Thomas Pynchon is, along with Salinger, the "great American recluse", one of the greatest writers of world literature of the XX and now the XXI century, after the very first publications, unanimously recognized as a classic of the level of Nabokov, Joyce and Borges. His "Rainbow of Gravity" is the main post—war novel of world literature, which absorbed the second half of the 20th century, just as Joyce's "Ulysses" absorbed the first. It is a grandiose postmodern epic and caustic satire, a tragedy multiplied by farce and a radical anti-war statement, a countercultural bible and an explosive mixture of irony and conspiracy theory; finally, it is a unique reader's experience and a surreal travelogue through the underworld of our collective past. Without the Rainbow of Gravity, there would be neither Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, nor the whole cyberpunk taken together, and the landscape of modern literature itself would be completely different. For almost half a century now, new meanings have been discovered in this book every day, but the only correct reading remains, fortunately, unattainable. Having received the main American literary award — the National Book Award of the USA, nominated for a dozen other prestigious awards and, with its radicalism, caused an avalanche of resignations of venerable juries, "Gravity's Rainbow" remains outside the evaluation scale and timeless.