Guidall, of a line in Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” where he describes homelessness as the “summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.” Virtually every one of Pynchon’s characters is homeless or displaced, wandering the earth’s great bombed-out Zone in search of some abode: a homeland, house or simply bed to spend the night in (if you like, a coefficient). Even the novel’s insects crave this: We see cockroaches trying to establish temporary dwellings in the “mysterious sheaf of vectors” of a straw bed even as their nibbling causes their small “tenement-world” to crumble. The scene is reprised later beneath a “lambent, all seeing” electric bulb — but first time round it plays out in the Christ-child’s crib in Bethlehem, under that other annunciating star. The prevalence of cockroaches points, of course, to the writer (also Germanophone) to whom Pynchon perhaps owes most of all: Kafka. The prisoners of “In the Penal Colony” are strapped into a giant killing-machine that writes in code on their own skin; as they die, angelic children stationed by their side, they’re meant to get a final burst of revelation — but the only subject whom we actually watch undergo the ritual is granted no such grace on his demise. The same holds true in “Gravity’s Rainbow” ... <

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/gravitys-rainbow-read-by-george-guidall.html

> ... Thomas Pynchon is the Richard Wagner of American fiction. This isn't only because his magnum opus, "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973), about the quest for a devastating V-2 rocket secreted inside Nazi Germany, both parodies and embraces the epic Teutonic insanity of the Ring Cycle. There's also a stylistic kinship: Mr. Pynchon's writing is startling, mesmeric, bombastic. He has a hideous genius ... <

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323846504579071433982952074

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