The Recogntions

Gaddis' The Recognition is really amazing. I really admire the way he writes; it seems so fluid, and he pays great attention to the hidden, unspoken complexities of everyday life. He is also extremely versitile, as he can write in both the classical and modernist styles. It's also fucking hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. I'm pretty well convinced that it's one of the defining influences on Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Here's another excerpt --

Above empty streets, the roseate heaving persisted; above bodies contorted with sleep, strewn among the battlements erected in this common war without end, some wrenched as though in the last embrace, spoke without tongues, untended and unattended, extended limbs and members to come up against the thigh of another fallen, and be similarly still, or rise distended to enter the warm nest again and swim in the dark channel, committing the final assault in the anonymity of exhaustion, hearts emptied of prayer. But the blood-luster of the sky witnessed that the battle was not done, though all were slain: it shone like the sky over the Campagna where Attila's Huns met the Romans in engagement so fierce that all were slain in deed, extreme but inconclusive, for their spirits continued the battle three nights and days over the field of unburied dead.