Thomas Girst

Between the ages of 14 and 16, reading Proust was my greatest reading experience ever. I wanted to hold off until retirement to reread In Search of Lost Time but am rereading this 4,000-plus-page novel now. Proust gave his life to his writing and in the end had to leave his greatest achievement unfinished after working on it daily for over a decade, barely leaving his room—or bed, for that matter. There are those who have read him and those who haven’t. Just as an orchestra may play Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor in front thousands of spellbound listeners in a huge concert hall, or just as every single feeling everyone on earth has had, or will be experiencing, is already contained within the lines of Shakespeare, so Proust’s magnum opus and the tremendous scope of thought that went into it constitute an almost otherworldly, beautiful reminder that humankind’s existence on this planet is not entirely in vain. Radiant intelligence, intellect, and an inspiring vision transmitted through literature are able to reinforce our fleeting trust in the true achievements of our species.

Though the original book was published in many subsequent parts by Gallimard in Paris, with its standard, forever unequaled typographic cover design, the 1979 German edition I am currently rereading is lovely to hold and look at as it is so poetically basic. Its design (the title appears only on the spine—horizontally, as Theodor W. Adorno preferred) harks back to that of the 18th and 19th centuries and thus ever so subtly underlines Proust’s absolute timelessness. There are entire books written on Proust and painting and how much the visual world meant to him and what a keen observer he was. I would recommend to anyone to start off with Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)—because he will, forever.

Robert Walser (1878–1956) loved to take long walks. One day, coming down a hill in the forest surrounding the small Swiss village Herisau, he sank onto the ground, into the soft snow, never got up again and thus passed away. For almost the last three decades of his life, Walser had been confined to mental homes. While many thought he had stopped writing altogether, Walser composed entire novels in tiny letters (no larger than five millimeters or one-seventh of an inch) written by hand with a pencil. Deciphered only after his death, most of the prose and poetry contained on hundreds of single sheets of paper was published posthumously, 30 years later.

Walser, his works brimming with child-like wonderment, is the wildest, most subtly erotic, humorous, and intelligently confusing writer one can think of—a contemporary of Kafka with whom he shares a sense of alienation and a fascination for slightly altered realities. Certainly not intentionally, his “micrograms” are a visual testimony to the possibilities at the faraway outskirts of the written language.

The Recognitions, the first novel by one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, went almost completely unrecognized upon its publication in 1955. Apparently, the only prize it won was for its jacket design, according to Jonathan Franzen, one of many contemporary writers to whom Gaddis is a great source of inspiration. A small vertical signature at the cover’s lower right corner reveals the typographic design to be by Janet Halverson, who went on to create many book designs for novels by Joan Didion and Maya Angelou, among others. As for Gaddis, despite his first novel’s failure to attract the critics (or an audience), he went on to be celebrated as a great force in literature.

Gaddis is a demanding and challenging writer. Just as Bach can hardly be enjoyed without giving in to him entirely, without concentration and devoting our time, so William Gaddis, at least in the first two of his total of only five novels, demands our full attention. This is a lesson to be learned, as reading him can be of great benefit to our many ways of life. The Recognitions, besides many other things, is about forgery, the original versus the fake, the genuine versus the facsimile, the origins and urges of creativity—in regard to art as well as our human interrelationships. It is an incomparable source of recognition for so many things going on in our daily lives today. Once we have allowed Gaddis to lead the way through his universe, there is laughter, and humor abounds.