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In Part 4, Episode 11, just before the explosive finale, Pynchon gives us a stunning, beautifully written anticlimax. It's one of the most moving chapters in the book, coming quite unexpectedly amidst the 776-page buildup to...no spoilers. "This is magic. Sure--but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it."

End of Part 3, the long, paranoid trip (rocket search? or is that a big red—uh, Black—herring?) through the channels and manifestations of power in “The Zone” of Europe in the few weeks after the end of WW2…one of “dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity." Can any pockets of European freedom survive in the final part?

“You follow the edge of the storm…as long as you stay always right at the edge between fair lowlands and the madness of Donar it does not fail you, whatever it is that flies, this carrying drive toward—is it freedom? Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the interface of the thunder?”

Finished Part 1: the cold, dark, dangerous London winter of December 1944, with rockets raining down, and mysterious psychological happenings. But lightening the depressing holiday season is found the sentence: "Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now to look like a cat." GR is also funny all the way through.

Just read Part 1, Episode 14, the first really difficult section, nested analepses, deep, dark and disturbing. This is where the novel begins to widen and take on its epic dimensions, yet it's only a glimmer of the massive construction still to come. Second time through is even better than the first...

Followship done.