Reviews
4.5 stars, it would have been 5, but Andreas' part didn't really grab me.
Guilty pleasure in the best connotation of this overused word
Senti desilusão, apesar de não me surpreender. Depois de dois livros seguidos brilhantes — “Correcções” e “Liberdade” — era natural surgir um livro menos interessante. A escrita continua boa, o livro lê-se com grande velocidade, contudo é uma escrita menos rica, menos elaborada. Perdeu, considerava Franzen um patamar acima de Donna Tartt, mas “Purity” acaba sendo o equivalente de “O Pintassilgo”. A julgar pelo que foi escrevendo não-ficcional, fica a ideia de que Franzen seguiu em excesso a sua definição do “modelo de contrato”, entre escritor e leitor. A escrita parece aligeirada para facilitar a compreensão aos leitores, assim como existe mais enredo e menos personagem, ou ainda mais redundância explicativa da ação, ou ainda mais sexo, e já agora muito mais perspetivas do ponto de vista da mulher (não que isso tenha algo de errado, mas sendo ele homem não funciona, pelo menos de modo convincente). Chegado ao fim, parece que Franzen andou a ler todas as críticas que lhe foram feitas na última década, e criou um cardápio de respostas para oferecer aos leitores que o criticaram por não ter aceite o selo da Oprah. A beleza do trabalho de Franken está na escrita, e o seu grande tema é a família, sair daí não o conduziu a nada de bom. Enfiou-se por uma trama policial sem grande sentido, talvez almejasse “Crime & Castigo” mas fica demasiado distante. Com personagens baseados em Assange e Snowden também não era difícil que assim acontecesse. Muitas vezes Franzen ataca a internet e as redes sociais, fala dos seus perigos, da privacidade e do mundo que mudou, mas é tudo tão lugar comum, tudo tão saturado que nada dali se retira. No extremo apresenta uma idealista, Anabel a mãe de Purity, que nos vai dar uma secção inteira de puro fastio, com as suas rejeições do vil metal e a sua pseudo-arte e um namorado/marido que é ainda mais fastioso por se deixar levar. Tirando esse capítulo, todo o restante livro se lê muito bem, embora pareça sempre que vamos chegar a algum lado com tudo aquilo, quando na verdade nada existe para além do que se vai desfilando na nossa frente. Existem muitos rasgos de grande brilhantismo, com personagens a tocarem-nos dentro, mas logo a seguir tudo se desvanece e surgem ações desses mesmos personagens que dão conta de um vazio amnésico. Depois, o reles truque de fazer calhar na rifa uns milhões para esquecer todos os problemas e viver feliz para sempre cai muito mal. Não o consegui colocar na mesma prateleira dos outros dois, foi para uma pilha no topo de outra estante. Acho que isso diz alguma coisa. Não vou dizer que é mau. Sei que assim escrevo pela desilusão que apoquenta quem tanto gosta de algo, neste caso deixei-me levar em excesso pelos trabalhos anteriores do autor. Por isso lhe dou 3 estrelas, mas talvez com algum distanciamento possa subir uma.
Guilty pleasure in the best connotation of this overused word
Rounding up from 3.65. Large in scope yet intimately focused on questions about family (what do parents owe their children?) and the different "views" of truth. Reminds me of Philip Roth's American Pastoral.
“So many Jonathans. A Plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.” Jonathan Franzens neuester Trümmer ist nicht nur Ausgleichstraining für einseitig belastete Maßkrug-Athleten, es ist eine wilde Mischung aus jugendlichen kalifornischen Idealisten, Ostdeutschen, Journalisten, dem Internet und der DDR, Eltern, Kindern und dem ewigen Geschlechterkampf. Die Hauptgeschichte dreht sich um Purity Tyler, genannt Pip, die auf der Suche nach ihrem Vater ist. Ihre Mutter lässt sich durch nichts erweichen, ihr auch nur die geringste Kleinigkeit zu ihrem Vater zu erzählen. Hauptsächlich möchte sie ihn in der Hoffnung finden, er möge sich vielleicht an der Abzahlung ihrer haushohen Studienschulden beteiligen. An ihm als Person und Teil ihrer Herkunft zeigt sie nur marginales Interesse. Den Rest der Rezension findet ihr hier: http://bingereader.org/2015/10/05/pur...
http://taohuayun.blogspot.com/2018/07... margaret atwood saying 'male fantasies, male fantasies' over and over - 10 hours | YouTube I bought Purity by Jonathan Franzen for ¥128 (actually quite a bargain, as the jacket says £20) at the Beijing Foreign Languages Bookstore for precisely two reasons: 1) It was 600 pages long and I figured it would last me a couple weeks; 2) I've heard the name Jonathan Franzen before so I had some kind of assurance that it would be quality literature. I ended up reading the bulk of it while lying around in bed on Sunday and finished it way too fast. I now have 2 weeks left in Beijing and nothing to read except for The New Yorker, yet again. I'm hopefully going to keep this quite short. While I acknowledge that Jonathan Franzen is a good writer – he writes scenes really well and is very good at building up emotion and sustaining interest – I found his style to be annoying. It was annoying in itself, and made more annoying by the fact that it was only just annoying enough for me to find it annoying, but not infuriatingly annoying that I couldn't bear to keep reading. I had to continue to read whilst annoyed. It was annoying. It was annoying because there wasn't anything inherently bad or low-quality about it: it just emanated white male entitlement and self-satisfaction. He made little jabs at the literary world, including a reference to Michiko Kakutani whom he'd once called stupid after she gave him a bad review, and one about the amount of authors named Jonathan, that were obviously meant to be coy, witty, and satirising, but are really not funny at all. It actively reduced his dignity in my eyes. And it's just one of the many instances in which Franzen thinks he is soooooooo intelligent. I feel embarrassed for him, I really do. The worst part is that he really does think he's being self-deprecating, when the narcissism emanates from every word that he types, every space between each letter (I did learn that this is called the kerning, which is cool). One of the major ways in which Franzen demonstrates just how smart and cool and interesting he thinks that he is is his Freud obsession. Everyone has daddy issues or mommy issues, and it could not be more transparent. He constantly brings up how Andreas Wolf (the same name as one of my friends at uni, actually the third reason why I decided to choose this book over others) literally sought his mother in the women that he was sleeping with. And the same with Pip. Like, it was so shockingly unsubtle. It really made me lose respect for Franzen. 2015, and he really thinks that constant allusions to Freud makes his book interesting. I also take issue with his portrayal of women. I don't think that Franzen is a misogynist, because this means that he oppresses women, but I genuinely believe that he hates women. He hates women not in the institutional way in which society hates women, but in the way that ignorant people believe sexism works, which is just straightforward personal hatred. There is a bit of misogyny, in the way that he describes women – this sort of condescending, judgemental description full of contempt, dismissal, and pity that only a man could muster, because only a man would truly see women as objects to the point where he ever thought he had a right to write about someone, even a fictional character, in such a matter-of-fact, cruel, and completely dehumanising manner. In terms of hating women, that's the thing: his female characters are very fleshed-out, entirely three-dimensional, and all have their own motivations and aren't merely used as tools in male narratives, although it does sometimes feel as though they are. He does justice by them. The titular character, Purity, is the least fucked-up character and she gets a nice happy ending. I'm no English student, and I don't really want to open this book ever again, so I'm not going to go back and analyse it, but there was something about the way that women are portrayed as manipulators of men, as 'making' them do this or 'not letting them' do that, that makes me uncomfortable. Twice in the book Franzen uses the word 'train', as in 'She had trained him not to say X because she didn't like it when he did'. As if she were some kind of witch for whom men were but pets to be trained to obey. Both times I was really unsettled by the casual use of that word, as if this is what relationships are like. I don't know. But it made me feel really weird and I think it's a good way to demonstrate the way that women are portrayed in this book – and not just in Tom's story because that's written in the first person by the character Tom himself so is obviously biased and doesn't necessarily reflect Franzen's own opinions – but in pretty much every heterosexual relationship in the novel. I guess it's this classic male thing of deflecting blame and shifting responsibility. Everything a man does is somehow his girlfriend's/mother's fault, something she had somehow provoked him to do. In a way it reminds me of Westworld, which I watched earlier this month and absolutely loved (Ah I love Lisa Joy!). I was concerned by William's attribution of the awakening of his evil to Dolores. He explicitly says that Dolores helped him to realise that he loved to kill and commit violence, and he constantly returns to Dolores throughout the next thirty years, paying tribute to her as the turning point of his story. But why is she somehow responsible, and not him? Why do women always 'make' men do things? Dolores was experiencing her own purgatory, had been and continued to be in hell for decades upon decades. She was living her own life – meanwhile William projected himself onto her and made her into a plot device for his own story. It's like men always have to be the protagonist, the special boy, but also can't bear to be in control of their own decisions, especially when the consequences come to light. Nobody is responsible for anything you do except for yourself. Edit: I've been reading some Goodreads review that I wholeheartedly agree with and I forgot to mention: ALL THE MEN KEEP THINKING ABOUT KILLING THEIR WIVES/MOTHERS BECAUSE OF HOW MUCH THEY HATE THEM LMAO. LIKE........... ENOUGH SAID. Also a review by Karen on goodreads says: "the ultimate white male novelist writing white male novels for white male readers and this book reads like him taking that criticism and thumbing his nose, saying "oh, man, you though i wrote like that before, check this out!" and ramping it up a thousand notches by being even whiter and maler." And wow. I really felt that. So much. Like I said, this is one of the white-male-est things I've ever read in my life. Also I just remembered what he wrote in the story of Leila Helou, the Lebanese-American journalist, which, like many of his descriptions of women, was soooo unfair and mean because he made the character, a woman or an immigrant respectively, say it, as if it was their point of view, as if they would think like that. When Leila goes to grad school to get an MFA in literature she says that she had more "immigrant lore" than the white men in her course which made her writing more interesting. That reminds me, once more, of Jenny Zhang's Buzzfeed article, which is so good that I keep on thinking about it. Like, boo hoo, Leila/women of color in MFAs get to be immigrant women and that gives them soooo much privilege because they get to write about it. Lucky them! Okay I'm done now. I need to cleanse myself. I've been meaning to read Brideshead Revisited so I'm gonna go see if it's free online somewhere.
I liked his other books. But this one? Pip wanted money from the beginning. We knew she'd get some. She wanted here dad to cough up the money. And she wanted to know who he was. There was intense smells. OK. That's all I have to say. I was so glad to finish.
Well that was disappointing. I told myself to put it down 1/3rd way in, but I didn't listen and now I feel like I wasted 7 days of reading. So the description of the book is accurate, it is about Purity (Pip) and her finding out who her mother really is and who her father is after being lied to her entire life by her mom, but its such a mess. She ends up working for a Snowden like guy, who killed this guy for this girl who was Purity's room mate, then he sends her to this guy's news business that he confessed to murder to to keep tabs, or is there something else. Hmmm? There's multiple characters telling the plot, but they are all awful and similar. The book is a bit misogynistic (shocker! A book which characters focusing on purity is filled with sexism), to the point where you just can't believe someone could write all these characters this flawed (with the same flaw) and that there's a issue with the author's view. Very disappointing, the plot could of been interesting if the characters were better developed and the book was much shorter.
