twentieth carpenter occasional recognitions

books:

41 reviews
William Gaddis

Penguin Classics, 1993

I Love It, But I'm Strange
Why in the world should anyone trouble to read so difficult a novel? A novel, for pete's sake, not even a work of non-fiction with useful information. Don't we read novels for entertaining? But it turns out that hard work has its rewards. If you are one of the lucky ones, the book is enthralling. For the unlucky majority it will be just boring. Gaddis's obscurity does not come from an ...

Agape Agape (Penguin Classics)

6 reviews
William Gaddis

Penguin Classics, 2003

Brilliant--It's Changed My Mind About Gaddis!
I have seldom if ever revised my opinion of an author based on a posthumous work-until now. I confess to having found the late William Gaddis' other (and in some circles, classic) novels (J.R., Frolic of His Own, The Recognitions, and Carpenter's Gothic) theoretically interesting and probably brilliant, but always far too long, very self-indulgent, difficult for its own sake and almost ...

JR (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

18 reviews
William Gaddis

Penguin Classics, 1993

JR
On a school excursion to New York, a small group of eleven year old children are introduced to the American way of life. A hurried business man, constantly on the phone or bothered by his secretary, gives a hasty explanation of the stock market, and what it means to 'purchase a piece of America'. The children are suitably awed, especially when their excursion moves from theory to practise with ...

Carpenter's Gothic (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

13 reviews
William Gaddis

Penguin Classics, 1999

Talk, talk, it's all talk
Often this is considered the least of Gaddis' novels, the most obvious reason being that it's the shortest, although that isn't the only reason. Still, in his longer novels Gaddis was always able to work his themes to a fever pitch and stretch them out, playing with dialogue and tone over the course of hundreds of pages, giving you in essence a grand symphony. A depressing symphony, also, mind ...

A Frolic of His Own

37 reviews
William Gaddis

Scribner, 1995

Nature scenes in A Frolic of His Own
I've noticed many instance of reviewers complaining about the nature scenes in this book. It seems that some people feel them to be unrelated to the rest of what is going on in the story. To the contrary, it is simply yet another sublime (though admittedly indirect) method by which Gaddis extolls his central analysis: that despite all of our technology and sophistication, the absurdities and ...

The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings

2 reviews
William Gaddis

Penguin (Non-Classics), 2002

Finally, the Collected Uncollected Works...
It's good finally to see William Gaddis's "ocassional" writings collected into one volume. For years, the only thing available was the super-rare and thus ridiculously expensive pirate edition, "The Uncollected Works of William Gaddis" published by the so-called Black Moon Press, whoever and wherever they were or weren't. While that underground classic might have had the drop on this legit book, ...