/lit/ - Literature

>>21962659
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
There have been many well-known and established classics—like Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Flaubert, Borges, Guimarães Rosa, Lowry, Kleist, Chaucer, Melville, Dickinson—that have moved me, but Gaddis' first novel really altered my perception of who I was and what I was searching for. I was fresh out of university, had a BA and had a falling out with my then-fiancée about going into post-grad studies. She wanted to keep going, I didn't have a plan besides not going into post-grad. This book opened my eyes to the question, What is real? and how can we find it in the world and in the things we do? How can we find meaning? or, at least, create meaning in our lives?
Now I look into it, reread it, and find things that are tedious and excessive (it took me three cracks to commit to this book the first time), but never less than meaningful and entertaining. Like a Bosch triptych, he lays out all of human nature and experience on a vast canvas of mistakes, miscommunications, mistaken identities and misunderstandings. He is the king of revolt against the normal, always looking for just the right twist to make things sound wrong, and beautiful. He makes all of this stupid, ugly, evil, brute world sound inviting and peculiar; after reading The Recognitions, I entered daily life like someone scuba diving for the first time.
tl;dr read William Gaddis' The Recognitions