The Recognitions (New York Review Books Classics)

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The Recognitions (New York Review Books Classics)

The Recognitions (New York Review Books Classics)

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this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour…what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s 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." Recognitions' has always meant the realization of painful truths for me," adds Palladino. "I thought releasing the record was the only way to let it all go—the final act, the last thing we made together. This album captures that change, the lapse of time in leaving one life to the next, which is what Exitmusic always represented." Reading The Recognitions is like wandering in a labyrinth, and around each corner there's a new revelation. One feels a little lost at times, but there are familiar sights. Can we trust our guide? Gaddis gives you the sense he knows the way...until he lets go of your hand...and pushes you into the darkness saying, dilige et quod vis fac. You must cling to those words, because that's the only thread this Ariadne offers - except for the follow up text message he sends: btw thngs fal aprt :-()

Focusing on the heft of the book and its supposed difficulty also erases some of the book’s many charms. “On the one hand it is a serious, intellectual novel with loads of dark drama, but it’s also very funny and witty, which lightens the weight of the serious side,” Moore says. “Gaddis regarded it as essentially a comic novel and was disappointed reviewers and readers didn’t appreciate that.”

The word 'recognition' has a lot of associations for me," says Church. "I remember when I first came to New York City and fell in love with Aleksa; I told her I felt like I 'recognized' her. Then of course there was the recognitions implied by the breakup, and the unravelling of a story we've been telling each other for 12 years. And I'm also really interested in Gnostic-type mystical practice, which centers on a kind of 'amanuensis’ or unforgetting of true reality." A)swim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away. U.S. novel writing has a strikingly fresh talent to watch, if not to cheer." - Time Like Eliot, sometimes Gaddis steals his material outright. The letter that begins "You: The demands of painting have the most astonishing consequences" was entirely written by Sheri Martinelli and used without her knowledge. She was the inspiration for the character who wrote it, Esme. Even Witkiewiczan Murti-Bing (from Witkiewicz's novel, Insatiability -- see our review) gets a mention.

I think this paragraph serves as an excellent metaphor for this novel as well as for any masterpiece. It is like a fragile castle - it contains so many perspectives that trying to separate one would dismantle the edifice. And I was starting to write this review a few times. But then gave up and just wrote what you find below. I stopped trying to analyse how this book is constructed and why it worked for me; how to reduce it to a scheme and explain it. I want to keep it alive in my memory. William Gaddis was the author of five novels. He was born in New York December 29, 1922. The circumstances why he left Harvard in his senior year are mysterious. He worked for The New Yorker for a spell in the 1950s, and absorbed experiences at the bohemian parties and happenings, to be later used as material in The Recognitions. Travel provided further resources of experience in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Spain and Africa and, perhaps strangest to imagine of him, he was employed for a few years in public relations for a pharmaceutical corporation. It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem.” An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.Lingan, John. "William Gaddis, the Last Protestant". The Quarterly Conversation . Retrieved February 3, 2011. There is only the Self that Lives, therefore the Life that is Lived, the Life that is Loved, the Life that is Contemplated. For advocates, the book retains its initial charge. “I reread it last summer for the first time in 35 years, and it’s lost none of its appeal,” says Steven Moore, an author and critic who is the leading authority on the work of Gaddis. He first read the book in October 1975, after reading a review in Time magazine of Gaddis’s second novel, JR . “It was like revisiting a grand museum I hadn’t been to in decades,” he says of the recent reading experience. “Gaddis was an angry young man when he wrote the novel, and that came through even more fiercely this time around.” Since 1958 to 2013 Art and the art world has undergone significant change. Painting is no longer deemed as important, or as key an artistic medium as it once was; media, technology and the internet-of-things, apps, connectivity and social media are all impacting how we define and project ourselves. The masks we wear, consciously or subconsciously, are even more complex and multifarious. He is not a copyist, and he dismisses those forgers who pull "the fragments of ten paintings together" to make a new one.



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