Finished "Gravity's Rainbow", after a year of intermittent reading. Maddening, brilliant book with a frustrating, confusing end. It's still too fresh for me to think about how that chaotic, bizarre, unresolved ending might be intended as a mirror (or twisted exemplar) for how all human lives wend their way to one fragmented ending or another.
This line near the end is rendered freakishly difficult to understand by the context of the surrounding sentences:
"The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple."
If I see oceans of meaning in that sentence, lifetimes of possible reinterpretations, it's because I have not yet shaken off the spell of "Gravity's Rainbow".
I love when fiction casts spells like that. Out of context, it looks almost silly - yet I can guess how Pynchon might earn it. Maybe this is the year when I finally give Gravity's Rainbow its due?
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