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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780140187083
ISBN number: 0140187081
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 976
Printing Date: May 01, 1993
Publishing house: Penguin Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 111279
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate 'originals' - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize. Contemporary life collapses the distinction between the 'real' and the 'virtual' world, and Gaddis' novel pre-empts our common obsessions by almost half a century. This novel tackles the blurring of perceptual boundaries, The Matrix and Bladerunner pale in comparison to this epic novel.
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Rated by buyers 
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Recognitions is an important book no doubt, but it's so outdated. Read the TIME review of the book in 1955. It's on the money! Gaddis was 33 when he wrote it and in 1953 when I believe the book was written, he slams America for hypocrisy, Madison Avenue sellout (where have we heard that before?), the usual 'truths' that young people believe in until it's time to get a job just like Gaddis did. Read his bio. Just who was selling out? Anyway, try reading it. Maybe you'll like it. But I find that the America of the 50's is better captured in crime novels of the time as is my NYC.
Rated by buyers 
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Long. Strange. Deep. Difficult. Tiring. Fun. Over-detailed. Likable characters. Horrible characters. Educational. Mind-numbing. Subtle.
The world of the fake juxtaposed with the world of the fair. Doing wrong for the right reasons and doing wrong for the wrong reasons.
This was an interesting read (I'm still not sure how enjoyable a read it was). I'm glad I read it and will read more Gaddis. I also discovered William Gass from the introduction. So, two "keeper" authors in one.
Not for casual readers. You have to have patience and prepare to work as a reader to make it through.
Rated by buyers 
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Why in the world should anyone trouble to read so difficult a novel? A novel, for pete's sake, not even a work of non-fiction with useful information. Don't we read novels for entertaining? But it turns out that hard work has its rewards. If you are one of the lucky ones, the book is enthralling. For the unlucky majority it will be just boring.
Gaddis's obscurity does not come from an inability to write clearly: "it is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it least" (p. 26);
"She's still sick of trench mouth. She got it kissing the pope's ring" (p. 192); "90 percent of the advertisements he read had no possible application in his life" (p. 283); "Busy as those monks in the Middle Ages were keeping a-kindle the light of knowledge which they had helped to extinguish everywhere else" (p. 495); and so forth. So if Gaddis can be witty, entertaining, and clear at the same time, why is The Recognitions, and all of Gaddis's work for that matter, so hard to follow?
A central theme in all the works of Gaddis is about the gap between what we know (through recognition) and what we are told. A priest-confessor sums up the problem: "We live in a world where first-hand experience is daily more difficult to reach, and if yo reach it through your work, perhaps, you are not fortunate in the way most people would be fortunate. But these are things I shall not try to tell you. You will learn these things for yourself if you go on, and I may help you there" (p. 952). For a writer, this problem of learning by first-hand experience is doubly challenging for story-telling is a second-hand way of knowing. So how can a story teller honestly urge first-hand experience through a second-hand medium? Gaddis's method is to turn novel reading into a very first hand experience. He tames the famous recommendation to young writers--show; don't tell--three steps further. He provides shadows which the readers, if they can, transform into shapes. ("Scarcely more steady than the shadows themselves, a figure took form and emerged," p. 920.)
A businessman who specializes in selling art forgeries says of most people, "They don't want to know. They want to be told" (p. 313), and he holds those people in contempt. The solution in art isto turn passive lookers into knowing creators: "Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of ... recognition, as though they were creating it themselves while they look at it or listen to it" (p. 535)
Three hundred plus pages later we see the idea spelled out again: "He studied with Titian... Titian's paintings in the Escorial, he saw then when he went to paint for the king, and who whole style changed. He learned from Titian. That's the way we learn, you understand" (p. 870). And the reader learns by reading Gaddis.
The result of this kind of creative participation in the work is a kind of enchantment that moves readers more deeply, when it moves them at all. An old woman is described as the "nightmare of the girly she had been two generations ago" (p. 561). To understand that image the reader has to see the old woman's body and the young girl's thoughts simultaneously. They have to work, not just read. And in this book they have to such work, line by line, page by page, for a thousand pages.
Gaddis does not think this kind of active engagement is easy: "They were enjoying the discusion very much, each finding the other intelligent, witty, in all a good companion, for neither was listening to what the other was saying" (p. 696), but Gaddis does believe intent participation in the other is essential. The price of not being able to listen and know is death--metaphorically in the death of the sou, literally, in the story, I count two people in the last 15 pages killed by ignoring messages in languages they didn't understand.
Every reader will find a different book. The more they bring, the more they can get. The harder they are willing to work, the easier their story will be to follow.
Rated by buyers -
I read The Recognitions in the 1990s. The gist of the book emerges here and there, just like "recognitions," not all at once, in sequence, or in bulk, but every now and then, not well-formed or even coherent. That we live in a miasma of forgery is clear to few. Most of us are so imbedded in myth and its rote that we cannot percieve, much less understand, our lot. Gaddis pokes at our fraudulent lives.
The book is a satire on a mythological scale. The bishops wear skirts to appear feminine and demure, but with a "thousand yards of material up their sleeves in South America." Aunt May is done in by technology in a single beautiful sentence. Homosexuality threads throughout the book and is as fundamental to religion as it is to art. (One would benefit by reading "The Lives of the Saints" along-side this work.)
Gaddis exposes the inauthentic on every page, and there are a thousand of them. His skill with words is exceptional: alliterations, allusions, metaphor, rhythms, melody, all music.
In Gaddis, the consequences of forgery are revealed over generations. They are cataclysmic. But forgery is the inevitable side effect of eating of the tree of knowledge and building the tower of Babel, as mankind, in its terror, is driven to know, speak -- continually giving new names to old values -- and dissemble; anything to avoid the ultimate recognition. Thus, the birth and renewal of religion.
I advocate, in the name of Gaddis, who would certainly appreciate it, that sweatshirts, hats, bumber stickers, tatoos, and other paraphernalia, be printed up and marketed commemorating this book. We live in the world of marketing as surely as we believe we understand ourselves. Read the book and live it out!
Rated by buyers 
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Gaddis is certainly a gifted writer, but what he crafted here is impossible to enjoy on any level. 1000 pages of fragmented sentences, incomplete thoughts, non-interlocking, interlocking story lines and cameo characters simply does not cut it for a very first rate work.
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