How is gaddis not more famous? I just finished this and it was amazing. one of my favorite books of all time...

how is gaddis not more famous? I just finished this and it was amazing. one of my favorite books of all time. it was funny, emotional and somehow super relevant. I could match people I know to characters in the book. I've noticed some other people are reading it now. what do you guys think?

Can you compare The recognition's difficulty to some other books?

Do you think if it takes a long time to read that it's difficult? If so, it's quite hard.

I haven't found any of it difficult. I didn't have a hard time with mason and Dixon but I'd say mason and Dixon was harder. it's just long. it was so consistenly good that the length only made it better. I never wanted it to end. you get to know some of the characters so well. fuck I might actually reread it one day.

Dude just wait

I'm working backwards through his catalogue but Agape Agapē was insane and Caroenter's Gothic was a trip i did not expect to go on

He's GOAT for 1900-1999

The moment I finished The Recognitions, I wanted to start again from the beginning. I read through JR and CG before coming back full round. Once I finish this reread, I'll tackle A Frolic.

How was JR? Was it hard keeping track of conversations?

i'm about to read the recognitions again. sadly i never finished it the first time, and it was only after i had read it, when all the moments had soaked into me, when my thoughts had been inexorably changed by the memories of this book's perspectives, i had realized what a grievous misservice i had done myself. i have been slowly preparing myself and giving myself enough time to forget most of it, so that i can read it once more. then i'll read JR which apparently just went out of print and costs like fifty bucks for a paperback! good thing i grabbed one a while back.

have you guys noticed how people on /lit seem to be afraid of reading this book or some shit

>There were quotations in Latin, Spanish, Hungarian, and six other languages to be rappelled across. Blizzards of obscure references swirled around sheer cliffs of erudition, precipitous discourses on alchemy and Flemish painting, Mithraism and early-Christian theology. The prose came in page-long paragraphs in which oxygen was at a premium, and the emotional temperature of the novel started cold and got colder. The hero, Wyatt Gwyon, was likable as a child ("a small disgruntled person"), but otherwise the author's satiric judgments and intellectual obsessions discouraged intimacy. It was a struggle to figure out what, or even who, the story was about; dialogue was punctuated with dashes and largely unattributed; Wyatt himself dwindled to a furtive, seldom-glimpsed pronoun ("he"); there came brutish party scenes, all-dialogue word storms that raged for scores of pages. The only portable nourishment that might have helped sustain me on my climb was a familiarity with Gaddis's influences, maybe a nice pemmican of T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves, which I hadn't thought to bring. I was alone and unprepared on a steep-sided, frigid, airless, poorly mapped mountain. Did I already mention that "The Recognitions" has nine hundred and fifty-six pages?

congrats, you're smarter than jonathan franzen.

Not at all. The characters have certain ticks and place-words which help you keep track of who's talking. Only the main characters have any real personality, and their conversations are almost always important to the plot.

oh boohoo he named a painter or picture I didn't know, well I Googled it, now I know it!

oh boohoo he said some shit in another language, welp I Googled that too.

oh man he doesn't say wyatts name anymore after 200 pages. well you got 200 pages to learn how he talks so that's not hard. especially when everyone else has a name, it's easy to see when wyatt talks.

oh darn they are talking about religion. who cares they are pseuds in the book just saying shit to be smart. only wyatts dad was actually religious for reals. he's only in the book a short time.

oh snap they are quoting shit from other books. good thing it's only usually just a sentence and it almost always says what books its from. for example "blah blah blah blah. better bone up on your Ovid Mr brown," basil said.

stop being pussies and read it.

Well said.

Really, it just goes to show how much of pseud Franzen is that he thought it was such a massive difficult book. You could actually think of The Recognitions as a proto-Infinite Jest (except better by leaps and bounds) in terms of the sort of reputation it had back in the day for being this Huge Difficult Postmodern Tome that may or may not have been written by Pynchon (it was a dumb rumor, but it existed).

Honestly, I think Franzen could literally be a character from the book. except maybe a decade or two removed. He'd fit right in with the sorts of milquetoast "artsy" pseuds in it.

you guys are the type of people who skim a book and let your eyes glaze over the book and think you "got" it, proudly mark it "read" on your goodreas, before moving on to the next book. when asked to discuss or reflect upon anything you've read a month later you would give blank stares and mumble some character names before shifting the conversation to the next Big Hefty Erudite Tome that you're proud to be "reading."

he was about as famous as authors get at his height...

Not at all. Though your inferiority complex is hilarious. You and Jon Fran would get along smashingly.

nice projection

>read a book built on knowledge and references and addressing the implications directly
>"nah bro you dont need to know anything just read it lol. im so smart."

wew

>knowledge and references
>"nah they're totally not things you can just look up these days lol. buk so dep u need 20 gorillion years or reserch 2 red it"

wew

it's not built on those things. there is literally one or two maybe 3 references every chapter.

well rekt lol

samefag

nice try

>he got on his phone to samefag himself

ms paint tier editing, but nice try

A S S M A D

S

S

M

A

D

samefag

I can do this all day.

samefag

...

nah dude you were fucking rekt as shit

fag

...

yeah I notice this in every recognitions thread that ever gets made. it makes me laugh. they will read Ulyssess and gravity's rainbow but then get psyched out by this book. it doesn't make sense.