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. And to carry the question further, has mankind, that master forger, outdone the creator? Each one of us is merely the latest link in the chain of human experience. Everything we know, believe, have, is founded on what has been passed down from the previous generations. Religion, culture, music, science, art. Nursery rhymes. Jokes. What claim to originality do we really have? There's a long cast of characters that drift in and out and we lose sight of Wyatt for long stretches. Names are changed! Identities are mistaken! Life and art are so entangled that their boundaries are not clear. We constantly overhear fragments of conversations, catch glimpses of the characters as they hurry by. 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."

I want to talk about the female heroine, Esme. I’ve heard somewhere that Gaddis was very ungenerous in creating female characters. I protest! She is an absolutely ethereal unique creation. She is a poetess who struggles to write her poems. And here, Gaddis manages to show how an inspiration reveals itself: Una de las técnicas que emplea Gaddis para despistar es no llamar a los personajes por su nombre. De repente empieza a decir 'él' o 'ella' y tienes que averiguar por pequeñas pistas de quién se trata. Introduce un auténtico montón de personajes y cuando empiezas a familiarizarte con alguno y dices 'Este es el protagonista', pues desaparece, aunque puede reaparecer 500 páginas después como si tal cosa. Es complicado. Muchos personajes no tienen nombre, directamente, como 'la mujer alta', o 'el hombre de la corbata verde' y no se sabe bien quién son, pero van apareciendo aquí y allá, cuando menos lo esperas.Todos estos escenarios - que resumen los periplos vitales del autor - están regados con una erudición abrumadora, como yo no pensaba que pudiera existir. La Guía va desmigando todas las alusiones a la historia, la religión, el arte, la literatura, la mitología, etc. etc. etc. que están contenidas en las líneas de la novela y que un cerebro humano no puede de ninguna manera procesar. Al principio me imprimía las paginas correspondientes de la Guía y las iba leyendo en paralelo. Pero a partir de un cierto punto lo dejé, sorry pero no. The Recognitions is many things, but ultimately, it's an artist’s quest of for an authentic self, told stylistically through satire and the exploration of forgery on all levels. Among the other characters is the hapless Otto, first encountered working in Latin America on his grand play.

Needless to say, it is a perfect introduction, both to Gaddis and The Recognitions, a welcome little bonus. 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.

Los diálogos son lo peor. Están llenos de puntos suspensivos, de cosas no dichas, de aire... y de ruido ambiente, porque se intercalan frases oídas al azar de otras conversaciones, por ejemplo en las fiestas o en los bares. Reflejan una incomunicación total y son difíciles de leer. Parece que en vez de dar más información sobre los personajes nos los alejan con cada palabra. 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." There is nature- A customary meeting that takes place between sun and moon to greet a new dawn and dusk is an essential and my most favorite part of this book. I have never read any writer who embraced nature so intimately and unifies it effortlessly with the emotional upheavals experienced by mankind. The lust of summer gone, the sun made its visits shorter and more uncertain, appearing to the city with that discomfited reserve, that sense of duty of the lover who no longer loves. Wherever Gaddis took me, he offered the sublime company of warm rays and bright moonlight and during the instances of foggy days; I relished the unusual beauty of a silent landscape. I walked. Es un universo líquido. Desde las fiestas de Greewich Village, a las calles de Roma, París y Nueva York, los pueblos de España de la posguerra, países de Sudamérica, todo se mezcla y los mismos personajes circulan enloquecidos por los diferentes escenarios, siempre sin un propósito muy claro. Marea.

The quotations in my Reading Progress are parts of the text that stood out in my quest for significance and meaning in the novel. Aunt May, Wyatt’s Calvinist aunt, who helps to rear Wyatt until her death, when he is twelve years old. She has a major effect on Wyatt. She condemns creativity as blasphemy because when humans create, they imitate God. She makes Wyatt, as a child, feel guilty about his drawing, leaving him deeply ambivalent about art. 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.Unlike Esme, Stanley does not believe that man, by himself, can find the truth. He thinks that God works through prayer and ritual to make man forget the limited and look for the infinite. His efforts to convert others to Catholicism show his belief in the power of faith. Since he composes a piece of music good enough “to offend the creator of perfection by emulating his grand design,” he justifies his belief. Everything is a collage built from previous works, a blatant example being The WasteLand yes, and The Recognitions too.

Gaddis has a style of writing that I easily respond to. His themes are ones I want to read and think about. Steven Moore's excellent Reader's Guide, with its useful annotations to the text, is highly recommended (and available online, in its entirety, for free -- kudos to all involved in that undertaking). 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 Now available as a "Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic" it is at least readily available; one suspects that it is still not widely read. Casi 5 meses me ha costado leerlo (gracias a mis compañeros de lectura por estar ahí), pero creo que ha merecido la pena. En la reseña del GR Paul Bryant he descubierto un artículo estupendo de Mark O'Connell sobre la lectura de este tipo de obras, en que las compara con una especie de Síndrome de Estocolmo o subida al Everest. Me quedo con este párrafo sobre Los reconocimientos, que resume bastante bien mi experiencia:

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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. The Clementine Homilies and Recognitions were stressed in the famous Tübingen reconstruction of primitive Christianity—but are now known not to be works of Clemens Romanus, regarded as a disciple of St. Peter. "They are evidently the outcome of a peculiar speculative type of Judaistic Christianity, for which the most characteristic name of Christ was 'the true Prophet.' The framework of both is a narrative purporting to be written by Clement [of Rome] to St James, the Lord's brother, describing at the beginning his own conversion and the circumstances of his first acquaintance with St Peter, and then a long succession of incidents leading up to a romantic recognition of Clement's father, mother, and two brothers, from whom he had been separated since childhood . . . The problems discussed under this fictitious guise are with rare exceptions fundamental problems of every age . . . the discussions are hardly every feeble or trivial" ( Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. [1910], "Clementine Literature," vol. 6, pp. 490-94). Through Rufinus, it can be said that this early Christian work was the parent of the late medieval legend of Faust, which initiated a tradition that William Gaddis's The Recognitions continues. Take this description of Madrid’s Retiro Park, seen through the eyes of Reverend Gwyon, early in the novel: