Reading 1001 discussion

This is a book about the lines, if there are any, between originals and forgeries, copies, or plagiarised works. (The "recognitions" of the title are the signs by which art experts tell if a painting is genuine or forged.) We have a painter whose inspiration is the Old Masters and how to paint like them and then wreak the damage of centuries onto the work to make it look authentic; a playwright who is accused of plagiarism, apparently by chance; and others including a money counterfeiter. What makes one thing genuine and another, apparently identical, fake?

This would be an interesting question, and often it was, except that it was padded out with hour after hour (on audio) of tedious New York parties of the kind where people stand around trying to be clever. Later things changed - there was a murder, and the scene shifted to Europe - but there was still a lot of dialogue that seemed completely pointless to me.

The story often failed to hold my attention, which may be why I found some of the characters interchangeable. Was there any difference between Esmé and Esther? Were they actually the same person going by two names, or was Gaddis the kind of writer who supplied his male characters with indistinguishable female love interests? What about the girl on the boat? Was she Esmé or Esther or another indistinguishable woman? There was another one called Rose. And were these women all the same because they were designed to embody the theme of similarity, genuine/copy/fake? Or am I crediting Gaddis with too much subtlety there?

I was bored by this most of the time, and I probably missed a lot because my attention wandered so much. Looking back, having finished it, I find the themes intriguing. But if I ever revisit this book, I will get a paper copy and skip all the parties.

I actually loved this book and gave it 5 stars. I listened to the 48 hour audiobook, and it was a pleasure and didn't feel that long or excessively padded out. The extensive society parties and circles parts really did seem to contribute to the main theme for me, as the pretense of that culture and the personas and attempts to 'make it' of many artists in the circle are perfect examples of what counts as authentic versus fraudulence, and to what extent does that matter as a moral distinction. The Harlem drag ball scene was a great example of this, and had such a sumptuous description of what I find to be such an interesting part of history.

Wyatt's upbringing by his devout Grandmother and Calvinist minister father is such a great (seemingly) extreme cultural difference between the society parties that still conveys this point. The tension of what counts as the 'true authentic way' is a tension in the religious world between sects and claims of prophecy as much as in the art world between forgeries and divergent movements. His father's eventual departure from conventional Christian doctrine, into different Indigenous beliefs and finally into a Mithraic Cult evokes the idea of how every 'one true faith practice' is derivative of earlier beliefs and customs.

Other than authenticity/fraud and the ambiguity between the two, another big theme of the novel is in the other similarities of the 'saintly/religious' versus 'hedonistic/artistic' life. Notably, in the aspect of obsessive devotion and 'purity politics' in the removal of impure society from the 'authentic' person. I found this to be a fascinating theme.