I'll just start off and say that I am not sure if I am smart enough to fully understand the book, or I might need a second read to get a better grasp on things, so this is mostly my attempt to sound smarter than I actually am.
There were too many parts in it, for me, that dragged on but the main reason I pushed on through them was because when it got good it just soared with the writing, when everything wasn't devastating or just horrid there still amazing things to be found in this world. As I read on through and was wondering if any of this was supposed to make sense, I thought of that quote Martin Scorsese said about Good Fellas where the underworld was a character in itself, so through the rest of the book it made more sense to me to see that war was the main character and the only vessel it has to communicate itself is through the frail mindset of all the soldiers caught up in it as they all refuse to ask themselves, "Why did this need to happen?" I loved the book but I think I might need to read it again because I guarantee I missed something.
Anywho, if anyone else has read it then I'd love to know your thoughts.
by NotBorris
4 Comments
Heard a good podcast on it a while back—Great American books or something like that. One of the pod guys is about as confused as you but the other has good points.
I read this decades ago because I’d read Infinite Jest which was often compared to GR.
And the reading experiences were kind of similar. I didn’t get much out of them in terms of a single narrative “story.” Rather, they were just oppressive walls of text out of which I had to mine for moments to enjoy.
So I have memories of particular parts I liked, some I liked a lot, but I have no real sense of a story that happened with a beginning, middle, and end.
I read it last year and thought it was hilarious. There are large parts that are references to other books (esp James Joyce). The voice/tone of the book is sarcastic or ironic, kind of like Catch-22, with lots of silliness. So my biggest tip to people trying it out is that it’s very funny.
When he started describing a dog fight happening with pie-throwing I got the sense he was not taking this too seriously and neither should I.