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Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (Paperback, 1974, Bantam Books) 5 stars

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets …

Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkom-mando. But he did talk about the Schwarzgerät. And he also coupled "schwarz-" with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that came through. Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream. ... The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop's Blackwords only appear to flower separately? Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, ana-lyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words. . . .

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