The Recognitions (New York Review Books Classics)

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The novel begins fairly straightforwardly, with Reverend Gwynn, father of young Wyatt, and the story of how his wife Camilla perished. He [Gaddis] is an heir to Eliot, whose quests, imposters and enervated landscapes haunt his novels, as well as the great Russians—Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev—with whom he shared the hope of civilizing a benighted nation. The story loosely follows the life of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a Calvinist minister from rural New England; his mother dies in Spain. He plans to follow his father into the ministry. But he is inspired to become a painter by The Seven Deadly Sins, Hieronymous Bosch's noted painting which his father owned. Gwyon leaves New England and travels to Europe to study painting. Discouraged by a corrupt critic and frustrated with his career, he moves to New York City.

Copying masterpieces is now an industry in Southern China, "the world’s leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year — most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day." This...these...the art historians and the critics talking about every object and...everything having its own form and density and ...its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this...and so in the painting every detail reflects...God's concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. -There isn't any. There isn't any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there...I take five or six or ten...the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can't include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it...Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that's the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and...and shape and smell, being looked at by God. IN WHICH WYATT EMPTIES THE POT ON WHICH HE MEDITATED FOR AN HOUR OR SO EACH MORNING INTO A FLOOR REGISTER.The Recognitions is a warning above all else—a plea, like “The Waste Land,” for Western society to recognize its mythic origins before art expires.

He is not a copyist, and he dismisses those forgers who pull "the fragments of ten paintings together" to make a new one. 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’sLa traducción de Juan Antonio Santos es - en mi humilde opinión porque no la he contrastado con el original - excelente. Me parece increíble que en 1.400 páginas de difíciles equilibrios y virtuosismos de todo tipo no me haya chirriado nada. Milagro.

I heard somewhere while reading this that Gaddis is praised for this work in that he made it the ultimate challenge for the reader. Yay! Let's make reading hard! #sarcasm 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.” El tema principal es la falsificación, la falsedad en todas sus variantes y su relación con el arte y la creatividad. Desde la típica falsificación de monedas u obras de arte (incluso momias), Gaddis abre el foco y ve la misma civilización como una falsificación a gran escala. La religión, el arte, el turismo, la publicidad... todo está visto desde el punto de vista de la impostura, todo es vender humo a personas que están deseando comprarlo. Eso es la vida y la sociedad según Gaddis. No deja nada en pie.

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I also want to mention how funny this novel is by parts, I had quite a few proper "laugh out loud" moments. The satirical element is brilliantly sharp. He satirises everything from religion and the dumbness of mass culture to the Bohemians of the 50s. Below is just an example how a distinguished, well published and well known writer, the character from the novel writes: 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 :-() Sé que no puedo y sé que no debo hacer una reseña de estas 1.400 páginas, que me han dejado exhausta y que no me atrevería a recomendar a nadie. ¿Me ha gustado conocer a Gaddis? Sí. ¿Tengo ganas de leer más del autor? Pues de momento no. En cualquier caso, la lectura de este tótem de la literatura posmoderna, escrito en 1955, es una experiencia única que encuentro imposible resumir. Así que me voy a limitar a escribir unos cuantos comentarios random, cualidad que de hecho es parte fundamental en este libro: los diálogos sin sentido, las situaciones surrealistas, los personajes que aparecen, desaparecen y mutan sin seguir una lógica... Pues allá van mis apostillas desordenadas a esta obra de Gaddis: As I made my progress through the novel, I decided to make a Glossary of Key Words, almost all of which were Abstractions.