/lit/ - Literature

Is he the greatest American novelist since Melville? Poets excepted.

Is this considered good prose? It's hard for me to follow at times.

>To the squeal of brakes, the car burst out into the world trailing a festoon of privet, swerved at the immediate prospect of open acres flowered in funereal abundance to regain the pavement and lose it again in a brief threat to the candy wrappers and beer cans nestled along the hedge line up the highway, that quickly out of sight to the windows’ half-shaded stare from the roof pitches frowning over the hedge to where it ended, and a yellow barn took up, and was gone in a swerving miss for the pepperidge tree towering ahead, past shadeless windows in a naked farmhouse sprawl at the corner where the road trimmed neatly into the suburban labyrinth and things came scaled down to wieldy size, dogwood, then barberry, becomingly streaked blood-red for fall.
>Past the firehouse, where once black crêpe had been laboriously strung in such commemoration as that advertised today on the sign OUR DEAR DEPARTED MEMBER easy to hang and store as a soft drink poster, past the crumbling eyesore dedicated within recent memory as the Marine Memorial, past the graveled vacancy of a parking lot where a house, ravined by gingerbread, had held out till scarcely a week before, and through the center of town where all allusion to permanence had disappeared or was being slain within earshot by shrieking electric saws, and the glint of chrome that streaked the glass bank front across the resident image of bank furniture itself apparently designed to pick up and flee at a moment’s notice doors or no doors, opened, as they were now, to dispense the soft music hovering aimlessly about a man pasteled to match the furniture, crowding the high-bosomed brunette at the curb with—something, Mrs Joubert, something I’d meant to ask you but, oh wait a moment, there’s Mister Best, or Bast is it? Mister Bast...? He’s music appreciation, you know.
>—He?

>>10015901
I loved it and I've only read it once, one thing you can do is if you feel as though you may have missed something in a chapter you can read the Gaddis online annotations for that chapter. It clarifies things. It's best to read The annotations and then go back and find the things you missed in the text itself.
One of, if not THE, best written books I've ever read.

I read an interview with Gaddis somewhere in which he says that he hadn't read Joyce until after writing The Recognitions. If that is so than where did he get the idea of using hyphens to dilineate speech? Is this something that has been done more widely than I'm aware of?

Also general Gaddis thread.

>>9884928

>>9447629
OP here, it serves as such a great character study of a whole varying cast of characters. There were many times where I thought I was so sure about how worthless and shallow certain characters were but Gaddis would show me the humanity of those characters and totally change my view of them. People like to praise Gaddis' dialogue (which is incredible) but for me his descriptive prose is what really got me absolutely hooked.

The book is stuffed to the brim with symbolism around things that are fake, or inauthentic, or counterfeit etc. He's incredibly heavy handed with this symbolism but I actually enjoyed that about it. It's not overly criptic.

I never found it boring and only found it difficult in one particular section (those who have read it probably know what I'm talking about), but there is an online guide that is very comprehensive and helped me out for that part.

I put it off for a long time because of the length. Don't be like me. Please read it, it's criminally under-read.

>>9244846
I second this

Almost done this book now. There's a lot of subtleties that I would of missed without the gaddis website annotations and summaries. Even still I was caught off guard by just how readable this is, engaging plot right off the bat and some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read without obfuscating the whole thing through symbolism and vagueness. It's seriously amazing to me how Gaddis can be so dramatic in his prose about the simplest thing and have it not be purple.

Got JR coming in the mail and I'm so psyched considering a lot of people consider it to be the better work.

If anyone is putting this book off because they're intimidated by the length (as I was) just start it now, it's so great.