Jonathan’s Reviews > The Recognitions > Status Update

Starting my 2026 reread of this a day early as had a few hours of good reading time this morning. As extraordinary as I remember it from my first read almost 15 years ago.

must..resist..urge...to..write..review...before...finished..book. Oh and, note to self, 1000 page books are not fun to lug around when going straight from work to a gig...

"What's tragedy to you is an anecdote to everybody else. We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are." - Jesus h Christ what a chapter - crushed kittens, baby stealing, drunken punch ups, desperate religious ranting, slit wrists in a dirty bathroom stall...like Pynchon's sadder, older brother. Gaddis breaks my heart on every damn page.

I think "LOL" is the most fitting comment for that last chapter...

"phew...that was the first section I could describe as "difficult", purely through the density of allusion and the confused and confusing mental states of all involved (not that it was not pleasurable to read, of course, just that my brain had to pull up its socks and sleeves and get stuck in). Now off to look at the annotations to see just how much I missed

I must confess I am starting to have to pause for a moment in these party scenes to remind myself who the hell everyone is...I am also head over heels in love with this damn beautiful book.

This story was about some people coming out of church, and they saw an anchor dangling by a rope from the sky. The anchor caught in the tombstones, and then they watched and saw a man coming down the rope, to unhook it. But when he reached the earth they went over to him and he was dead…He looked up at both of them from the glass. – Dead as though he'd been drowned.

This book is, so far, everything I hoped it would be. How lovely to find something which lives up to, or even exceeds, the hype for once. It blows my mind that he wrote this when he was a couple of years younger than me.

Bloomin' great...

Forcing myself to stop for the night as jetlag is making my brain fuzzy. Loving this so far though...