The Recognitions (New York Review Books Classics)

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I confess I did not have heart to finish our business so immediately, I spent a few minutes congratulating him. He became very angry when I appeared to question the… authenticity? of this thing, but he was very proud. I saw in his eyes, he was very proud, when we finished our business together. 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. As I made my progress through the novel, I decided to make a Glossary of Key Words, almost all of which were Abstractions. Frank Sinisterra "...he found himself rescued from oblivion by agents of that country not Christian enough to rest assured in the faith that he would pay fully for his sins in the next world....he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisection." Gaddis has a style of writing that I easily respond to. His themes are ones I want to read and think about.

Lingan, John. "William Gaddis, the Last Protestant". The Quarterly Conversation . Retrieved February 3, 2011. Names are dropped, languages flourished (there are exchanges in Spanish and Hungarian and a fair number of bits in other languages), works of art -- musical, visual, literary -- referred to. Needless to say, it is a perfect introduction, both to Gaddis and The Recognitions, a welcome little bonus. Crémer's shrug still hung in his shoulders, and he emphasized it with a twitch, throwing the exact lines of his neat blue suit off, for it was a thing of careful French construction, and fit only when the figure inside it was apathetically erect, arms hung at the sides, at which choice moment the coat stood up neat and square as a box, and the trousers did not billow as they did in walking, but hung in wide envelopes with all the elegance that right angles confer, until they broke over the shoes, which they were, fortunately, almost wide enough at the bottoms, and enough too long, to cover.Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they’re so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure.”

There's a great deal in this book, and Gaddis ties a remarkable amount of it together, rarely in obvious ways. The love I have from others is not love of me, but where they try to find themselves, loving me. I dream and I wake up, and then at that moment you are somewhere ring real to other people; and they are part of your reality; and I am not.. But you are the only person I am real with..”The old Aunt May who raises him is a hard woman, yet oh, she breaks one's heart too, "when she made things, even her baking, she kept the blinds closed in the butler's pantry when she frosted a cake, nobody ever saw anything of hers until it was done". Fuller "We would believe that Fuller had had a childhood only in helpless empiricism, because we all have. But it was as unreal to him by now as to anyone looking at his face, where time had long since stopped experimenting. That childhood was like a book read, misplaced, forgotten, to be recalled when one sees another copy, the cheap edition in a railway station newsstand, which is bought, thumbed through, and like as not left on the train when the station is called."

IN WHICH WYATT EMPTIES THE POT ON WHICH HE MEDITATED FOR AN HOUR OR SO EACH MORNING INTO A FLOOR REGISTER. 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. He is not a copyist, and he dismisses those forgers who pull "the fragments of ten paintings together" to make a new one. She dies, and the Reverend has her interred in Catholic Spain -- something that the Aunt May who runs his household and then helps raise young Wyatt can never forgive or comprehend.

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Gioia, Ted (September 20, 2013). " The Recognitions: William Gaddis's Novel About Forgery". Fractious Fiction. Some of the many motifs that run through The Recognitions: the constant random snatches of overheard conversations are like a Greek chorus; Christianity is relentlessly contrasted to its pagan origin; characters pause in distress to brush a spot of moonlight off the sleeve; mirrors - distorting, creating, confirming, paralyzing "Wyatt was sent to bed for saying he could not move, as though the mirrors in the arms of the cross on the wall had gripped him from behind". Art, so much art - paintings, sculptures, churches, ornaments. Mummies and babies, roses and lavender, windows. Body parts. And death: suicide, murder, disease, drowning, calamity. The ship's doctor is, in fact, a con man (a forger) masquerading as a doctor, the appropriately named Mr. Sinisterra (who continues to figure prominently in the novel) who cannot help Camilla. The effort is worth it, for this book is a delight. But never mind - it stands on its own even if we don't get all the references. As Jonathan Franzen says about it, "Peel away the erudition, and you have The Catcher in the Rye: a grim winter sojourn in a seedy Manhattan, a quest for authenticity in a phony modern world."

While not overly complex, much of the novel is in the form of dialogue and it is often not immediately clear which characters are involved in the conversation and who is speaking.

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The novel is dark (and there is certainly no happy ending) but there is a great deal of humour throughout. No se entiende nada. No está escrito para que lo entiendas. En muchas páginas he tenido la impresión de estar descifrando un acertijo o un jeroglífico más que leyendo. He sido salvada por la monumental Reader's Guide de Steven Moore. Si leía la sinopsis después del capítulo, me quedaba asombrada de las cosas que habían pasado sin enterarme: 'Así que aquel ha matado a aquel otro? Vaya!' Eso sí, si la lees antes es espoiler total. Difícil elección. Note: the Penguin edition comes with an introduction by William H. Gass (a man occasionally mistaken for Gaddis).