I started the Recognitions a couple of weeks ago. Not rushing this one. I read a few pages every morning with my coffee. It’s dense and often funny. By the time I reach the end of this book, I am sure I will have read it 4 times. My brain seems most receptive to it in the hours before the concerns of the day start flooding in. The first couple of chapters concern the artist Wyatt as a young boy growing up motherless in a religious household and his relationships with his father and an elderly Aunt. There is a fascinating and disturbing episode with a barbary ape brought home by the Reverend Gwyon from his overseas travels. Later, when Wyatt is an adult, attempting to make his way as a painter, there is a pointed interaction with a critic that has a cruel impact on his aspirations. Following this, are a series of conversations with Wyatt’s wife Esther, who is confounded by Wyatt’s “work,” that make for compelling reading. I’ll post more of my impressions as I continue with The Recognitions.

While even Aunt May’s medieval posture could not credit her stomach as a cauldron where food was cooked by heat from the adjacent liver, she sought evidences of the Lord’s displeasure in foreign catastrophes and other people’s difficulties, and usually found good reason for it.

p.33

What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around.

p. 95