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I read The Recognitions last month (my first Gaddis), and it was fine I guess. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the DFW-Pynchon-DeLillo trifecta. I wrote about it here but generally I found it enforcing an extremely repetitive point that is somewhat difficult to connect with nowadays. But of course the bar and party conversations were great. I laughed out loud often. Also I have no idea what postermodernism truly means, find any explanation classified by authorial intent unconvincing and useless, and have no idea where it intersects with self-referential meta-fiction (Don Quixote part 2) or experiments in form, but Volume 3 of Danielewski's The Familiar series just came out and you might call that postmodern, maybe. I will be shocked if he makes it to Volume 26, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The story is engaging enough and what he does with imagery, typography, and space is enchanting.
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Jun 21, 2016 19:57
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He's releasing them 2 a year, so yeah, like 2028? Actually I'm googling and it might be 27 volumes. I'm less concerned about the timeline and more like: not many people can possibly be buying these, can he really keep publishing? Volume 1 and 2 were right up front in one of the major indie bookstores in SF, but 3 was already stuffed in the back somewhere when I picked it up around release time. Going to look sweet on my bookshelf in the full library of the fictional house I own in 2028.
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Jun 21, 2016 20:26
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The basic premise is that there is a relationship between the presentation of the text/book and its content. At it's most simple: a character is stuck in a tight space so the text gets smaller or tighter to simulate it, or it's raining and this is important and the text is arranged as rain drops. To give a non-Danielewski example, the copy I have of Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays, which is a book heavily focused on nihilism/fatalism, there's huge pockets of white space intentionally placed to create a sort of page metaphor for the main character. I do a lot of UI design for my job, or at least oversee UI design on my products and the fonts used and various colors, spacing, etc do have observed behavioral effects, so it's not outlandish to think this would follow in novels. The Familiar volumes all have a Youtube video (represented across a few pages) towards the start and I think the visuals of youtube do give you a sort of visual-mental effect that goes beyond describing that what is happening is in video. At the very least, it's pretty to look at. Also, The Fifty Year Sword is by far the weakest version of this. I think he might have written it (and published?) as a regular short story first and all that crap got added later.
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Jun 21, 2016 21:15
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