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34th out of 38 books
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Agape Agape
William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the pl...more
Paperback, 128 pages
Published
September 30th 2003
by Penguin Classics
(first published 2002)
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Liza
rated it
Recommends it for:
people holed up in bed, people worried about technology, people who lost the self who could do more
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Um livro repleto de agonia, um monólogo no leito da morte e na iminente intermitências do colapso da mente e corpo. Um livro singular, peculiar onde W. Gaddis utiliza a história/evolução do piano para criticar a sociedade na sua cavalgada para a cultura mecanizada. O sistema binário como sistema iniciático da destruição das elites, elites descritas no livro com um carinho especial, sistema em convergência com as massas a popularização do piano para todos (não deixa de ser interessante verificar ...more
There’s a line on the second page that pangs me with a guilty conscience, “…entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist…” Gaddis finished this book about ten years ago and rather presciently diagnosed what was to come in the art world. It does seem like anyone with a word processor and a computer can suddenly call themselves an artist; I say this from experience, since I just self-published a book online. ...more
I had an occasion recently to peck away on someone else's manual typewriter - it was at a party a poet was having and a poem was sitting there reeled up on his little desk being ruined by his guests, so I joined in and I added a line and then suddenly couldn't remember how to do a carriage return. I grew up with the things so I knew but technological adoption had pushed this minor skill to a box in the attic. I knew there was a bell when you got to the end and the speed by which you get to that...more
I first read Gaddis on a dare from an editor friend. She had just finished working on a re-issue of Mr. Gaddis' earlier books Recognitions and JR. At a party she told me that nobody in her office had read Gaddis and she thought that those who claimed to have were liars. Gaddis' work is dense and thick and a tough read. I told her that I could get through one. The next time I saw her she handed me a copy of JR.
JR was written in the 70's and is an examination of youth culture, high finance a...more
JR was written in the 70's and is an examination of youth culture, high finance a...more
Agape Agape sat on my shelf for several weeks while I waited for the the right time to read it. It is very short and various reviews I had read mentioned that it was the sort of book that should be read in a single sitting. I recall several books which I had read in this fashion and I loved the experience. As a teenager I had read Candide, Animal Farm and Notes from Underground respectively in single sittings. I recalled how reading books in this fashion left one in a state of shock, with t...more
At the beginning I laughed a few times. By the end of the novella I was taking the whole thing very seriously.
I definitely appreciate this rant of a book. Gaddis does a good job at getting you to begin thinking like his narrator relatively quickly and, since the book is pretty short, on most days, it's not too much time to spend in the head of a desperate dying man who is faced with the impossibility of being able to say what he desires to say. Unfortunately, today was no...more
Confused rant about the mechanization of the arts by a dying writer, subdued on sustaining drugs and dehumanised by the loss of his own motor and cognitive abilities, a 30 minute talking head stream of consciousness riff with a central symbol of the player piano, which simulates Mozart for me and you.
I know that Gaddis has written huge tablets of stone in the past, but this is a microphone job, a vocal discourse in script form. I liked it though, it has a repetitive cadence like an a...more
I know that Gaddis has written huge tablets of stone in the past, but this is a microphone job, a vocal discourse in script form. I liked it though, it has a repetitive cadence like an a...more
Right there with Bernhard and Markson's respective Wittgenstein's as seeming stream of conscious short works that read quickly and in the pure mind prose that exposes thought process and, thus, individual logic and decision/conclusion making. Not only that, but I must say that the stark difference in style between this and Recognitions really solidifies Gaddis as a formidable writer with great energy and that Madonna type of rebirthing that so few understand or undertake willingly. It's funny, t...more
Thomas Bernhard meets David Markson. The book is about the player piano and how it affects our perception of art. As can be predicted, the narrative appears to take the shape of a player piano's roll. Lines, phrases, and ideas repeat with regularity.
The text proper (in this paperback version) clocks in at 96 pp. The whole thing's a quick read, if a bit exhausting. The story revolves around one dying man in one room trying to unpack his idea on the piano player before he dies. A good wo...more
The text proper (in this paperback version) clocks in at 96 pp. The whole thing's a quick read, if a bit exhausting. The story revolves around one dying man in one room trying to unpack his idea on the piano player before he dies. A good wo...more
In reading Dean Young's poem "Pacific Decorum," I was somehow reminded of Agape Agape. The theme in this book - it's one that I think I should revisit. . . trying to tie it all together, and yet to still be creating in one's death throes . . . I don't have anything meaningful to say about it, but I want to. Here's the bit of Young's poem that struck me:
"Still, I keep thinking about
God, about how the body's always torn
apart, and lost. No, sorry....more
"Still, I keep thinking about
God, about how the body's always torn
apart, and lost. No, sorry....more
I find it difficult to believe that this fragmentary rant is essentially an excerpt (or the only piece of text remaining) from a lifelong project on the social history of the player piano. The book was published posthumously in 2004, seemingly with the aid of the growing cult of Gaddis scholars.
Poor Mr. Gaddis. Surprisingly enough, he must have felt that he had never truly made his Benjaminian point about the mechanization of the arts. For such a short text it is completely full...more
Poor Mr. Gaddis. Surprisingly enough, he must have felt that he had never truly made his Benjaminian point about the mechanization of the arts. For such a short text it is completely full...more
I've finally read all of William Gaddis's fiction. Agape Agape, published posthumously, and apparently vastly scaled down from the history of the player piano that Gaddis worked on throughout his entire life, is his weakest book, but that's a relative term when applied to one of the towering writers of the twentieth century. The book is a decent coda for the big ideas that ran throughout his four novels The Recognitions, J.R., Carpenter's Gothic and A Frolic of His Own -- a continued, unrelent...more
total rueb with regards to Da Classics and old greek things but gaddis' messy breakdown of the player piano and the increasing mechanization and dehumanization of art is cooooool beans!!! for fans of thomas bernhard, and complainy old henry rollins people who probably dont like the idea of remixes, maybe despite this book being a slurry of chopped n screwed quotes from other sources... heavy shit!!!
I can't believe this chunk of writing, published posthumously, appeared in any form or shape that William would have approved of. Though I have read many fine books culled from the piles of papers that writers have left behind, this book is a good argument against that sort of scavenging.
A fun, short, crazy read. Just an old man's dying rant. Albeit an old man who was an absolute giant as a pomo writer.
This is a difficult read, which is typical of Gaddis, but it's atypical in several other ways. For one, it's a long first-person stream-of-consciousness "rant" about what's wrong with American 20th-century culture (this last part is typical, though). For another, it's very very short (calling it a novel is a bit of a stretch) -- but it does distill many of the issues that have been part of Gaddis's artistic psyche since his debut meganovel The Recognitions (1955). In terms of 20th-c...more
Incredible. Preface and afterword to this edition are excellent, too.
Should have remained a novel in a novel. The anticipation doomed this from the start.
Gaddis' final work, a deathbed monologue with very few sentence breaks about how technology ultimately destroys art, how commerce destroys everything (see J.R., any other Gaddis book ever), and how the artist ultimately destroys himself - in the context of a history of the player piano. You can read this in one sitting and still feel like your brain was just sodomized by that hadron particle collider in Switzerland. Totally amazing, sublimating of concepts and emotions in a way that poetry as a ...more
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This is such a strange subject to have obsessed Gaddis for so long, but the book is fascinating. At the same time it is both more approachable than "The Recognitions" and more exhausting. I definitely dig the writing but I found the insight more enthralling. "Agape Agape" and the other writings and commentary in this edition gave me quite a different understanding of Gaddis. It is quite different than what I've seen of him before, but at the same time it is an explanation...more
Frenetic. Feverish.
The pain of Art. How else can I put it? Agape Agape (love in Greek) are the last words of a dying man's thoughts on the state of modern Art. The mechanization of the Art for consumer pleasure, for the new bourgeois. Even though it is a slim book written in one paragraph there are enough references here to digest for a lifetime.
The title is Agapē Agape. It reads like a half-senile old man (experiencing the mania side-effect of prednisone?) wrote it.
It's heartbreaking, but the musicality of the words is beautiful, and the point still comes through. It's less than 100 pages, and if you just read, it really isn't that difficult.
It's heartbreaking, but the musicality of the words is beautiful, and the point still comes through. It's less than 100 pages, and if you just read, it really isn't that difficult.
Gaddis's deathbed distillation of his lifelong project, a social history of the player piano, a monologue disguised as a novel. Four stars for crotchetiness, multilayered prose and intense feelings about art. I learned after finishing it that it's pronounced ah-gah'-pay ah-gayp'.
maybe it's the initial shock, but i can't stop thinking about this book. i'm inclined to say this is the greatest piece of literature i've ever read. i feel enlightened, vindicated, and a little less alone. powerful stuff.
What a powerful way to cap off a profound artistic life!
Hardcore Gaddis fans will appreciate this insight to his work and philosophy. A lot of us have waited a long time to see the perpetually edited work of Gaddis' best characters, Jack Gibbs.native son
My first William Gaddis book. Having the enitre book consist of only one paragaph was not the easiest reading! Rather depressing novel in fact but right on the mark in terms of the commercialization of art.
One of the best books I ever read, top 5. Maybe because it is so different. A stream of consciousness, abstract story of a talking to himself about his lot in life. Dark.
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“That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything. ”
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