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Farther Away
Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it "a masterpiece of American fiction" and lauded its illumination, "through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew."
In Farther Away , which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. On a trip to China to see first-hand the environmental devastation there, he doesn't omit mention of his excitement and awe at the pace of China's economic development; the trip becomes a journey out of his own prejudice and moral condemnation. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. Farther Away is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.
In Farther Away , which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. On a trip to China to see first-hand the environmental devastation there, he doesn't omit mention of his excitement and awe at the pace of China's economic development; the trip becomes a journey out of his own prejudice and moral condemnation. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. Farther Away is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.
321 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
197 people are currently reading
3,700 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Franzen
90 books9,730 followersJonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.
Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.
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January 18, 2024
MAS AFUERA
Una raccolta di pezzi, interventi, brevi saggi, articoli sull’origine dei quali l’edizione non accende lumi.
Si va dal discorso per la cerimonia del conferimento delle lauree di un college all’orazione funebre per David Foster Wallace.
In mezzo si parla di uccelli – Franzen è un maniaco del birdwatching, capace di girare il mondo, anche nei luoghi più irraggiungibili, per guardare uccelli attraverso il binocolo – si parla di ecologia, di tecnologia (i contributi ovviamente più datati: dato l’argomento, dieci anni rappresentano almeno mezzo secolo), si parla di letteratura (del romanzo, dell’autobiografia…).
I due capitoli per me più interessanti sono quello che ispira il titolo della raccolta e l’orazione funebre per il carissimo amico DFW, morto suicida (recidivo) nell’ottobre del 2008. E Jonathan è arrabbiato con David, molto arrabbiato: perché non c’è più, perché si è ucciso, perché gli manca, perché aveva interrotto la terapia che gli consentiva di tenere a bada la sua malattia, perché…
Più lontano ancora perché l’isola più lontana dalla costa del Cile è Masafuera, che in spagnolo significa più lontano (mas afuera). Poi si scopre che Masafuera è il vecchio nome e quello tuttora in voga, ma quello ormai ufficiale è Alejandro Selkirk.
Un isolotto inospitale abitato da pochi esseri umani nel periodo di pesca all’aragosta, per il resto invaso da topi e mosche (chissà perché). Natura e clima ostile, gole crepacci e alture sopra i mille metri. Franzen va a passarci un periodo di raccoglimento, di silenzio e solitudine. Portandosi dietro una scatolina con un po’ delle ceneri di DFW, dategli dalla vedova dell’amico. Appena compiuta la missione, Franzen torna a casa senza indugio, sazio e satollo di silenzio solitudine e raccoglimento. Torna a casa a New York, dove abitava a quell’epoca (orami da tempo si è trasferito a Santa Clara in California).
Il resto credo presupponga un acuto amore e interesse per Jonathan Franzen, che io purtroppo nutro in modo alquanto blando. Di conseguenza, non posso dire d’aver apprezzato appieno la lettura.
Una raccolta di pezzi, interventi, brevi saggi, articoli sull’origine dei quali l’edizione non accende lumi.
Si va dal discorso per la cerimonia del conferimento delle lauree di un college all’orazione funebre per David Foster Wallace.
In mezzo si parla di uccelli – Franzen è un maniaco del birdwatching, capace di girare il mondo, anche nei luoghi più irraggiungibili, per guardare uccelli attraverso il binocolo – si parla di ecologia, di tecnologia (i contributi ovviamente più datati: dato l’argomento, dieci anni rappresentano almeno mezzo secolo), si parla di letteratura (del romanzo, dell’autobiografia…).
I due capitoli per me più interessanti sono quello che ispira il titolo della raccolta e l’orazione funebre per il carissimo amico DFW, morto suicida (recidivo) nell’ottobre del 2008. E Jonathan è arrabbiato con David, molto arrabbiato: perché non c’è più, perché si è ucciso, perché gli manca, perché aveva interrotto la terapia che gli consentiva di tenere a bada la sua malattia, perché…
Più lontano ancora perché l’isola più lontana dalla costa del Cile è Masafuera, che in spagnolo significa più lontano (mas afuera). Poi si scopre che Masafuera è il vecchio nome e quello tuttora in voga, ma quello ormai ufficiale è Alejandro Selkirk.
Un isolotto inospitale abitato da pochi esseri umani nel periodo di pesca all’aragosta, per il resto invaso da topi e mosche (chissà perché). Natura e clima ostile, gole crepacci e alture sopra i mille metri. Franzen va a passarci un periodo di raccoglimento, di silenzio e solitudine. Portandosi dietro una scatolina con un po’ delle ceneri di DFW, dategli dalla vedova dell’amico. Appena compiuta la missione, Franzen torna a casa senza indugio, sazio e satollo di silenzio solitudine e raccoglimento. Torna a casa a New York, dove abitava a quell’epoca (orami da tempo si è trasferito a Santa Clara in California).
Il resto credo presupponga un acuto amore e interesse per Jonathan Franzen, che io purtroppo nutro in modo alquanto blando. Di conseguenza, non posso dire d’aver apprezzato appieno la lettura.
January 14, 2013
Franzen’s second collection of non-fic trimmings is as strong as his first, albeit slacking on the long luscious literary essays that made How To Be Alone such a public event (remember, there were STREET PARTIES when that beast was published!), and too ornithological for five-star status. One man’s birdwatching is another man’s trainspotting and Franzen fills almost 90pp with enormous pieces on crested tits and other porn-flappers. Jeez. Otherwise, ‘On Autobiographical Fiction’ is a brilliant riff that could fill a monograph, ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ is a selfconsciously cranky anti-tech-abuse rant, and the title piece mixes Robinson Crusoe ruminations with beautiful reflections on his late mate DFW. His memorial service remarks are printed later, but ‘Farther Away’ is one of the most moving DFW encomiums since the deed. Otherwise, Franzen is in book weenie mode, talking up various lesser-known treats in GR-sized reviews (see my books-found-in-books shelf). A little too scrilla with filler, but otherwise a solid second album with no hint of sophomore slump.
May 22, 2015
This brilliant essay collection is worth the price of admission just for the first piece, “Pain Won’t Kill You” (his 2011 commencement address at Kenyon College), which is, bluntly put, about the difference between the throwaway Facebook ‘like’ and truly falling in love with someone or something. He uses the personal example of birdwatching: “it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool.”
Yet discovering that enthusiasm for birds taught him that he could transform frustrated feelings of helplessness into useful action; if he could just “run toward...pain and anger and despair, rather than away from them,” he could turn hobbies into impassioned journalism: “I started taking on a new kind of journalistic assignment. Whatever I most hated, at a particular moment, became the thing I wanted to write about.”
And this is evident in later pieces in the collection: eloquent exposés of songbird slaughter in the Mediterranean and China’s environmental degradation. I found this essay hugely inspirational. Why let myself get depressed about palm oil plantations destroying orangutan habitat, or non-recyclable plastics, or Internet pornography and other degradations of women – why not write about them as a form of protest?
Indeed, as Franzen learned, “When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?”
Title piece “Farther Away” documents Franzen’s pilgrimage to Alejandro Selkirk Island (where the real-life Robinson Crusoe was stranded) to experience solitude, find some rare birds, and scatter his friend David Foster Wallace’s ashes. Franzen believes Wallace was right to posit “fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. Fiction was his way off the island.”
“On Autobiographical Fiction” is an absolute must-read for any reader or writer. The autobiographical pieces here are, ironically, among the least interesting, though his whimsical interview with New York State is charming, and I prized this line from “Hornets” (about his hard-up house-sitting days): “Mowing lawns has always seemed to me among the most despair-inducing of human activities” (for me it’s washing dishes).
The remaining essays are a mixture of gently irascible anti-technology polemic (he detests constant cell phone use, arguing it displays the selfish attitude of ‘My emotions and my family are more important to me than your social comfort’) and literary criticism based on appreciation rather than sniping (à la Nick Hornby): he fêtes Alice Munro and resurrects a number of lost classics, such as Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children.
He ends his piece on Munro with a plea for the transforming power of literature: “Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul.”
I agree: I’m a firm believer in and supporter of bibliotherapy. Books can be one way of becoming that impassioned, involved lover and critic of the world he describes in the first essay.
There is hardly a better reader or writer at work in America today than Jonathan Franzen.
Yet discovering that enthusiasm for birds taught him that he could transform frustrated feelings of helplessness into useful action; if he could just “run toward...pain and anger and despair, rather than away from them,” he could turn hobbies into impassioned journalism: “I started taking on a new kind of journalistic assignment. Whatever I most hated, at a particular moment, became the thing I wanted to write about.”
And this is evident in later pieces in the collection: eloquent exposés of songbird slaughter in the Mediterranean and China’s environmental degradation. I found this essay hugely inspirational. Why let myself get depressed about palm oil plantations destroying orangutan habitat, or non-recyclable plastics, or Internet pornography and other degradations of women – why not write about them as a form of protest?
Indeed, as Franzen learned, “When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?”
Title piece “Farther Away” documents Franzen’s pilgrimage to Alejandro Selkirk Island (where the real-life Robinson Crusoe was stranded) to experience solitude, find some rare birds, and scatter his friend David Foster Wallace’s ashes. Franzen believes Wallace was right to posit “fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. Fiction was his way off the island.”
“On Autobiographical Fiction” is an absolute must-read for any reader or writer. The autobiographical pieces here are, ironically, among the least interesting, though his whimsical interview with New York State is charming, and I prized this line from “Hornets” (about his hard-up house-sitting days): “Mowing lawns has always seemed to me among the most despair-inducing of human activities” (for me it’s washing dishes).
The remaining essays are a mixture of gently irascible anti-technology polemic (he detests constant cell phone use, arguing it displays the selfish attitude of ‘My emotions and my family are more important to me than your social comfort’) and literary criticism based on appreciation rather than sniping (à la Nick Hornby): he fêtes Alice Munro and resurrects a number of lost classics, such as Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children.
He ends his piece on Munro with a plea for the transforming power of literature: “Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul.”
I agree: I’m a firm believer in and supporter of bibliotherapy. Books can be one way of becoming that impassioned, involved lover and critic of the world he describes in the first essay.
There is hardly a better reader or writer at work in America today than Jonathan Franzen.
January 8, 2015
Here is a story about Jonathan Franzen: I read The Corrections several years ago, perhaps just after it was at its zeitgeistiest. Yes that's a word. What are you looking at.
Anyway, I remembered really liking it, and several years later when I found myself contemplating a fairly limited audiobook selection at my parents' home library, I checked out an audio version of the Corrections and listened to most of it on a trip. It was not as good as I remembered it being, but I thought, well maybe now my tastes are more SOPHISTICATED. I had listened to something like 9 of 10 discs of it and then had to return it to their library. I decided to get the audiobook from my home library so I could finish the last disc. Then I realized that my parents' library had the ABRIDGED version and the real version was at least 20 discs long. I was unwilling to dedicate the time to listening to the entire 20 discs, but I think that The Corrections was probably at least as good as I had remembered it being. Jonathan Franzen uses a LOT of words, but by God, he earns them.
******
OK I wrote all of that as a note when I added this book but before I started listening to it
like
is Jonathan Franzen parodying himself?
Like
when he goes to China to investigate the factory where his puffin golf club cover is made, because he loves birds sooo much...
...
is that for real.
When he suggests that maybe if David Foster Wallace had gotten into birdwatching, he wouldn't have committed suicide...
is that for real??
There are some good essays in this collection, but I think I already read them all on the internet already, and then there are just like A BILLION OF JONATHAN FRANZEN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT BIRDS.
I used to feel bad for Franzen because he was forever going to be known as DFW's less-talented friend but now I think I feel bad because he's so obsessed with birds??
Oh I forgot there are also some hilariously crotchety thoughts in here about technology, like literally he is mad when people end cell phone conversations with "Love you!"
Go put a bird on it, Franzen.
Anyway, I remembered really liking it, and several years later when I found myself contemplating a fairly limited audiobook selection at my parents' home library, I checked out an audio version of the Corrections and listened to most of it on a trip. It was not as good as I remembered it being, but I thought, well maybe now my tastes are more SOPHISTICATED. I had listened to something like 9 of 10 discs of it and then had to return it to their library. I decided to get the audiobook from my home library so I could finish the last disc. Then I realized that my parents' library had the ABRIDGED version and the real version was at least 20 discs long. I was unwilling to dedicate the time to listening to the entire 20 discs, but I think that The Corrections was probably at least as good as I had remembered it being. Jonathan Franzen uses a LOT of words, but by God, he earns them.
******
OK I wrote all of that as a note when I added this book but before I started listening to it
like
is Jonathan Franzen parodying himself?
Like
when he goes to China to investigate the factory where his puffin golf club cover is made, because he loves birds sooo much...
...
is that for real.
When he suggests that maybe if David Foster Wallace had gotten into birdwatching, he wouldn't have committed suicide...
is that for real??
There are some good essays in this collection, but I think I already read them all on the internet already, and then there are just like A BILLION OF JONATHAN FRANZEN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT BIRDS.
I used to feel bad for Franzen because he was forever going to be known as DFW's less-talented friend but now I think I feel bad because he's so obsessed with birds??
Oh I forgot there are also some hilariously crotchety thoughts in here about technology, like literally he is mad when people end cell phone conversations with "Love you!"
Go put a bird on it, Franzen.
April 20, 2021
За пореден път есетата на Франзен ме разбиват. Беше ми най-интересно, когато разказва за това как Филип Рот първо му е бил пример за това как да не пише, но после е прочел “Sabbath’s theater” и е започнал да приема Рот като приятел, а не като враг (в смисъл на литературно влияние).
Друг любим момент ми беше за това как е разпръснал част от прахта на Дейвид Фостар Уолас на остров Masafuera (в превод на английски Farther Away) и как е осъзнал, че смисъла на този акт е в името на това да съхрани своя си вътрешен свят, а не паметта на Фостър Уолас.
Дори най-скучнат част - за птиците в Крит и Малта ми беше интересна, защото когато вече познаваш Франзен така, както аз, мисля, че успяващ да прозреш втория, третия и четвъртия план зад това, което прозира зад авторовото говорене за птици. Казвам говорене, защото слушах книгата. Смятам, че това е форматът за тази книга - голяма част от съдържанието е писано като лекция пред публика и смятам, че ако се консумира със слушане, читателят може само да спечели.
А сега съм твърдо решен да прочета книгите “The man who loved children”, “The Hundred Brothers” и “Sabbath’s Theater”, защото когато Франзен препоръчва нещо, то винаги е добро. It is known, както биха казали дотраките ;)
Друг любим момент ми беше за това как е разпръснал част от прахта на Дейвид Фостар Уолас на остров Masafuera (в превод на английски Farther Away) и как е осъзнал, че смисъла на този акт е в името на това да съхрани своя си вътрешен свят, а не паметта на Фостър Уолас.
Дори най-скучнат част - за птиците в Крит и Малта ми беше интересна, защото когато вече познаваш Франзен така, както аз, мисля, че успяващ да прозреш втория, третия и четвъртия план зад това, което прозира зад авторовото говорене за птици. Казвам говорене, защото слушах книгата. Смятам, че това е форматът за тази книга - голяма част от съдържанието е писано като лекция пред публика и смятам, че ако се консумира със слушане, читателят може само да спечели.
А сега съм твърдо решен да прочета книгите “The man who loved children”, “The Hundred Brothers” и “Sabbath’s Theater”, защото когато Франзен препоръчва нещо, то винаги е добро. It is known, както биха казали дотраките ;)
September 2, 2023
Daha önce üç romanını keyifle okuduğum Franzen’in 1998-2011 tarihleri arasında kaleme aldığı kurgu-dışı yazılarından oluşan bu derlemesini de severek okudum. Tabii kitap içinde bazı yazılar öne çıkıyor, bazıları ise okunmasa da olur. Kitaba adını veren yazı (Robinson Crusoe-vari bir tecrübe yaşadığı Şili açıklarında ücra bir adada geçirdiği birkaç günün hikayesi), Kıbrıs (güney tarafı) ve İtalya’da kuşların acımasızca katlini ilginç bazı ayrıntılarla anlattığı “The Ugly Medditerranean” (Franzen’ın sıkı bir kuş takipçisi olduğunu da öğrenmiş oldum böylece), edebiyatın olmazsa olmaz tartışmalarından otobiyografik kurgu meselesini kendi yazarlığı ekseninde ikna edici bir şekilde ele aldığı yazısı, Çin’deki endüstrileşme ve doğanın tahribine değindiği, çok hoş ve nüanslı gözlemler içeren “The Chinese Puffin” ve Alice Munro hakkındaki, ama genel olarak öykü türüne de ufuk açıcı tespitlerle hakkını verdiği yazısı - ki Franzen romancı ve bildiğim kadarıyla bir öykü kitabı yok - özellikle dikkat çekiyor. Bahsettiğim yazılar için dahi okumaya değer bir kitap Farther Away. Sel tarafından “Uzaktaki” başlığıyla Türkçe çevirisi de yayınlanmış.
April 28, 2012
Franzen's first essay dissects modern technology/internet trends, in particular FaceBook's (and now others') 'Like' feature. He pulls apart the desire to be likeable, and the need to be real, contrasting having many 'likes' to being genuine.
Kinda hits home as I write a review in the hopes that I will receive many 'helps'.
I don't typically find reading challenging in this way, which sums up Franzen's brilliance. While his topics vary to the point of mania, sharp intellect, and what I can only describe as earnest expression are a common factor amongst Franzen's essays.
If I must summarise the topics, I would say Farther Away is a mixture of literary reviews and insight, interspersed with the author's personal experiences. Not quite sure where the 'interview with New York State' fits in, buts it's there nonetheless.
I particularly enjoyed Franzen's rants on literary interviews, then grammar (read it to get the in joke). Whatever the topic Franzen writes with enjoyable fluid prose that prevented me from putting the book down (OK figure of speech, closing the kindle on my laptop)
All up, I recommend taking your time with this one and absorbing Franzen's insights. With Farther Away he has down exactly as he mentions in his first essay and produced something genuine, rather than something marketable/likeable (although it is those things too).
Kinda hits home as I write a review in the hopes that I will receive many 'helps'.
I don't typically find reading challenging in this way, which sums up Franzen's brilliance. While his topics vary to the point of mania, sharp intellect, and what I can only describe as earnest expression are a common factor amongst Franzen's essays.
If I must summarise the topics, I would say Farther Away is a mixture of literary reviews and insight, interspersed with the author's personal experiences. Not quite sure where the 'interview with New York State' fits in, buts it's there nonetheless.
I particularly enjoyed Franzen's rants on literary interviews, then grammar (read it to get the in joke). Whatever the topic Franzen writes with enjoyable fluid prose that prevented me from putting the book down (OK figure of speech, closing the kindle on my laptop)
All up, I recommend taking your time with this one and absorbing Franzen's insights. With Farther Away he has down exactly as he mentions in his first essay and produced something genuine, rather than something marketable/likeable (although it is those things too).
May 30, 2012
In the years since he refused Oprah Winfrey's invitation to go onto her show to discuss his novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has developed (though some might say "earned" or even "sought") a reputation as a crank, or a grouch. What too few of the stories about him take the time to explain is that he is usually cranky for all of the right reasons. This collection contains heartfelt essays, journalism, and speeches that argue that our smartphones reduce intimacy just as much as they increase it (by makin it too easy to "like" another person but harder to actually love them) and by allowing people to conduct personal phone calls in public spaces, depriving others of much-needed solitude, or, at least, the right to ignore the private lives of strangers. Franzen advocates for four or five novels to be elevated into the modern canon, discusses the legacy of David Fostet Wallace, investigates ways in which traditional Meditetannean customs about bird hunting, in the era of modern weapons and recording equipment, are threatening bird species in Africa, Europe, and Eurasia, explores what it means to write "autobiographical" fiction, and expounds upon the virtues of life in New York state and the richness of suburban Connecticut as a setting for great fiction. Franzen has strong opinions, and strong opinions alienate people. But, if you do not have a strong opinion, what is the point of writing at all?
June 8, 2014
A collection of essays and speeches written in the last five years. It covers various issues which are important to Franzen including the life and suicide of his dear friend David Foster Wallace. It traces the progress of Franzen's unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day.
An intimate portrait of Franzen and who'd have thought it? The guy is a devoted bird watcher! I am taking this book slowly, don't want to lose the essence of each chapter by immediately reading the next. I want to take time to really digest what Franzen is saying.
Funny, I thought a book of essays and speeches would not be my thing but I'm really enjoying this. I'll be seeking Franzen's books like this...
October 12, 2013
It's about books and birds really. I got it cause I heard about the essay on Munro and then just kept going and was surprised over how much more sympathetic Franzen is here then in what little I heard about him in media.
I might even try one of his novels after this one.
I might even try one of his novels after this one.
March 23, 2017
I skipped two essays because they were boring and I just learned from lithub post that in my life I only have time to read 4500 more books, so here's that and it's a first day of the rest of my life.
April 13, 2018
SECOND READING (APRIL 2018): 3 STARS
Listened to the audiobook on my commute to and from work this week. It still strikes me as very much a mixed bag--"I Just Called to Say I Love You" especially is a very profound and moving meditation on technology and our interpersonal relationships, and the Christina Stead essay is very good as well. Otherwise, meh.
FIRST READING (MARCH 2014): 3 STARS
Like a lot of other people on this site, I struggled to find interest in the essays on birding.
Franzen has gained a lot of credibility with me as a compelling and competent writer, and so I really did try to like the essays. I wanted to like them. I Googled the birds he references in the essays to try and understand what he sees in them, I took care during my cigarette breaks to scan the trees to see the birds and try to identify them (although, God help me, I can't tell wrens from sparrows or blackbirds from crows, and they all sound the same to me). And yet, when faced with 20-page ornithological essays, I found myself spacing out and wishing for them to end.
That said, when Franzen is on here, he's really on. Like many others, I kind of rolled my eyes when Franzen denounced Twitter and Facebook as legitimate societal ills in interviews. With all of the true evil that exists in the world currently, it's hard to see social media as something worth spending any time on. And yet, I'd be hard pressed not to concede the point Franzen makes in "I Just Called To Say I Love You": for all this talk about social media bringing us together, perhaps it's actually driving us apart by filling our lives with cheap and empty sentimentality. Perhaps it's making the world a far lonelier place, and if that is not in and of itself an enormous cultural problem, it's certainly symptomatic of one.
So, in short, I didn't feel that this book was up to par with his first essay collection, but it's worth reading just the same. Just skip over the bird essays.
Listened to the audiobook on my commute to and from work this week. It still strikes me as very much a mixed bag--"I Just Called to Say I Love You" especially is a very profound and moving meditation on technology and our interpersonal relationships, and the Christina Stead essay is very good as well. Otherwise, meh.
FIRST READING (MARCH 2014): 3 STARS
Like a lot of other people on this site, I struggled to find interest in the essays on birding.
Franzen has gained a lot of credibility with me as a compelling and competent writer, and so I really did try to like the essays. I wanted to like them. I Googled the birds he references in the essays to try and understand what he sees in them, I took care during my cigarette breaks to scan the trees to see the birds and try to identify them (although, God help me, I can't tell wrens from sparrows or blackbirds from crows, and they all sound the same to me). And yet, when faced with 20-page ornithological essays, I found myself spacing out and wishing for them to end.
That said, when Franzen is on here, he's really on. Like many others, I kind of rolled my eyes when Franzen denounced Twitter and Facebook as legitimate societal ills in interviews. With all of the true evil that exists in the world currently, it's hard to see social media as something worth spending any time on. And yet, I'd be hard pressed not to concede the point Franzen makes in "I Just Called To Say I Love You": for all this talk about social media bringing us together, perhaps it's actually driving us apart by filling our lives with cheap and empty sentimentality. Perhaps it's making the world a far lonelier place, and if that is not in and of itself an enormous cultural problem, it's certainly symptomatic of one.
So, in short, I didn't feel that this book was up to par with his first essay collection, but it's worth reading just the same. Just skip over the bird essays.
October 5, 2012
Not to be contrarian, but I think I prefer Franzen's essays and nonfiction to his fiction. I enjoyed his earlier book HOW TO BE ALONE much more than either THE CORRECTIONS or FREEDOM. FARTHER AWAY deals with some very personal issues, but ones that Franzen is able to use to illuminate his thoughts on the (mainly) upper-middle class American human condition of the 21st century. There are some "filler" pieces here--a screed against the annoying use of "then" seems to be one--along with book reviews, commencement addresses, interviews (with himself as the subject), and his remarks at the memorial service of his friend, David Foster Wallace. DFW also appears in the eponymous essay, which is easily the best piece in the book. Interwoven with Franzen's chronicle of marooning himself on a remote isle (all the better for a close rereading of ROBINSON CRUSOE), birding and ruminations on modern life, Franzen reflects on his relationship with, and the great tragedy of, Foster Wallace's mental illness and subsequent suicide. This piece is very good, especially in the unsentimental way Franzen examines without making excuses for DFW's actions. Again, an interesting book of non-fiction.
May 3, 2012
This latest collection of essays by Jonathan Franzen is necessarily uneven. His literary criticism continues to be compelling and enthusiastic, his social commentary continues to be somewhat infuriatingly self-righteous, and his interest in birds continues to be somewhat eccentrically interesting. What colors this collection more than anything is his rage and sorrow over his dead friend, David Foster Wallace. Wallace is explicitly discussed in several pieces, but his specter looms throughout. Franzen is heartbroken, clearly, but he primarilly seems to feel hurt, betrayed, and enraged. To watch someone work through all of these emotions could be cathartic - Wallace is my favorite author - but instead it feels nauseatingly voyeuristic. This, to me, is the dark side of memoir culture. This may be for some people, but it is, regrettably, not for me.
June 28, 2021
Cada artículo/ensayo se vuelve una cátedra de literatura tras cátedra de literatura. Amenos, divertidos, profundos, incisivos pero diplomáticos, está compilación de ensayos de Franzen son de una belleza de esa que te hace querer leer y releer y sentarte a escribir, pero también platicar con tu pareja, con amigos, con la familia, ponerte a pensar sobre la estupidez del hombre y su lugar en el mundo.
Me gusta compartir mis comentarios aquí en Goodreads, pero también he buscado migrar estos contenidos a mi blog, escribí más sobre este libro allá, los invito a leerme: ¿Para quién escribir?
Me gusta compartir mis comentarios aquí en Goodreads, pero también he buscado migrar estos contenidos a mi blog, escribí más sobre este libro allá, los invito a leerme: ¿Para quién escribir?
June 20, 2019
In questa raccolta Jonathan Franzen ( considerato uno dei romanzieri più promettenti del panorama americano) raccoglie una serie di riflessioni avvenute dal 2007 ad oggi sugli argomenti più disparati, ma che si possono riassumere nel suo impegno ecologico a favore negli uccelli, in una serie di recensioni a grandi romanzi contemporanei, a riflessioni sulla letteratura e sul ruolo dello scrittore.
Quando ho pensato al motivo di cinque stelle così di getto, sulle prime sono stato in difficoltà, perchè il libro nel suo complesso è sicuramente documentatissimo e profondo ma non contiene idee particolarmente originali. Guardando meglio tuttavia emergono a tutti i livelli aspetti che lo rendono utile a chi volesse riflettere sul proprio tempo.
Dal punto di vista politico e letterario Franzen è dichiaratamente e radicalmente democratico, e la sua poetica raappresenta molto bene quest'aspetto.
Nel descrivere la sua idea di romanzo contemporaneo parte dalle stesse tematiche di Roth, contestandone ferocemente i risultati. Franzen è infatti convinto che non esistono romanzi che non siano autobiografici, perchè nella scelta del tema e dello stile il vissuto personale non solo influenza lo scrivere, ma costituisce l'anima del messaggio. "Ogni uomo contiene dentro di sè uno ed un solo romanzo facile da scrivere", dirà. Questo da un lato significa che il racconto della propria vita e del proprio flusso di coscienza come è venuto sviluppandosi non è che la nostra storia da raccontare, dall'altro è la dichiarazione di umiltà obbligata per ogni scrittore di professione. Se non si vuole finire col raccontare sempre la stessa storia come fa Philip Roth, occorre esaminarsi interiormente e lasciarsi cambiare dalla storia. Se ci si accorge che questa violenza su se stessi non è possibile, occorre rinunciare a scrivere perchè ne verrebbe fuori un romanzo non degno di essere scritto e non degno di essere letto.
La stessa umiltà deve essere presente nello sfruttare la vita e le sofferenze dei propri cari nello scrivere romanzi. Franzen si sforza di superare il cinismo spietato di Nathan Zuckerman/Roth. Il riprodurre la vita di una persona cara in un romanzo sicuramente porta delle difficoltà, ma se vissuto con apertura e come il cammino di un percorso verso un incontro, queste possono e devono essere superate.
Nel guardare agli uomini nella società dei consumi, Franzen incontra due grandi storture che mi sono rimaste impresse, perchè sono d'accordo e perchè le ho incontrate già altrove. Innanzi tutto la tentazione del manicheismo e della semplificazione morale. In una società come quella americana in cui tutti devono essere vincenti e all'atto pratico non lo è nessuno, tutti sono alla feroce ricerca di un "noi" e di un "loro" a cui dare la colpa, rifiutando una realtà refrattaria a lasciarsi ridurre a logiche di questo tipo. Da questo punto di vista l'11 Settembre viene visto come "un prezioso dono di odio di Bin Laden agli americani", prontamente accettato e ricambiato dall'odiato Bush Jr., che faticava a trovare una via d'uscita per la sua logica competitiva dalla quale da buon conservatore non voleva prescindere.
Il secondo punto è la mercificazione del sentimento. La tecnologia progredita della civiltà dei consumi, dagli smartphone ai social networks, contiene dentro di se un pericolo terribile: la riduzione dell'amore a piuro piacere. La contrapposizione tra il faticoso vivere il rapporto con l'altro in un dare avere quotidiano e lo sfruttamento asimmetrico e remissivo per il proprio piacere dello smartphone o dell'oggetto alla moda di turno. Cedere alla tentazione di sostituire i rapporti umani con rapporti di possesso, o peggio di elerttronizzarli in un social network, ci renderà degli automi vestiti di grigio ridotti a cercar di guadagnare qualcosa di più per permetterci una casa più grande...
Anche le deformazioni psicologiche come la masturbazione vanno viste in quest'ottica. Il problema della masturbazione non è semplicemente sessuale (la semplificazione morale va rigettata), ma trova il suo nocciolo nella sua solitudine, nella pretesa di ridurre il climax di una vita inseme all'altro a oggetto di piacere.
Questi ed altri punti di lettura dell' uomo possono costituire strumenti di lettura anche dei grandi classici dell'ottocento e della prima metà del novecento. Sono bellissime ed illuminanti le recensioni di Kafka e di Dostoevskij da una parte, di Alice Munro, Philip Roth ed alcuni minori della letteratura americana dall'altra. Anche se non sempre sono stato d'accordo con alcune sue considerazioni l'eleganza e la linearità con cui Franzen spalanca nuovi livelli di lettura hanno di per se un grande valore estetico.
Mi coinvolgevano troppo personalmente le parti che l'autore ha dedicato alla malattia mentale ed alla italianità, vista come disgustoso ed affascinante esempio di complessità morale. Molte sono le frasi riportate in italiano nel testo, molti i viaggi che l'autore ha fatto in Italia, importantissimo il ruolo che Franzen attribuisce alla cultura italiana negli esiti dell'uomo di oggi nel bene (il francescanesimo vissuto come rapporto umile e diretto col mondo) e nel male (Berlusconi visto come il risultato ultimo della riduzione dei rapporti umani a puro piacere di possesso).
Questi solo alcuni degli aspetti che mi hanno impressionato delle ventuno digressioni. Le quali se non fanno altro che esporre il pensiero di uno scrittore del nostro tempo, questo pensiero sa essere cosi profondo ed elegante da essere un prezioso invito verso il lettore a superare i propri schemi abituali ed ad andare più in profondità nel guardare agli uomini, al mondo, alla letteratura.
Quando ho pensato al motivo di cinque stelle così di getto, sulle prime sono stato in difficoltà, perchè il libro nel suo complesso è sicuramente documentatissimo e profondo ma non contiene idee particolarmente originali. Guardando meglio tuttavia emergono a tutti i livelli aspetti che lo rendono utile a chi volesse riflettere sul proprio tempo.
Dal punto di vista politico e letterario Franzen è dichiaratamente e radicalmente democratico, e la sua poetica raappresenta molto bene quest'aspetto.
Nel descrivere la sua idea di romanzo contemporaneo parte dalle stesse tematiche di Roth, contestandone ferocemente i risultati. Franzen è infatti convinto che non esistono romanzi che non siano autobiografici, perchè nella scelta del tema e dello stile il vissuto personale non solo influenza lo scrivere, ma costituisce l'anima del messaggio. "Ogni uomo contiene dentro di sè uno ed un solo romanzo facile da scrivere", dirà. Questo da un lato significa che il racconto della propria vita e del proprio flusso di coscienza come è venuto sviluppandosi non è che la nostra storia da raccontare, dall'altro è la dichiarazione di umiltà obbligata per ogni scrittore di professione. Se non si vuole finire col raccontare sempre la stessa storia come fa Philip Roth, occorre esaminarsi interiormente e lasciarsi cambiare dalla storia. Se ci si accorge che questa violenza su se stessi non è possibile, occorre rinunciare a scrivere perchè ne verrebbe fuori un romanzo non degno di essere scritto e non degno di essere letto.
La stessa umiltà deve essere presente nello sfruttare la vita e le sofferenze dei propri cari nello scrivere romanzi. Franzen si sforza di superare il cinismo spietato di Nathan Zuckerman/Roth. Il riprodurre la vita di una persona cara in un romanzo sicuramente porta delle difficoltà, ma se vissuto con apertura e come il cammino di un percorso verso un incontro, queste possono e devono essere superate.
Nel guardare agli uomini nella società dei consumi, Franzen incontra due grandi storture che mi sono rimaste impresse, perchè sono d'accordo e perchè le ho incontrate già altrove. Innanzi tutto la tentazione del manicheismo e della semplificazione morale. In una società come quella americana in cui tutti devono essere vincenti e all'atto pratico non lo è nessuno, tutti sono alla feroce ricerca di un "noi" e di un "loro" a cui dare la colpa, rifiutando una realtà refrattaria a lasciarsi ridurre a logiche di questo tipo. Da questo punto di vista l'11 Settembre viene visto come "un prezioso dono di odio di Bin Laden agli americani", prontamente accettato e ricambiato dall'odiato Bush Jr., che faticava a trovare una via d'uscita per la sua logica competitiva dalla quale da buon conservatore non voleva prescindere.
Il secondo punto è la mercificazione del sentimento. La tecnologia progredita della civiltà dei consumi, dagli smartphone ai social networks, contiene dentro di se un pericolo terribile: la riduzione dell'amore a piuro piacere. La contrapposizione tra il faticoso vivere il rapporto con l'altro in un dare avere quotidiano e lo sfruttamento asimmetrico e remissivo per il proprio piacere dello smartphone o dell'oggetto alla moda di turno. Cedere alla tentazione di sostituire i rapporti umani con rapporti di possesso, o peggio di elerttronizzarli in un social network, ci renderà degli automi vestiti di grigio ridotti a cercar di guadagnare qualcosa di più per permetterci una casa più grande...
Anche le deformazioni psicologiche come la masturbazione vanno viste in quest'ottica. Il problema della masturbazione non è semplicemente sessuale (la semplificazione morale va rigettata), ma trova il suo nocciolo nella sua solitudine, nella pretesa di ridurre il climax di una vita inseme all'altro a oggetto di piacere.
Questi ed altri punti di lettura dell' uomo possono costituire strumenti di lettura anche dei grandi classici dell'ottocento e della prima metà del novecento. Sono bellissime ed illuminanti le recensioni di Kafka e di Dostoevskij da una parte, di Alice Munro, Philip Roth ed alcuni minori della letteratura americana dall'altra. Anche se non sempre sono stato d'accordo con alcune sue considerazioni l'eleganza e la linearità con cui Franzen spalanca nuovi livelli di lettura hanno di per se un grande valore estetico.
Mi coinvolgevano troppo personalmente le parti che l'autore ha dedicato alla malattia mentale ed alla italianità, vista come disgustoso ed affascinante esempio di complessità morale. Molte sono le frasi riportate in italiano nel testo, molti i viaggi che l'autore ha fatto in Italia, importantissimo il ruolo che Franzen attribuisce alla cultura italiana negli esiti dell'uomo di oggi nel bene (il francescanesimo vissuto come rapporto umile e diretto col mondo) e nel male (Berlusconi visto come il risultato ultimo della riduzione dei rapporti umani a puro piacere di possesso).
Questi solo alcuni degli aspetti che mi hanno impressionato delle ventuno digressioni. Le quali se non fanno altro che esporre il pensiero di uno scrittore del nostro tempo, questo pensiero sa essere cosi profondo ed elegante da essere un prezioso invito verso il lettore a superare i propri schemi abituali ed ad andare più in profondità nel guardare agli uomini, al mondo, alla letteratura.
May 5, 2022
okay franzen che ammetti di essere un vecchio lamentoso, ma a tutto c'è un limite.
December 1, 2021
https://delsharm.blog.ir/1400/09/10/fa
این کتاب مجموعه مقالات، سخنرانیها و نوشتههای سالهای ۱۹۹۸ تا ۲۰۱۰ از «جاناتان فرنزن» نویسنده و داستاننویس آمریکایی است. مضمون نوشتهها مختلف است. اما میشود به چند بخش تقسیمش کرد: نقد دنیای مدرن و فناوری، پرندهها، نقد کتاب دیگران، و نویسندگی. نام کتاب در واقع ترجمهٔ اسم جزیرهای دورافتاده است که فرنزن پس از خودکشی دوست نویسندهاش، «دیوید فاستر والاس»، به آن پناه میبرد. او بخشی از خاکستر دوستش را با خودش میبرد که در آن جزیره بپراکند. این جزیره دقیقاً همان جزیرهای است که «رابینسون کروزو» در آن گم شده است و به همین خاطر فرنزن نقبی به فضای ادبیات، تنهایی و چرایی اتفاقات پیرامون ادبیات میپردازد.
فرنزن پس از سالها درگیری روحی و دلزدگی شدید از دنیای مدرن به شکلی جنونآمیز به پرندهها علاقهمند شده است و برای دیدن گونههای نادر پرندهها به جاهای مختلف سر زده است. از دیدگاه پرندهدوستی زیاد او بسیاری از نوشتههایش در این موضوع خستهکننده است اما اطلاعات جانبی که در مورد انقراض پرندهها بر اثر آلودگی هوا، جنگلزدایی و ساخت و سازهای بیرویه میدهد خیلی جالب و البته ترسناک است. او حتی برای بررسی فکرهایش مدتی به چین سفر کرده است و چین را مدرنترین کشور دنیا مییابد: از نظر او مدرنترین یعنی کثیفترین و وحشتناکترین. او در اتاق هتلش در طبقهٔ هفتاد و چندم است ولی آنچه روبرویش است دود غلیظ حاصل از وارونگی هواست.
او از دنیای مجازی گریزان است اما وقتی دلایلش را بیان میکند میتوان به او حق داد. در کتاب مقالات قبلیاش «چگونه تنها بودن» نیز به گریزان بودن از تلویزیون اشاره میکند. در کتاب حاضر، گریزی به اتفاقات ۱۱ سپتامبر میزند: رسانهها فضا را ملتهب تصویر میکنند اما او که از رسانهها بیخبر است دنیای روزمرهٔ شهر نیویورک را زیاد متفاوت از گذشته نمیبیند. در مقالهای دیگر به لوث شدن «دوستت دارم» در فضای جدید میپردازد. او دلش میلرزد وقتی این جمله را در خیابان یا در صف قطار از فرد کناریاش که با تلفن حرف میزند میشنود: مگر قرار نبود این جمله خاص باشد و در خصوصیترین لحظهٔ زیست انسانی بگنجد؟ او داستایوسکی را به خاطر تحلیل دقیقش از اعتیاد در «قمارباز» میستاید و انسان جدید را معتاد به اینترنت و گوشی تلفن میبیند: دقت کنید این مقالات برای قبل از ۲۰۱۰ است و حالا این قضیه خیلی افتضاحتر شده است.
به نظرم یکی از قشنگترین مقالات او در مورد «رمان خودنوشت» است. نظرات فرنزن در مورد ادبیات بسیار بیپرده است. او آلیس مونرو (داستاننویس کانادایی) را میستاید، سر تعظیم به رمان روس قرن نوزدهم (گوگول، داستایوسکی، تورگنیف، تولستوی و بسیاری دیگر) فرو میآورد اما در عین حال بیپرده میگوید که لذت چندانی از «ویرجینا وولف» و «جیمز جویز» نمیبرد. او بارها «فیلیپ راث» رماننویس معاصر آمریکایی را به باد انتقاد میگیرد: جالب است این سطح از اختلاف سلیقه وقتی مثلاً سلمان رشدی «فیلیپ راث» را بهترین نویسندهٔ زندهٔ دنیا میبیند (در سال ۲۰۱۷، یک سال قبل از فوت راث). حتی اخیراً دیدم فرنزن با کنایه میگوید که نمیفهمد چرا خیلیها «ای. ام. فاستر» را جدی میگیرند.
اندک مقالات نقد کتابهای دیگران را نخواندم چرا که آن کتابها را نخوانده بودم.
این کتاب مجموعه مقالات، سخنرانیها و نوشتههای سالهای ۱۹۹۸ تا ۲۰۱۰ از «جاناتان فرنزن» نویسنده و داستاننویس آمریکایی است. مضمون نوشتهها مختلف است. اما میشود به چند بخش تقسیمش کرد: نقد دنیای مدرن و فناوری، پرندهها، نقد کتاب دیگران، و نویسندگی. نام کتاب در واقع ترجمهٔ اسم جزیرهای دورافتاده است که فرنزن پس از خودکشی دوست نویسندهاش، «دیوید فاستر والاس»، به آن پناه میبرد. او بخشی از خاکستر دوستش را با خودش میبرد که در آن جزیره بپراکند. این جزیره دقیقاً همان جزیرهای است که «رابینسون کروزو» در آن گم شده است و به همین خاطر فرنزن نقبی به فضای ادبیات، تنهایی و چرایی اتفاقات پیرامون ادبیات میپردازد.
فرنزن پس از سالها درگیری روحی و دلزدگی شدید از دنیای مدرن به شکلی جنونآمیز به پرندهها علاقهمند شده است و برای دیدن گونههای نادر پرندهها به جاهای مختلف سر زده است. از دیدگاه پرندهدوستی زیاد او بسیاری از نوشتههایش در این موضوع خستهکننده است اما اطلاعات جانبی که در مورد انقراض پرندهها بر اثر آلودگی هوا، جنگلزدایی و ساخت و سازهای بیرویه میدهد خیلی جالب و البته ترسناک است. او حتی برای بررسی فکرهایش مدتی به چین سفر کرده است و چین را مدرنترین کشور دنیا مییابد: از نظر او مدرنترین یعنی کثیفترین و وحشتناکترین. او در اتاق هتلش در طبقهٔ هفتاد و چندم است ولی آنچه روبرویش است دود غلیظ حاصل از وارونگی هواست.
او از دنیای مجازی گریزان است اما وقتی دلایلش را بیان میکند میتوان به او حق داد. در کتاب مقالات قبلیاش «چگونه تنها بودن» نیز به گریزان بودن از تلویزیون اشاره میکند. در کتاب حاضر، گریزی به اتفاقات ۱۱ سپتامبر میزند: رسانهها فضا را ملتهب تصویر میکنند اما او که از رسانهها بیخبر است دنیای روزمرهٔ شهر نیویورک را زیاد متفاوت از گذشته نمیبیند. در مقالهای دیگر به لوث شدن «دوستت دارم» در فضای جدید میپردازد. او دلش میلرزد وقتی این جمله را در خیابان یا در صف قطار از فرد کناریاش که با تلفن حرف میزند میشنود: مگر قرار نبود این جمله خاص باشد و در خصوصیترین لحظهٔ زیست انسانی بگنجد؟ او داستایوسکی را به خاطر تحلیل دقیقش از اعتیاد در «قمارباز» میستاید و انسان جدید را معتاد به اینترنت و گوشی تلفن میبیند: دقت کنید این مقالات برای قبل از ۲۰۱۰ است و حالا این قضیه خیلی افتضاحتر شده است.
به نظرم یکی از قشنگترین مقالات او در مورد «رمان خودنوشت» است. نظرات فرنزن در مورد ادبیات بسیار بیپرده است. او آلیس مونرو (داستاننویس کانادایی) را میستاید، سر تعظیم به رمان روس قرن نوزدهم (گوگول، داستایوسکی، تورگنیف، تولستوی و بسیاری دیگر) فرو میآورد اما در عین حال بیپرده میگوید که لذت چندانی از «ویرجینا وولف» و «جیمز جویز» نمیبرد. او بارها «فیلیپ راث» رماننویس معاصر آمریکایی را به باد انتقاد میگیرد: جالب است این سطح از اختلاف سلیقه وقتی مثلاً سلمان رشدی «فیلیپ راث» را بهترین نویسندهٔ زندهٔ دنیا میبیند (در سال ۲۰۱۷، یک سال قبل از فوت راث). حتی اخیراً دیدم فرنزن با کنایه میگوید که نمیفهمد چرا خیلیها «ای. ام. فاستر» را جدی میگیرند.
اندک مقالات نقد کتابهای دیگران را نخواندم چرا که آن کتابها را نخوانده بودم.
July 19, 2014
Few contemporary American writers are as good at ridiculing contemporary America as Jonathan Franzen is. He has next to no sympathy for the numerous manifestations of our popular culture and how they almost inevitably leave us feeling empty, unhappy, and less alive as people. And he manages to communicate all of these things in his essays with humor, wit and at times, something approximating compassion. Unfortunately he beats these strengths to death in Farther Away, which is nowhere near as strong as his past novels or non-fiction. The tone in most of these pieces is so generically, so cleanly misanthropic that it almost makes misanthropy itself boring. His bitterness over environmental issues, forgotten works of fiction, American politics (because it's just SO original to be bitter about that), social networks and cell phones, it all feels like someone checking things off of a old list of grievances rather then someone passionately engaging with any of them. And you can see him struggling to try and tie a lot of these things together in the title piece, which is sort of about loneliness, sort of about birds, sort of about his deep friendship with David Foster Wallace, and sort of about Robinson Caruso, without it really being about any of these things. It's just bland and muddled. Franzen has often written and said that his friendship/mild competitiveness with Wallace helped to serve as a catalyst in his own writing life. If he's to be believed, it helped him grow and made him into a better writer. The pieces in Farther Away are smart and well written, but they ultimately feel like the work of someone who isn't risking much or pushing into new territory. I really like Franzen's books. I hope he doesn't continue to stand still.
November 26, 2018
En esta ocasión, la editorial Salamandra nos trae 21 textos de Franzen.
Incluye ensayos, artículos periodísticos, discursos, y algún relato de su vida personal en defensa de las aves.
Si te gustó “Las Correcciones” o “Libertad”, éste es un buen complemento para conocer más a un gran autor. Tengo pendiente para leer “Pureza”, espero poder hacerlo pronto.
Incluye ensayos, artículos periodísticos, discursos, y algún relato de su vida personal en defensa de las aves.
Si te gustó “Las Correcciones” o “Libertad”, éste es un buen complemento para conocer más a un gran autor. Tengo pendiente para leer “Pureza”, espero poder hacerlo pronto.
January 31, 2016
Güzel bir denemeler kitabı, aslında 4.5 yıldızlık. Kitap eleştiri ve yorumları ilginç.
December 22, 2017
If the man says, "Read Alice Munro", you go and read Alice Munro.
April 29, 2018
There's this group of living essayists/critics that I'm grateful for, but that I can't quite get beyond gratitude to full-blown admiration. This includes Sven Birkerts, James Wood, Clive James, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates (20 years ago or so, certainly not now), William H. Pritchard, William Logan, and Donald Hall, Michael Robbins, Joan Acocela, Anthony Lane, among others. These writers worry about contemporary letters in a way that I find congenial, bracing, and commonsensical. In short I tend to agree with them, fret along side them, feel dismayed with them. And yet they always manage to disappoint me, flinching at the last second, resorting to some bit of contemporary correctitude or right-thinking. Having found a nice copy of Jonathan Franzen's Farther Away on the library discard shelf, I can now add him to my list as well. Glad to know he's out there fighting the good fight, siding with literature and stuff, not an academic (sorry Harold Bloom - it's too late to change your stripes now), not an assumer of doctrines (mostly), not an establishment rah-raher (David Orr, Seth Abramson, Dan Chiasson).
But, like I said, I cannot quite work up full-blown admiration for these critics the way I do for these dead old guys: Lionel Trilling, Randal Jarrell, W. H. Auden (sometimes, when he's not explaining things), T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, James Dickey (a surprisingly good critic!), Robert Frost (who wrote very little prose, but could be killer-diller when he did; when he wasn't kissing Louis Untermeyer's ass, his letters are pretty good too) or Anthony Burgess. Perhaps it is the fault of our times - too much has been lost, decayed, massacred, too much freedom lost to doctrine, political correctitude, social media and fear. Maybe we just aren't educated enough. Or spend far too much time worrying about who's getting elected (don't you wish you could get back all that time you wasted on Al Gore and/or George W. Bush?)
As for this collection by Jonathan Franzen, he makes all the right moves for those readers who unfailingly describe themselves as "passionate readers." He defends, as Birkerts does, our dying print culture, bemoans the dire plight of literary fiction, the death of literary criticism, literary journals, literary salons, etc. etc.. Nothing wrong with this, and as far as it goes, I agree with him. But something is missing, something seems too facile, too, I don't know, too ahistorical, somehow besides the point. In a paradoxical way, as much as he complains about it, Franzen to me seems to embody the digital - he gripes about it, then mentions his Blackberry (what's that?). Nothing really connects with anything - literary trends, friendships, feuds, history - have been replaced with doctrine and a great deal of noise...and those of us (including Franzen, Birkerts, etc.) who worry and fret about it. Cutting through the noise is the critic's goal, and Franzen is hard to hear too much of the time. But I do respect the fact he is trying.
***
David Foster Wallace suffuses this book, and for me this was what was most interesting about it. Professional critics have noted this (so I see from online reviews), as well they should, since it is the heart of this collection in a way. It is an interesting relationship Wallace and Franzen had - friends and rivals, the way all real literary friendships should be. This is a rare thing, and Franzen cherished it as much as he could comprehend it, and I enjoyed reading about it here, with reservations. So much of what passes for literary relationships has degenerated to professors being colleagues to each other - backbiting and squabbling, but mostly off the record, keeping within career bounds. It sucks and despite Wallace's professorial career track, he had enough clout outside academia to not sink into the sad sorry state of the failed academic writer. Franzen, of course, is financially successful, which makes him suspect, of course (keep Oprah at a distance, for God's sake!) but on the other hand it keeps him free from CV-scrounging.
Franzen does a good job describing the scarifying effects of such a friendship, he never quite brings himself to state the situation baldly: Wallace was a semi-realized genius, while Franzen is a quasi-"literary" hack with popular appeal. Maybe this is too harsh, but I really couldn't get through The Corrections for all the usual novely ways - all those people observed, gouts of over-writing, observations and descriptions that add up to...a really big novel. It's one of those quasi-profound doorstops that comes along every decade or so - Raintree Country comes to mind - or Gone with the Wind or James Michener or Leon Uris - bestseller and over-praised.
Anyway, it was an uneven friendship - again, Wallace was a genius and Franzen...is not a genius - it makes for an awkward fit - in what might be Bellow's best novel, Herzog's Gift, this dynamic is explored in excruciating detail. Since I have personal experience in this area - I was once friends with a genius while I myself am most definitely not a genius - I admired Franzen's efforts to explore this dynamic, which for the non-genius, can be humiliating (among other things). Here, I will attempt a jocular, knowing tone, but the fact is, the humiliations, the disappointments, and the absolute thrill of being friends with a genius has probably affected me more than any other relationship in my life. My genius friend changed me, improved me, and possibly damaged me - to this day I hear his heh-heh-heh's in the background of my puny efforts and minuscule "successes." Feel his eyes glaze over when I spout off some inane "opinion" or another after a few drinks. Which is to say, years after he severed contact with me, he still undermines me - geniuses have a tendency to do that, if you'll let them. And yet I'd be a lesser everything without him, without that experience. I need undermining, both as "artist" and half-baked man. But like dialysis, I don't have to like it even if I need it.
One of the most humiliating aspects of friendship with a genius - and again, Franzen never quite says this, although he sort of implies it by some of his anecdotes - is the fact that a genius is bored most of the time, and that includes most of the time he is with you. Like I said, this is a humiliating realization. All those years I tried - the way Franzen admits that he did with Wallace - to be smart and funny - only to have my friend find far more of interest in the non-literary, the non-intellectual, the non-sober. Because, well, those people were intrinsically more interesting than my frantically patched-together quasi-intellectual-Bohemian posturings and half-baked, half-educated "opinions." It took me years to get over my own snobbery and bombast and bullshit that obscured the fact that, yep, a guy who is really good at vehicle electronics is almost always more interesting and enjoyable to spend time with than someone with an MFA full of bureaucratic (i.e. academic) or corporate ambitions - more interesting than me, I mean. Not forever, not to be roomies, but in the mere moment-to-moment encounters with other people, a genius finds those people with a grasp on the actual are far more...something. Real? Lovable? Interesting? Real lovably interesting? I don't know what, but to some extent, I do understand it now, if a bit late in the game.
A genius has ways of manifesting his boredom, often with displays of cruelty. Franzen tells an interesting anecdote about Wallace signing copies of his novels to Franzen:
"David and I had a friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete. A few years before he died, he signed my hardcover copies of his two most recent books. On the title page of one of them I found the traced outline of his hand; on the title page of the other was an outline of an erection so huge that it ran off the page, annotated with a little arrow and the remark "scale 100%." (p. 40)
I bet Franzen's inscriptions to Wallace were sweated-over, heartfelt, disguised with carefully-deployed irony-cum-affection. And here's Wallace with a big dick joke. Vulgar but, I think, kinda funny, so long as it isn't your title page. But I also sympathize with Franzen, because, again, my own genius friend did similar things to me. Once, not long after I met him, I spotted my new genius friend in a car, while I was out running errands. We live in a medium-to-largish city, so such encounters are not really to be expected. I waved enthusiastically. My new genius friend flipped me off and laughed. Twenty-plus years on, that still stings, I still feel a little foolish, a bit uncool. He had a knack for that sort of thing. Some years back I sent him a YouTube link I thought was clever - big mistake; it wasn't clever at all, it was a typical online homemade video mishmash that he'd seen through years before (I've always been a slow adopter of online garbage; I'm just now turning on to funny cat videos). His smackdown was harsh and unambiguous - he just didn't have time for stupid shit emailed by stupid people. I'm not sure he could've made me feel worse over such a minuscule thing. Trivial, perhaps just another big dick graffiti moment, but thanks to what might be called his highly developed emotional intelligence, my friend was able to say the most devastating things, knowing just exactly where all the joints in somebody's armor might be. When drinking, he would use this gift in ways that can only be described as diabolical. He spared me, mostly, probably because he detected how compliant, fragile and slow-witted (not stupid - I am not especially stupid, but I am slow-witted) I was and generally what poor sport I would be in such an encounter, how easily hurt. This is just further evidence of how boring I must've been to him.
Another similarity is Franzen's bird-watching, featured prominently in this collection. Although I don't bird watch, I collect things (right now I am in the midst of an ancient Roman coin obsession), which is pretty much the same thing (a hobby's a hobby's a hobby). Wallace, like my genius friend, had no use for such things, for knickknacks and photo collections and gluing stamps into albums.
"David wrote about weather as well as anyone who ever put words on paper, and he loved his dogs more purely than he loved anything or anyone else, but nature itself didn't interest him, and he was utterly indifferent to birds. Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I'd stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. "Yeah," he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, "it's pretty." In the summer before he died, sitting with him on his patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn't keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps I was learning the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not." (pp. 37-38)
This is an interesting passage, showing as it does Franzen's frequent slack moments ("who put words to paper" "magnificence" "saddened" "the joy of birds") as well as his half-veiled malice and resentments (Wallace's naps were "heavily medicated" and he loved his dogs "more purely" than "anything or anyone else"); whenever Franzen uses the word "love" in a DFW context, you can be pretty sure poor old dead Dave is going to get a drubbing. But as for the hobby, I get it; our hobbies, whether it be curlews or some variation in the legend of late Marcus Aurelius denarii from the Rome mint - for some of us, our hobbies go a long way to fill up the empty spots (well, until they don't). But there is a hierarchy of hobbies - Franzen is pretty pleased with his birds and with the idea of himself watching birds (as I am, sometimes, when I am winkling out some attribution from an obscure numismatic source). But I doubt Franzen would be so sympathetic to someone who works word search puzzles, or dominates a virtual battlefield in Call of Duty III. Harrumph! One of the great burdens of genius is boredom; one of the great gifts of mediocrity is the ability to be easily amused. In my mediocre way I am grateful, but I am pretty clear on the mediocre part of it all. Franzen still seems to think bird watching is a virtue.
Franzen brings up Wallace's lying and betrayals. This too was a humiliating aspect of my friendship with a genius. Many's the time I waited for him to show up to our little "writer's group" only to have him not. Something else came along. Or he forgot. Or, later on, he started drinking. The lying, not so much perhaps, but, perhaps more because of the drinking than anything else, it too came up. Dismaying! One of the most ruthlessly intellectually and emotionally honest people I've ever known would resort to lying and cheap excuse-mongering. His girlfriends suffered far more than I did from these things, but it was still dismaying.
Then there's love. Wallace, apparently, didn't know what love is, just like that singer from Foreigner:
"The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing and abstract or spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent - the cranial-fluid-dripping wife in Infinite Jest, the psychopath in the last of the interviews with hideous men. David's fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with him took this rather laborious hyperconsiderateness and moral wisdom at face value." (p. 39)
Franzen can really huff and puff when he feels threatened, and this passage is a good example of this. So what is it, exactly, this "ordinary love" he mentions? These "close loving relationships" that are a "foundational source of meaning"? Sounds like the kind of love found in Jonathan Franzen novels. As for the fact "David's fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates" the same could be said about Flannery O'Connor, Dickens or Kafka or Jane Austen. Elsewhere Franzen puts it: "...it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him." (pp. 38-39) Yes, but what is this "love" of the people closest to him, exactly, and how was it going to save David Foster Wallace? Franzen is in love with love, he is a true believer - throughout these essays, he mulls over his failed first marriage and the promise of love. Love is the thing that saves us, absence of love (or in Wallace's case, apparently) the rejection of love is what destroys us. This all strikes me as a bit too easy-squeezy. Franzen throws love about - how great it is, how it can save us - pretty much the way a schlocky novelist predictably does. Love is the deus ex machina we should let into our lives. Love is all things. "All you need is love," sang the Beatles, even as John Lennon was being a really unloving father and husband to Julian and Cynthia. Love, love, love.
"He (Wallace) was loveable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself..." (p. 40)
More bad novel stuff here (or cheap "literary" psychology - "island of himself"). Another dismaying thing about my friendship with a genius was that my friend was a genius at love - I don't mean girlfriends, which he accumulated by the score (on top of genius, my friend looked like an out-at-the-elbows John F. Kennedy Jr., which is to say he was arguably even more appealing than John-John who somehow always looked as if his mother still dressed him) - that was only a small, sexual part of his lovableness. Beyond sex, my friend had a knack, an astonishing warmth that made my own dutiful affections towards family and friends seem shallow and, well, merely dutiful. My friend had a heart bigger than Nebraska whereas I had one eye on the bank account, another on the clock, and a vast store of cheap sentimentality I could call up on a dime. Fortunately for my self-esteem, my friend was a drunk, so he would do horrible things, giving me the opportunity to feel superior, self-righteous, virtuous and be more demonstrably virtuous and "lovable" in general. But the fact was, despite the horribleness, he had a talent for love that I don't. In my younger years this dismayed me and fuelled secret resentments - why are people so drawn to my genius friend when it was universally acknowledged that I was the "nice guy"? I'd put a lot of work into the nice guy thing, a lot of honing and pruning to pull it off. But my sloppy, often cruel, big-hearted friend was the sun, I was an orbiting satellite, a half-failed planet, chilly and mostly inert. That he was my friend became one of my biggest accomplishments, something for which I was envied - pretty much the only thing I was envied for. The Franzen-Wallace friendship is, of course, on a much larger stage - they were successful and famous while me and my friend were not. But the dynamics are similar, I'd bet. My guess is that Franzen, for all his agonizing about ex-wives and how we fail 'em, recognizes down deep that David Foster Wallace's "childlike purity" is what actual, non-botched, non-intellectualized, non-examined, love really is. Most adults discard "childlike purity" and the non-negotiable aspects of love because these things make you vulnerable, make you stupid, make you ineffective. Then we spend our adulthoods covering up the sell-outs we are (that's a good subject for a novel, eh?). One of the great cover-ups is sentimentality - one of the hallmarks of a genius is a terrifying lack of sentimentality. This is one of the reasons the company of a genius can be pretty scarifying for us mediocrities.
But, like I said, I cannot quite work up full-blown admiration for these critics the way I do for these dead old guys: Lionel Trilling, Randal Jarrell, W. H. Auden (sometimes, when he's not explaining things), T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, James Dickey (a surprisingly good critic!), Robert Frost (who wrote very little prose, but could be killer-diller when he did; when he wasn't kissing Louis Untermeyer's ass, his letters are pretty good too) or Anthony Burgess. Perhaps it is the fault of our times - too much has been lost, decayed, massacred, too much freedom lost to doctrine, political correctitude, social media and fear. Maybe we just aren't educated enough. Or spend far too much time worrying about who's getting elected (don't you wish you could get back all that time you wasted on Al Gore and/or George W. Bush?)
As for this collection by Jonathan Franzen, he makes all the right moves for those readers who unfailingly describe themselves as "passionate readers." He defends, as Birkerts does, our dying print culture, bemoans the dire plight of literary fiction, the death of literary criticism, literary journals, literary salons, etc. etc.. Nothing wrong with this, and as far as it goes, I agree with him. But something is missing, something seems too facile, too, I don't know, too ahistorical, somehow besides the point. In a paradoxical way, as much as he complains about it, Franzen to me seems to embody the digital - he gripes about it, then mentions his Blackberry (what's that?). Nothing really connects with anything - literary trends, friendships, feuds, history - have been replaced with doctrine and a great deal of noise...and those of us (including Franzen, Birkerts, etc.) who worry and fret about it. Cutting through the noise is the critic's goal, and Franzen is hard to hear too much of the time. But I do respect the fact he is trying.
***
David Foster Wallace suffuses this book, and for me this was what was most interesting about it. Professional critics have noted this (so I see from online reviews), as well they should, since it is the heart of this collection in a way. It is an interesting relationship Wallace and Franzen had - friends and rivals, the way all real literary friendships should be. This is a rare thing, and Franzen cherished it as much as he could comprehend it, and I enjoyed reading about it here, with reservations. So much of what passes for literary relationships has degenerated to professors being colleagues to each other - backbiting and squabbling, but mostly off the record, keeping within career bounds. It sucks and despite Wallace's professorial career track, he had enough clout outside academia to not sink into the sad sorry state of the failed academic writer. Franzen, of course, is financially successful, which makes him suspect, of course (keep Oprah at a distance, for God's sake!) but on the other hand it keeps him free from CV-scrounging.
Franzen does a good job describing the scarifying effects of such a friendship, he never quite brings himself to state the situation baldly: Wallace was a semi-realized genius, while Franzen is a quasi-"literary" hack with popular appeal. Maybe this is too harsh, but I really couldn't get through The Corrections for all the usual novely ways - all those people observed, gouts of over-writing, observations and descriptions that add up to...a really big novel. It's one of those quasi-profound doorstops that comes along every decade or so - Raintree Country comes to mind - or Gone with the Wind or James Michener or Leon Uris - bestseller and over-praised.
Anyway, it was an uneven friendship - again, Wallace was a genius and Franzen...is not a genius - it makes for an awkward fit - in what might be Bellow's best novel, Herzog's Gift, this dynamic is explored in excruciating detail. Since I have personal experience in this area - I was once friends with a genius while I myself am most definitely not a genius - I admired Franzen's efforts to explore this dynamic, which for the non-genius, can be humiliating (among other things). Here, I will attempt a jocular, knowing tone, but the fact is, the humiliations, the disappointments, and the absolute thrill of being friends with a genius has probably affected me more than any other relationship in my life. My genius friend changed me, improved me, and possibly damaged me - to this day I hear his heh-heh-heh's in the background of my puny efforts and minuscule "successes." Feel his eyes glaze over when I spout off some inane "opinion" or another after a few drinks. Which is to say, years after he severed contact with me, he still undermines me - geniuses have a tendency to do that, if you'll let them. And yet I'd be a lesser everything without him, without that experience. I need undermining, both as "artist" and half-baked man. But like dialysis, I don't have to like it even if I need it.
One of the most humiliating aspects of friendship with a genius - and again, Franzen never quite says this, although he sort of implies it by some of his anecdotes - is the fact that a genius is bored most of the time, and that includes most of the time he is with you. Like I said, this is a humiliating realization. All those years I tried - the way Franzen admits that he did with Wallace - to be smart and funny - only to have my friend find far more of interest in the non-literary, the non-intellectual, the non-sober. Because, well, those people were intrinsically more interesting than my frantically patched-together quasi-intellectual-Bohemian posturings and half-baked, half-educated "opinions." It took me years to get over my own snobbery and bombast and bullshit that obscured the fact that, yep, a guy who is really good at vehicle electronics is almost always more interesting and enjoyable to spend time with than someone with an MFA full of bureaucratic (i.e. academic) or corporate ambitions - more interesting than me, I mean. Not forever, not to be roomies, but in the mere moment-to-moment encounters with other people, a genius finds those people with a grasp on the actual are far more...something. Real? Lovable? Interesting? Real lovably interesting? I don't know what, but to some extent, I do understand it now, if a bit late in the game.
A genius has ways of manifesting his boredom, often with displays of cruelty. Franzen tells an interesting anecdote about Wallace signing copies of his novels to Franzen:
"David and I had a friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete. A few years before he died, he signed my hardcover copies of his two most recent books. On the title page of one of them I found the traced outline of his hand; on the title page of the other was an outline of an erection so huge that it ran off the page, annotated with a little arrow and the remark "scale 100%." (p. 40)
I bet Franzen's inscriptions to Wallace were sweated-over, heartfelt, disguised with carefully-deployed irony-cum-affection. And here's Wallace with a big dick joke. Vulgar but, I think, kinda funny, so long as it isn't your title page. But I also sympathize with Franzen, because, again, my own genius friend did similar things to me. Once, not long after I met him, I spotted my new genius friend in a car, while I was out running errands. We live in a medium-to-largish city, so such encounters are not really to be expected. I waved enthusiastically. My new genius friend flipped me off and laughed. Twenty-plus years on, that still stings, I still feel a little foolish, a bit uncool. He had a knack for that sort of thing. Some years back I sent him a YouTube link I thought was clever - big mistake; it wasn't clever at all, it was a typical online homemade video mishmash that he'd seen through years before (I've always been a slow adopter of online garbage; I'm just now turning on to funny cat videos). His smackdown was harsh and unambiguous - he just didn't have time for stupid shit emailed by stupid people. I'm not sure he could've made me feel worse over such a minuscule thing. Trivial, perhaps just another big dick graffiti moment, but thanks to what might be called his highly developed emotional intelligence, my friend was able to say the most devastating things, knowing just exactly where all the joints in somebody's armor might be. When drinking, he would use this gift in ways that can only be described as diabolical. He spared me, mostly, probably because he detected how compliant, fragile and slow-witted (not stupid - I am not especially stupid, but I am slow-witted) I was and generally what poor sport I would be in such an encounter, how easily hurt. This is just further evidence of how boring I must've been to him.
Another similarity is Franzen's bird-watching, featured prominently in this collection. Although I don't bird watch, I collect things (right now I am in the midst of an ancient Roman coin obsession), which is pretty much the same thing (a hobby's a hobby's a hobby). Wallace, like my genius friend, had no use for such things, for knickknacks and photo collections and gluing stamps into albums.
"David wrote about weather as well as anyone who ever put words on paper, and he loved his dogs more purely than he loved anything or anyone else, but nature itself didn't interest him, and he was utterly indifferent to birds. Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I'd stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. "Yeah," he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, "it's pretty." In the summer before he died, sitting with him on his patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn't keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps I was learning the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not." (pp. 37-38)
This is an interesting passage, showing as it does Franzen's frequent slack moments ("who put words to paper" "magnificence" "saddened" "the joy of birds") as well as his half-veiled malice and resentments (Wallace's naps were "heavily medicated" and he loved his dogs "more purely" than "anything or anyone else"); whenever Franzen uses the word "love" in a DFW context, you can be pretty sure poor old dead Dave is going to get a drubbing. But as for the hobby, I get it; our hobbies, whether it be curlews or some variation in the legend of late Marcus Aurelius denarii from the Rome mint - for some of us, our hobbies go a long way to fill up the empty spots (well, until they don't). But there is a hierarchy of hobbies - Franzen is pretty pleased with his birds and with the idea of himself watching birds (as I am, sometimes, when I am winkling out some attribution from an obscure numismatic source). But I doubt Franzen would be so sympathetic to someone who works word search puzzles, or dominates a virtual battlefield in Call of Duty III. Harrumph! One of the great burdens of genius is boredom; one of the great gifts of mediocrity is the ability to be easily amused. In my mediocre way I am grateful, but I am pretty clear on the mediocre part of it all. Franzen still seems to think bird watching is a virtue.
Franzen brings up Wallace's lying and betrayals. This too was a humiliating aspect of my friendship with a genius. Many's the time I waited for him to show up to our little "writer's group" only to have him not. Something else came along. Or he forgot. Or, later on, he started drinking. The lying, not so much perhaps, but, perhaps more because of the drinking than anything else, it too came up. Dismaying! One of the most ruthlessly intellectually and emotionally honest people I've ever known would resort to lying and cheap excuse-mongering. His girlfriends suffered far more than I did from these things, but it was still dismaying.
Then there's love. Wallace, apparently, didn't know what love is, just like that singer from Foreigner:
"The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing and abstract or spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent - the cranial-fluid-dripping wife in Infinite Jest, the psychopath in the last of the interviews with hideous men. David's fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with him took this rather laborious hyperconsiderateness and moral wisdom at face value." (p. 39)
Franzen can really huff and puff when he feels threatened, and this passage is a good example of this. So what is it, exactly, this "ordinary love" he mentions? These "close loving relationships" that are a "foundational source of meaning"? Sounds like the kind of love found in Jonathan Franzen novels. As for the fact "David's fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates" the same could be said about Flannery O'Connor, Dickens or Kafka or Jane Austen. Elsewhere Franzen puts it: "...it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him." (pp. 38-39) Yes, but what is this "love" of the people closest to him, exactly, and how was it going to save David Foster Wallace? Franzen is in love with love, he is a true believer - throughout these essays, he mulls over his failed first marriage and the promise of love. Love is the thing that saves us, absence of love (or in Wallace's case, apparently) the rejection of love is what destroys us. This all strikes me as a bit too easy-squeezy. Franzen throws love about - how great it is, how it can save us - pretty much the way a schlocky novelist predictably does. Love is the deus ex machina we should let into our lives. Love is all things. "All you need is love," sang the Beatles, even as John Lennon was being a really unloving father and husband to Julian and Cynthia. Love, love, love.
"He (Wallace) was loveable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself..." (p. 40)
More bad novel stuff here (or cheap "literary" psychology - "island of himself"). Another dismaying thing about my friendship with a genius was that my friend was a genius at love - I don't mean girlfriends, which he accumulated by the score (on top of genius, my friend looked like an out-at-the-elbows John F. Kennedy Jr., which is to say he was arguably even more appealing than John-John who somehow always looked as if his mother still dressed him) - that was only a small, sexual part of his lovableness. Beyond sex, my friend had a knack, an astonishing warmth that made my own dutiful affections towards family and friends seem shallow and, well, merely dutiful. My friend had a heart bigger than Nebraska whereas I had one eye on the bank account, another on the clock, and a vast store of cheap sentimentality I could call up on a dime. Fortunately for my self-esteem, my friend was a drunk, so he would do horrible things, giving me the opportunity to feel superior, self-righteous, virtuous and be more demonstrably virtuous and "lovable" in general. But the fact was, despite the horribleness, he had a talent for love that I don't. In my younger years this dismayed me and fuelled secret resentments - why are people so drawn to my genius friend when it was universally acknowledged that I was the "nice guy"? I'd put a lot of work into the nice guy thing, a lot of honing and pruning to pull it off. But my sloppy, often cruel, big-hearted friend was the sun, I was an orbiting satellite, a half-failed planet, chilly and mostly inert. That he was my friend became one of my biggest accomplishments, something for which I was envied - pretty much the only thing I was envied for. The Franzen-Wallace friendship is, of course, on a much larger stage - they were successful and famous while me and my friend were not. But the dynamics are similar, I'd bet. My guess is that Franzen, for all his agonizing about ex-wives and how we fail 'em, recognizes down deep that David Foster Wallace's "childlike purity" is what actual, non-botched, non-intellectualized, non-examined, love really is. Most adults discard "childlike purity" and the non-negotiable aspects of love because these things make you vulnerable, make you stupid, make you ineffective. Then we spend our adulthoods covering up the sell-outs we are (that's a good subject for a novel, eh?). One of the great cover-ups is sentimentality - one of the hallmarks of a genius is a terrifying lack of sentimentality. This is one of the reasons the company of a genius can be pretty scarifying for us mediocrities.
June 30, 2022
Jonathan Franzen is a man of specific interests: birds and books. These essays are about various bird watching trips, and specific plays or novels that normal people have never heard of.
It's impossible to review Jonathan Franzen's books without venturing an opinion of Franzen himself. This is different than, say, Margaret Atwood. No one reviews a Margaret Atwood novel and devotes half the allotted word count to an assessment of her merits as an individual. But Franzen, for whatever reasons, elicits strong reactions. Most Franzen reviews devolve into a treatise on whether Franzen is smug, conceited, or a snob.
For instance, I was living in Seattle when his novel Freedom came out, and Time magazine put Franzen on the cover. Seattle’s weekly magazine, The Stranger, didn't like that. It ran a parody cover at Franzen's expense, and in its review section called Freedom a bloated pretentious turd (more or less). Then there was the whole Oprah debacle, which branded Franzen as an ingrate.
I don't know why it matters. It’s important to remember that famous novelists aren’t really famous. 98% of people have never heard of Jonathan Franzen, and 1% hate him for some reason. Like worst case scenario, lets assume Franzen really is arrogant and snobby. Would that mean his books are bad? Like, do you really think Vladimir Nabokov was a man of the people?
Here's what Chuck Klosterman wrote, noting that there's one question that everyone wants to ask about Franzen:
"Is he arrogant? Because that's always the first thing people want to know. Franzen is the only author who consistently engenders this kind of emotional conflict from the public at large; people want to understand what he's like as a person, even if they haven't read his multiperspective 562-page masterwork, Freedom, or 2001's National Book Award-winning The Corrections. And here's the answer: He's a little arrogant. But he's not remotely unlikable, and there's no element of his self-perception that seems inflated or misplaced."
I think Franzen is elitist but not necessarily high-brow. He likes the Simpsons. He thinks fiction should be accessible and readable, but he won't apologize for asserting that literature is superior to television, and that Twitter is dumb.
I don't think elitism is the same as arrogance. Oddly, his elitism would sell better if he was genuinely arrogant. Christopher Hitchens was arrogant, astoundingly so, and that was half his appeal.
Here’s a Christopher Hitchens quote:
“If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, 'I'm still waiting to hear what your point is."
These are the words of a man who doesn’t care what anyone (besides George Orwell and Thomas Paine) thinks. Hitchens reveled in his contrarian status. Franzen seems conflicted by his contrarian status. And Franzen doesn't speak with a posh Oxford accent, either, so he doesn't get a pass.
My two favorite essays in this book were "Farther Away" and "On Autobiographical Fiction." The first described spreading some of David Foster Wallace's ashes on a remote Pacific Island where Franzen came to birdwatch, and the second is about autobiographical fiction, as advertised.
Some essays left me scratching my head. For instance, the essay about how he finds it “oppressive and grating” when people end cell phone conversations in public spaces by saying “I love you.”
There is no higher-caliber utterance than “I love you”—nothing worse that an individual can inflict on a communal public space. Even “Fuck you, dickhead” is less invasive, since it’s the kind of thing that angry people do sometimes shout in public, and it can just as easily be directed at a stranger.
Well, don’t people also say “I love you”, in public?
Later he adds “I do here admit the possibility that, compared with everyone else on the airport concourse, I am an extraordinarily cold and unloving person.” Um, yeah, maybe. He’s worried that the too-frequent habitual repetition empties the phrase of its meaning. Perhaps less than habitual repetition empties the phrase of its relevance. Perhaps Franzen just takes the phrase "I love you" too seriously, if its utterance ought to be reserved for sacred, intimate moments, rather than casually tossed off.
It’s a pattern. He takes many things very seriously, whether it’s birds, Oprah, literature, or his own moral integrity. Which is good, I guess, but abnormal.
Most people, for better or arguably worse, have an apathy reflex that kicks in past a certain point. In the interests of self-preservation, normal people stop giving a shit once a threshold of inconvenience is crossed. They care about recycling, but they won’t (as Franzen did) obsessively research whether throwing an empty peanut butter jar in the trash unwashed is ultimately better for the environment than using a certain quantity of hot water to wash it and throw it in the recycling bin. Does the fact that Franzen agonized over the cost-benefits of peanut butter-jar-recycling mean that he takes responsibility for his ecological impact in a way that would greatly benefit the planet were we all to emulate him? Yes. Does it mean that he comes across as narcissistic and insufferably fussy? Also yes.
And here's my conclusion. All the armchair psychology expended on Franzen as an individual is a trivial distraction from the rewards of Franzen's writing. He can craft a sentence. And his occasionally odd opinions, eccentric fixations, and clunky metaphors (See: "the pennies of his innocence" in Freedom) are more than compensated for by exquisitely focused insights on nearly every page that glint like sharp diamonds in . . . the deep mines of his prose? Similes aren't my strong suit.
Here's what I mean:
“The more you pursue distractions, the less effective any distraction is.”
Simple, true, and obvious, yet surprising when put succinctly.
Here's some quotes:
“ . . . the novel, as it was developed in the eighteenth century, provided its readers with a field of play that was at once speculative and risk-free. While advertising its fictionality, it gave you protagonists who were typical enough to be experienced as possible versions of yourself and yet specific enough to remain, simultaneously, not you. The great literary invention of the eighteenths century was, thus, not simply a genre but an attitude toward that genre. Our state of mind when we pick up a novel today—our knowledge that it’s a work of the imagination; our willing suspension of disbelief in it—is in fact one half of the novel’s essence.”
On David Foster Wallace:
"He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took him away from us and made the person into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in The Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul."
“How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult—what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be—if you are not!”
"To deserve the death sentence he’d passed on himself, the execution of the sentence had to be deeply injurious to someone. To prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved, it was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best, by killing himself at home and making them firsthand witnesses to his act."
On literature as a sort of boxing match or struggle:
“Unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved; unless the finished book represents the surmounting of some great resistance—it’s not worth reading. Or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing."
On autobiographical fiction:
"I suspect that people less encumbered by loyalty have an easier time being fiction writers, but all serious writers struggle, to some extent, at some point in their lies, with the conflicting demands of good art and good personhood."
Another diamond insight:
"All loyalties, both in writing and elsewhere, are meaningful only when they’re tested."
On visiting New York as a teenager:
"The self I felt myself to be that day was a self I recognized only because I’d longed for it for so long. I met, in myself, on my first day in New York City, the person I wanted to become."
One fiction, generally:
“Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you’re unhappy about the hatred that’s been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it’s like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself.”
It's impossible to review Jonathan Franzen's books without venturing an opinion of Franzen himself. This is different than, say, Margaret Atwood. No one reviews a Margaret Atwood novel and devotes half the allotted word count to an assessment of her merits as an individual. But Franzen, for whatever reasons, elicits strong reactions. Most Franzen reviews devolve into a treatise on whether Franzen is smug, conceited, or a snob.
For instance, I was living in Seattle when his novel Freedom came out, and Time magazine put Franzen on the cover. Seattle’s weekly magazine, The Stranger, didn't like that. It ran a parody cover at Franzen's expense, and in its review section called Freedom a bloated pretentious turd (more or less). Then there was the whole Oprah debacle, which branded Franzen as an ingrate.
I don't know why it matters. It’s important to remember that famous novelists aren’t really famous. 98% of people have never heard of Jonathan Franzen, and 1% hate him for some reason. Like worst case scenario, lets assume Franzen really is arrogant and snobby. Would that mean his books are bad? Like, do you really think Vladimir Nabokov was a man of the people?
Here's what Chuck Klosterman wrote, noting that there's one question that everyone wants to ask about Franzen:
"Is he arrogant? Because that's always the first thing people want to know. Franzen is the only author who consistently engenders this kind of emotional conflict from the public at large; people want to understand what he's like as a person, even if they haven't read his multiperspective 562-page masterwork, Freedom, or 2001's National Book Award-winning The Corrections. And here's the answer: He's a little arrogant. But he's not remotely unlikable, and there's no element of his self-perception that seems inflated or misplaced."
I think Franzen is elitist but not necessarily high-brow. He likes the Simpsons. He thinks fiction should be accessible and readable, but he won't apologize for asserting that literature is superior to television, and that Twitter is dumb.
I don't think elitism is the same as arrogance. Oddly, his elitism would sell better if he was genuinely arrogant. Christopher Hitchens was arrogant, astoundingly so, and that was half his appeal.
Here’s a Christopher Hitchens quote:
“If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, 'I'm still waiting to hear what your point is."
These are the words of a man who doesn’t care what anyone (besides George Orwell and Thomas Paine) thinks. Hitchens reveled in his contrarian status. Franzen seems conflicted by his contrarian status. And Franzen doesn't speak with a posh Oxford accent, either, so he doesn't get a pass.
My two favorite essays in this book were "Farther Away" and "On Autobiographical Fiction." The first described spreading some of David Foster Wallace's ashes on a remote Pacific Island where Franzen came to birdwatch, and the second is about autobiographical fiction, as advertised.
Some essays left me scratching my head. For instance, the essay about how he finds it “oppressive and grating” when people end cell phone conversations in public spaces by saying “I love you.”
There is no higher-caliber utterance than “I love you”—nothing worse that an individual can inflict on a communal public space. Even “Fuck you, dickhead” is less invasive, since it’s the kind of thing that angry people do sometimes shout in public, and it can just as easily be directed at a stranger.
Well, don’t people also say “I love you”, in public?
Later he adds “I do here admit the possibility that, compared with everyone else on the airport concourse, I am an extraordinarily cold and unloving person.” Um, yeah, maybe. He’s worried that the too-frequent habitual repetition empties the phrase of its meaning. Perhaps less than habitual repetition empties the phrase of its relevance. Perhaps Franzen just takes the phrase "I love you" too seriously, if its utterance ought to be reserved for sacred, intimate moments, rather than casually tossed off.
It’s a pattern. He takes many things very seriously, whether it’s birds, Oprah, literature, or his own moral integrity. Which is good, I guess, but abnormal.
Most people, for better or arguably worse, have an apathy reflex that kicks in past a certain point. In the interests of self-preservation, normal people stop giving a shit once a threshold of inconvenience is crossed. They care about recycling, but they won’t (as Franzen did) obsessively research whether throwing an empty peanut butter jar in the trash unwashed is ultimately better for the environment than using a certain quantity of hot water to wash it and throw it in the recycling bin. Does the fact that Franzen agonized over the cost-benefits of peanut butter-jar-recycling mean that he takes responsibility for his ecological impact in a way that would greatly benefit the planet were we all to emulate him? Yes. Does it mean that he comes across as narcissistic and insufferably fussy? Also yes.
And here's my conclusion. All the armchair psychology expended on Franzen as an individual is a trivial distraction from the rewards of Franzen's writing. He can craft a sentence. And his occasionally odd opinions, eccentric fixations, and clunky metaphors (See: "the pennies of his innocence" in Freedom) are more than compensated for by exquisitely focused insights on nearly every page that glint like sharp diamonds in . . . the deep mines of his prose? Similes aren't my strong suit.
Here's what I mean:
“The more you pursue distractions, the less effective any distraction is.”
Simple, true, and obvious, yet surprising when put succinctly.
Here's some quotes:
“ . . . the novel, as it was developed in the eighteenth century, provided its readers with a field of play that was at once speculative and risk-free. While advertising its fictionality, it gave you protagonists who were typical enough to be experienced as possible versions of yourself and yet specific enough to remain, simultaneously, not you. The great literary invention of the eighteenths century was, thus, not simply a genre but an attitude toward that genre. Our state of mind when we pick up a novel today—our knowledge that it’s a work of the imagination; our willing suspension of disbelief in it—is in fact one half of the novel’s essence.”
On David Foster Wallace:
"He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took him away from us and made the person into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in The Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul."
“How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult—what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be—if you are not!”
"To deserve the death sentence he’d passed on himself, the execution of the sentence had to be deeply injurious to someone. To prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved, it was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best, by killing himself at home and making them firsthand witnesses to his act."
On literature as a sort of boxing match or struggle:
“Unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved; unless the finished book represents the surmounting of some great resistance—it’s not worth reading. Or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing."
On autobiographical fiction:
"I suspect that people less encumbered by loyalty have an easier time being fiction writers, but all serious writers struggle, to some extent, at some point in their lies, with the conflicting demands of good art and good personhood."
Another diamond insight:
"All loyalties, both in writing and elsewhere, are meaningful only when they’re tested."
On visiting New York as a teenager:
"The self I felt myself to be that day was a self I recognized only because I’d longed for it for so long. I met, in myself, on my first day in New York City, the person I wanted to become."
One fiction, generally:
“Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you’re unhappy about the hatred that’s been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it’s like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself.”
August 19, 2020
Like with any collection of essays, some are more enjoyable than others. There are a few slogs and a few throwaways, but at least the more forgettable ones are typically the shoetest. Franzen might hate sentimentality, but he's most appealing when he's delving into more personal topics and when he doesn't get held up on being so grumpy. I definitely prefer his fiction. Looking forward to his next novel, which he's speculated could be his last.
August 16, 2020
I've loved Franzen fiction and nonfiction writing for a long time now. He's formidably smart, and just bold and edgy enough amidst so many crowd-pleasing writers all around. I loved many pieces in this collection, especially the more personal ones (and there, too, he doesn't hold back!) and some of the book reviews. I do though wish this collection had more coherence, some sort of centre to hold it all together. Instead - as happens too often with famous authors - somebody (probably the publisher rather than Franzen) decided to just chuck in together, in a literary version of potluck dinner, anything Franzen then had. Speeches, investigative journalism, book reviews, personal essays and lectures. Ahhh... Nevertheless, there is so much delight and wisdom among these pages, especially if you are a writer. Or a birder. Or Franzen-fan at the least.
January 26, 2014
Most books I read usually elicit a strong reaction from me.
By the time I've finished the last page, I have either strongly enjoyed or strongly hated my time with a book. I can then log onto Goodreads and easily put into words what I loved/despised about it.
However, my time with Jonathan Franzen's "Farther Away" isn't that easy to sum up. The collection of essays, speeches and book reviews left me flip flopping between captivation and aggravation.
Overall, I couldn't connect with Franzen's writing style. His prose is usually devoid of emotion and sentimentality. Even in 'formal' writing, I prefer a bit of heart and a sense of nostalgia to come across in essays and speeches. At times, I felt like a crusty English teacher, urging her student to make me feel why saving endangered bird species or whatever other cause is meaningful.
I also didn't care much for the variety of works in "Farther Away." Readers would have been better served by Franzen only including essays, speeches and book reviews on one topic. It felt awkward to read an essay on Franzen's foray to China to find the manufacturer of a stuffed puffin, followed by a review of a detective series of books. Some of the pieces quite frankly felt like filler in the book.
Despite my harsh words until this point, I did find several of Franzen's essays and book reviews to be enjoyable.
In "I Just Called to Say I Love You," Franzen beautifully captured the societal damage being caused by cellphones. He also draws the issue close to home, describing how his relationship with his late parents may have coloured his view of cellphones.
He hits the nail on the head again in "What Makes You So Sure You're Not the Evil One?" Instead of simply listing why Alice Munro is a fantastic writer, he chooses to suggest why the Canadian author isn't a household name. He also brilliantly describes why short stories -- Munro's bread and butter -- shouldn't be dismissed by the general reading public.
While "Farther Away" provided some fleeting moments of great writing, I was still left wondering what Franzen hoped to get across in this collection. And that's a question, as a writer, you never want to leave with a reader.
By the time I've finished the last page, I have either strongly enjoyed or strongly hated my time with a book. I can then log onto Goodreads and easily put into words what I loved/despised about it.
However, my time with Jonathan Franzen's "Farther Away" isn't that easy to sum up. The collection of essays, speeches and book reviews left me flip flopping between captivation and aggravation.
Overall, I couldn't connect with Franzen's writing style. His prose is usually devoid of emotion and sentimentality. Even in 'formal' writing, I prefer a bit of heart and a sense of nostalgia to come across in essays and speeches. At times, I felt like a crusty English teacher, urging her student to make me feel why saving endangered bird species or whatever other cause is meaningful.
I also didn't care much for the variety of works in "Farther Away." Readers would have been better served by Franzen only including essays, speeches and book reviews on one topic. It felt awkward to read an essay on Franzen's foray to China to find the manufacturer of a stuffed puffin, followed by a review of a detective series of books. Some of the pieces quite frankly felt like filler in the book.
Despite my harsh words until this point, I did find several of Franzen's essays and book reviews to be enjoyable.
In "I Just Called to Say I Love You," Franzen beautifully captured the societal damage being caused by cellphones. He also draws the issue close to home, describing how his relationship with his late parents may have coloured his view of cellphones.
He hits the nail on the head again in "What Makes You So Sure You're Not the Evil One?" Instead of simply listing why Alice Munro is a fantastic writer, he chooses to suggest why the Canadian author isn't a household name. He also brilliantly describes why short stories -- Munro's bread and butter -- shouldn't be dismissed by the general reading public.
While "Farther Away" provided some fleeting moments of great writing, I was still left wondering what Franzen hoped to get across in this collection. And that's a question, as a writer, you never want to leave with a reader.
May 1, 2014
This is (for me, anyway) an extremely tough book to review on its own merit. Franzen will always be on my "must read" list (at least his fiction, anyway. He earned that distinction by penning my second favorite book to date: The Corrections.) This collection of "essays", however, is an uneven, avian mishmosh that lacks cohesion, and is at times somewhat boring.
The biggest reason why this is so tough to review is that it's impossible not to compare this with the incomparable essayist/novelist, the late David Foster Wallace, close friend of Franzen's and the subject of two of the "essays" in this collection. In the titular "Farther Away" (easily the best of the bunch) Franzen discusses his quest to observe a rare bird on a remote island off tbe Chilean coast, then (quite effectively) shifts the focus to his friendship with DFW. It's a truly heartbreaking story, and it (along with a speech given by Franzen at a memorial service for DFW) is a fitting tribute to one of the best writers of our generation.
But where to go from there? There's two more lengthy essays about birds (one from a trip to the Mediterranean, where songbirds and other endangered migratory fowl are decimated by a culture of hunting (and haute cuisine), another to Shanghai, China, where birds are eradicated mostly by the destruction of their habitat.) Fortunately, Franzen's love of birds (unlike, say, Annie Proulx's ridiculously self-indulgent bird-watching paean Bird Cloud) makes for compelling reading. After that, though, there isn't much else. Several book reviews (which suspiciously appear to be Franzen's introductions lifted from the reprinted novels he's reviewing), an irritating "interview" with New York State (huh?), and a lecture on autobiographical fiction pepper the rest of Farther Away.
All in all, a pretty good read (especially for Franzen and DFW fans), but absolutely nowhere near as good (or hilarious) as any of DFW's essays. That disparity in talent is just too large (and too sad) to overcome.
April 14, 2016
Originally published in Time Out New York
In his latest collection of essays, Jonathan Franzen reiterates his well-documented love of birds and mourns his late friend, the literary heavyweight David Foster Wallace. Much of the better material here has been previously published. Taken together, however, these writings present a broader, more freewheeling curiosity than the novelist generally indulges in his fiction.
A kitschy gift provokes a cautionary tale on sustainability and emerging economies in “The Chinese Puffin.” “Authentic but Horrible” condemns the Broadway musical adaptation of Spring Awakening while getting to the core of Frank Wedekind’s subversive play. A brief bid is made for the canonization of Canadian short-story master Alice Munro in “What Makes You So Sure You’re Not the Evil One Yourself?” The title essay finds the author on a remote Pacific island confronting, at long last, the death of Wallace.
Analyzing and extrapolating from disparate literary sources (anything from Robinson Crusoe to Swedish detective novels), these occasionally dithering essays provide a glimpse into the critical faculties of one of our most celebrated contemporary novelists. Franzen’s views on technology and writing are particularly salient: The Internet’s expansiveness is a kind of prison, and postmodernism actually leads us back to the primitive. Still, Farther Away reads more like supplemental material than primary text, and one gets the feeling that this collection is only meant to hold over readers hungry for the author’s next novel. In that sense, the essays in Farther Away are not unlike the European songbird poachers he writes about: For a novelist like Franzen, they make for strange bedfellows.
If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews!
In his latest collection of essays, Jonathan Franzen reiterates his well-documented love of birds and mourns his late friend, the literary heavyweight David Foster Wallace. Much of the better material here has been previously published. Taken together, however, these writings present a broader, more freewheeling curiosity than the novelist generally indulges in his fiction.
A kitschy gift provokes a cautionary tale on sustainability and emerging economies in “The Chinese Puffin.” “Authentic but Horrible” condemns the Broadway musical adaptation of Spring Awakening while getting to the core of Frank Wedekind’s subversive play. A brief bid is made for the canonization of Canadian short-story master Alice Munro in “What Makes You So Sure You’re Not the Evil One Yourself?” The title essay finds the author on a remote Pacific island confronting, at long last, the death of Wallace.
Analyzing and extrapolating from disparate literary sources (anything from Robinson Crusoe to Swedish detective novels), these occasionally dithering essays provide a glimpse into the critical faculties of one of our most celebrated contemporary novelists. Franzen’s views on technology and writing are particularly salient: The Internet’s expansiveness is a kind of prison, and postmodernism actually leads us back to the primitive. Still, Farther Away reads more like supplemental material than primary text, and one gets the feeling that this collection is only meant to hold over readers hungry for the author’s next novel. In that sense, the essays in Farther Away are not unlike the European songbird poachers he writes about: For a novelist like Franzen, they make for strange bedfellows.
If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews!
June 24, 2012
This new collection of essays from Jonathan Franzen, now one of the grand men of American letters, covers mostly the later half of the 2000s. There are a number of essays here that prefigure themes latent in his novel, Freedom, and illuminate and contrast some of the thinking in that novel.
At its heart are two great essays: the title piece, which explores Franzen attempting to get away from civilisation, at least for a day or two and which becomes a meditation on nature, art and personality all in one.
The second essay of note is on autobiographical fiction and contains an interesting and informative insight into Mr. Franzen's working methods. The book is worth reading for this essay alone, especially if you're a writer or interested in the art of writing.
Some of the other pieces are of a lesser quality - though still of interest - and some are very slight indeed. This does not, however, detract from what is a useful deconstruction of an individuals attitude to the creative arts in twenty-first century America. It' also a good read to pass the time while waiting for his next novel.
At its heart are two great essays: the title piece, which explores Franzen attempting to get away from civilisation, at least for a day or two and which becomes a meditation on nature, art and personality all in one.
The second essay of note is on autobiographical fiction and contains an interesting and informative insight into Mr. Franzen's working methods. The book is worth reading for this essay alone, especially if you're a writer or interested in the art of writing.
Some of the other pieces are of a lesser quality - though still of interest - and some are very slight indeed. This does not, however, detract from what is a useful deconstruction of an individuals attitude to the creative arts in twenty-first century America. It' also a good read to pass the time while waiting for his next novel.
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