The Recognitions (New York Review Books Classics)

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It is certainly a complex structure (.....) It is a novel about forgery of all kinds and all the ambiguities involved in the concept of “imitation.” (...) Any attempted summary of character and incident would be both impossible and inappropriate. To talk of the characters and their language, and the events which together they compose and decompose, as if they were stable entities is misleading in such a world. It is here that Gaddis shows some of his most original handling of the novel form. (...) (U)ltimately I think this is a religious book." - Tony Tanner, The New York Times Book Review He is not a copyist, and he dismisses those forgers who pull "the fragments of ten paintings together" to make a new one. Interwoven in the three parts of the book (and an unnumbered epilogue) are the tales of many other characters, among them Otto, a struggling writer; Esme, a muse; and Stanley, a musician. The epilogue follows Stanley's adventures further. He achieves his goal to play his work on the organ of the church of Fenestrula "pulling all the stops". The church collapses, killing him, yet "most of his work was recovered ..., and is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played." The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

He is creating anew, and as though he were a painter from those times: "I'm a master painter in the Guild, in Flanders," he claims, not a modern reproductionist. The novel is peopled with a wide cast of characters, whose stories intersect with Wyatt’s but have their own stories. There is Otto Pivner, the would-be revolutionary and dramatist, who has an affair with Esther, Wyatt’s wife. Esme is a heroin addict who has an affair with Wyatt. Basil Valentine is an art critic who authenticates Wyatt’s forgeries while the beautifully named Agnes Deigh is the literary agent who rejects Otto’s play for, what else?, plagiarism. Religion is a key factor in the novel, from Aunt May’s puritanical fanaticism to Wyatt’s father’s experiments, ending up with Mithraism and his own crucifixion. Indeed, virtually all the main characters seem to change their identities, with Wyatt being called Stephen and working in a monastery, Esme becoming a nun and Otto working as a medical assistant.While the entire book is incredible the two opening chapters are especially captivating and I knew early on I was reading a writing style which is the DNA of so much of the writing I admire. It’s the prototype of Delillo, Gass, Pynchon and Salinger. Especially Delillo. Among the multitudes in “The Recognitions,” there’s Otto, a young playwright who spends his days filling a notebook with overheard conversations; when he submits his patchwork quilt to an agent named Agnes Deigh (and yeah, get ready for some crazy puns), she tells him the play sounds really familiar, and rejects him. In several long (to my mind, too-long) New York arty-party scenes, we first hear the voices of numerous characters who will come and go throughout the novel. Time itself is merely alluded to, albeit powerfully, in poetic descriptions of the sky and city in day and night. Everything in Gaddis is experiential. He is cerebral, yet he is one of the most sensual writers in fiction. See the face on the book cover? That is my face now as I finish this book. That was my face every step of the way. Franzen compared the novel to a "huge landscape painting of modern New York, peopled with hundreds of doomed but energetic little figures, executed on wood panels by Brueghel or Bosch." [8] He believed that its disappointing reception negatively affected Gaddis's future development as a novelist. [8] Gaddis did not publish another novel for 20 years. El arcano, lo oculto, los restos de antiguas creencias como el culto a Mitra y la adoración al sol, impregnan todo el texto. España se presenta como un lugar especial donde lo mágico aún no ha sido erradicado, en contraste con un París tomado por los turistas americanos y donde ya nada es auténtico.

As I made my progress through the novel, I decided to make a Glossary of Key Words, almost all of which were Abstractions. There are colors- Colors of the patient sky and impatient homes. Colors of Flemish paintings and forged wonders. Colors of innovative minds and frustrated hearts. Colors of a colorful history and colorless present. And a quest. A quest for identifying real and fake behind the several layers of these colors that emphasize the purity of a blank canvass and the misery of a disquieted soul. I became acquainted with many new shades whose existence was unknown to me. What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason?Life proved terrible enough by the 1950s to produce in The Recognitions the most "Russian" novel in American literature. Gaddis's love for nineteenth-century Russian literature in general crops up in his novels, his letters, and in his few lectures, where references are made to the major works of Dostoyevski, Tolstoy (especially the plays), Gogol, Turgenev, Gorky, Goncharov, and Chekhov. Gaddis shares with these authors not only their metaphysical concerns and often bizarre sense of humor, but their nationalistic impulses as well. - William Gaddis by Steven Moore the sea which has lots the glare of sunrise. The sea, romantic in books, or dreams or conversation, symbol in poetry, the mother, the last lover, and here it was, none of those things before him. Romantic? This heaving senseless actuality? alive? evil? symbolic? shifting its surfaces, of blind life and death. Boundlessly neither yes or no, good nor evil, hope nor fear, pretending to all these things in the eyes that first beheld it, but unchanged since then, still its colour, heaving with the indifferent hunger of all actuality.” There is everything- Including a plot which I didn’t describe and several names which I didn’t take, the beauty which is inexplicable and ugliness that is inevitable, a madness which is the sanest and sanity which is fatal; this book certainly have everything to give a reader small but substantial rewards which slowly and steadily culminates into a nonpareil experience. Gaddis intended his complex novel, full of characters whose lives intertwine, to be challenging. He said later: Eliot and Dostoyevski are the most significant names here; none of Gaddis's reviewers described The Recognitions as The Waste Land rewritten by Dostoyevski (with additional dialogue by Ronald Firbank), but that would be a more accurate description than the Ulysses parallel so many of them harped upon. Not only do Gaddis's novels contain dozens of "whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot," but The Recognitions can be read as an epic sermon using The Waste Land as its text. The novel employs the same techniques of reference, allusion, collage, multiple perspective, and contrasting voices; the same kinds of fire and water imagery drawn from religion and myth; and both call for the same kinds of artistic, moral, and religious sensibilities.

a b c Franzen, Jonathan (September 30, 2002). "Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on January 22, 2011 . Retrieved February 2, 2011– via adilegian.com.I felt throbbing within my breast the thrill of a deep emotion which I was powerless to describe, as I approached the soaring walls after an exhausting climb, and reached up to pull the cord on the centuries old bell. Its gentle voice sounding distantly just as it must have on that sunny day (snowy might be) when Saint x (to fill in) appeared at this same door…”

He invited me there, in fact, to see the mummy. He had made one himself for me! Oh, but with such ingenuity, it was really a masterpiece… Grossman; Lacayo, Richard (October 16, 2005). "All Time 100 Novels". Time. Archived from the original on October 19, 2005 . Retrieved February 2, 2011. JR” is the same story, only different. The protagonist is another aspiring artist, Edward Bast, who wants to make beautiful music but gets dragged down by a world of money and dull jobs. (“ Money” is, appropriately, the first word in the novel.) In a series of escalatingly chaotic scenes, Edward gets tied up in the financial schemes of a sixth-grade boy named JR Vansant, who manipulates everyone to help him build an empire-on-paper that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Meanwhile, everyone loses everything that matters, while the world fills up with junk bonds, junk mail, junk education, junk food and junk art. There's a great deal in this book, and Gaddis ties a remarkable amount of it together, rarely in obvious ways.

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Wyatt, of all the pretenders, changes to become a truth seeker. Most of the other characters loiter at the right bars, attend fashionable parties, and go sightseeing at the correct places. They gossip, drink, develop their images, and, whenever they can, because they have nothing better to do, antagonize and distract the moral characters. Hannah tells Anselm to “shut up,” “go home,” and “take a nap” when he and Stanley discuss religion. Don Bildow asks Stanley for methyltestosterone (“I’m with this girl, see”) and later “the Italian word for contraceptive” when Stanley frantically pursues Esme.