One of the most anticipated books in early 2011 (some say the network in May , who in March) is Freedom American Jonathan Franzen (Einaudi), 8 years after the famous Corrections . The latter, which recounts the daily life of relazoni of a family from a small town in the American Midwest, is considered by many to be one of the best American novels of the last decade. The ability to describe human relations with an eye sincere but ruthless, the strength to tell how passionate pursuit of happiness in every individual fights and prevents the assertion of the happiness of others, strong criticism of contemporary society embarked on a run without control: with The Corrections, Franzen has renewed the American literary tradition in the path traced by the likes of Roth and DeLillo. About Freedom, it seems that the latest work by Franzen was the book that Obama has chosen to read during his holidays (and meicojoni).
Here is a quite interesting article by Francesco Pacific published in Il Sole 24 Ore, which I caught from the blog Minima Moralia & of Minimum Fax:
The phenomenon Franzen
Francesco Pacific
Jonathan Franzen back in bookstores with a new American novel, Freedom, a decade on the success of Corrections , and America will form two sides of noisy detractors and supporters, while Time devoted a cover, as a writer not happened since 2000. The book is too compelling to reveal the multiple and intertwined plots - one part, however, the combination of American literary dysfunctional family and late capitalism have already dealt with in Corrections - but I want to leave to fight two fronts in the task of illustrating the strengths and weaknesses.
Proponents believe that Franzen is the new Tolstoy and has saved American literature with a great novel that talks about important issues with a passion and expertise unavailable in other writers of the new generation. Reveal some of these issues in any order (that is the only order allowed, because Franzen is so good, from the first paragraph, to muddy the waters to avoid being predictable, which reveal only part of the plot would make him wrong): the private contracts for the war in Iraq, the college basketball; plagiarism as a basic component of friendship and love: civic involvement and disappointed dreams of progressives, endangered birds, psychoanalysis, punk cocaine, lobbyists, the rise of the neocons in America post-September 11 (also in ruthless young college Republicans); a single mother, the practical disadvantages of democracy: how to transfer and evict workers from one region to another by providing them new jobs. In each of these things Franzen writes as if it were the theme of his life. According to those who loved Freedom, the book speaks to the heart through the crisis and the dreams of his characters and through the long story arcs for which the characters discover the exact extent of their freedom, but also speaks to the brains of our western citizens paralyzed by the complexity, revealing slang, rules and mechanisms of many underworlds that have an indirect impact on our lives.
Critics Franzen think instead that the case is too good to be true: in reality the author would be the dream of literary New Yorkers, whites, Middleclass, to maintain cultural relevance in a world in which perhaps has and now more interested in the functioning of international organized crime and the fate of the underclass that Chinese marital crises of U.S. residential neighborhoods. The Guardian it is written that Freedom strives to be a novel universal, but that does not tell the whip now play a living room, with large tears, separation, teenage children, the American general dotage el '
coarsening of morals ... I read the American edition (six hundred pages) in one go, giving up many hours of sleep during an intense week, but the first to recommend it, sight unseen, I must say two things. 1) The truth the book is not so much as the sum halfway between the enthusiastic reaction of the supporters and the reservations of angry detractors are two extreme opinions, and the book deserves them both for hours until his issues will not go out of fashion and you can judge the true required structural and emotional and linguistic work. 2) The book is perhaps predictable in its themes but not in their organization, so it's a gripping read that will give great satisfaction to many readers, however, do not recommend it to a certain group of readers: from a contemporary author who is high level expects a deep relationship with the author's language, its games, its pitfalls, its potential, its magic. The history of the novel has led us into the kingdom of hyperrealism and unreliable narrator, the language as excitement, promise, pure delusion. In this component, juxtaposed with the political and social interests, it must be the luck of Bolaño's 2666, for example. But a novel of social realism - while making use of elegant and complex - it gives the language for granted as if the instrument of communication, did not affect heavily on what communicate, can not give satisfaction to those who love the folk who took great literature in the twentieth century.
Franzen, for explicit choice, and more decisively here in Corrections, which was still significantly influenced by the experiments Don DeLillo and friend David Foster Wallace, choose a language almost invisible to offer all possible content to the widest possible readership. He chose to go back in time to coincide with when the words describing the objects and thus the facts were more powerful than the author's tone of voice. That's why it sounds weird to say that Franzen is the greatest American writer: the absolute magnitude has never come from bringing back the clock, but carry them forward from where no one had yet been. It can be said that Franzen is the new Tolstoy, but Nabokov could not ever say it was the new Gogol 'would have been offensive to Nabokov, that was new. The purpose for which Franzen
sends back the clock like that novel, I think, is winning the battle against the great new art form of our time: the television series of high quality, which has already ESTABLISHED masterpieces in Six Feet Under , Sopranos, Mad Men and The Wire, works of surprising complexity, variety and generosity narrative and thematic human, consumption is high. It seems that Franzen should say, the novel can take back the role of narrative power unbeatable. And even if it meant, is what makes the whole, passionate, irresistible novel. The great strength of
TV series, for as you are developing now, is working on a team of authors who, at best, gives the viewer two great joys: a complex narrative in the management of facts, information, subplots, and a true heterogeneity and polyphony of characters, created and developed by merging different sensitivities in the script. Franzen, a man alone in his study, unable to compete in the knowledge and accuracy and abundance, although, perhaps, forced to look within himself an array of emotional events of many, makes it a bit 'too smooth trajectories fall and redemption of the characters on the finish.
In any event, read a novel so successful and intelligence that puts fear and envy, one wonders what can be expected to obtain literature in its relation to our times: this book has given up the legacy of modernism and postmodernism, but not to the intelligence and talent, and this is the result: well-deserved attention, a promise of cultural relevance. What will happen this fall, say, a few writers like Rick Moody and Gary Shteyngart, among the most respected researchers of language and themes in America, whose new novel, The Four Fingers of Death Super Sad and True Love Story are released simultaneously Freedom, and what conclusions should be drawn from the phenomenon Franzen?
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