⋙ Libro Gratis Purity A Novel Jonathan Franzen 9780374239213 Books

Purity A Novel Jonathan Franzen 9780374239213 Books

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Purity A Novel Jonathan Franzen 9780374239213 Books

Why read literary fiction? Sometimes it's for the beauty of the prose, or maybe for the richness of the characters, or even insights into the human condition. This novel has none of those values, though Franzen can write with pace. PURITY has a great theme: the ridiculousness of absolutism, either in person or in social systems. However, it is a really lousy book, in need of an editor or two to cut off the endless side streets and impulsive non sequiturs Franzen seems to enjoy. I read it to the end, wondering what East Germany had to do with anything, or San Francisco or Denver or Bolivia, for that matter. The places were poorly portrayed, peppered with language phrases to add authenticity (fail). The characters were stick figure avatars for the zeitgeist: Andreas, the handsome internet crusader afflicted with guilt and hubris; Pip, the daughter of a mysterious un-family, whose mother rejects her capitalist origins; Jason, the sweet boy who brings out the best in all of us; and so on. The women are not written with an authentic voice, which is admittedly hard for a man to accomplish. They all seem like victims or self-absorbed ingenues. The clichés are childish (secrecy is oppression, transparency is freedom; to be killer and killed is the closest form of human intimacy). At times, the prose is excruciating: "Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary." So, let me get this straight: the authors of the Russian Revolution were risk takers? Fair enough. Or how about, "strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden." Yikes. No wonder "she didn't like having her brains stirred with a wooden spoon." I guess the message of the book, if there is one, is that contemporary Western society is headed off a cliff in the direction of digital hell, but that doesn't mean you can't fall in love. Or something.


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Purity A Novel Jonathan Franzen 9780374239213 Books Reviews

Franzen's book is, simply, vastly overwritten. I just finished it last night or maybe I didn't. Maybe he's already written another hundred pages since then. But seriously, where have editors gone? I work in the movie business and we say the same thing about directors who people are afraid to question and let them go on and on. But Franzen is a witty and interesting writer, no question. It's just that page after page describing the East German Stasi

The length of this book makes you want to scream enough!!! The plot is also remarkably contrived to the point of it being almost like a fairy tale. The length of the book and the good writing in it may numb the reader to this however how contrived the plot is. Also, like many writers he has long
periods of short dialogue in which I lost track of who was speaking. We don't want "he said" or "she said" every line but, really, remember that the reader hasn't lived with your characters for five years. In playwriting there's something they used to call The Wasserman Test (Was it named after Dale Wasserman of Man of La Mancha fame? I don't know.) But what you do is place an index card over the characters names on a page and see if you can tell who's speaking simply be reading the dialogue. Besides the difference of what they say, it shows how characters in good plays differ in
how they say it. Franzen fails the Wasserman test continually. I hope he'll put a few more "he said"s and "she said"s into his next book. I liked The Corrections a lot. This book was disappointing.
When an author names his main character Pip – a name immortalized in Charles Dickens masterwork, he is almost baiting the reader to make comparisons, so let’s get those out of the way first. Here, Pip is female, not male, although she’s still mesmerized by a charismatic flame (Andreas, a Julian Assange type anti-hero who shines as brightly as Estella), and she, too, is in search of her birthright. The themes are every bit as compelling love and rejection, wealth and poverty and the predestined triumph of pure over evil (except when it doesn't).

Oh, and of course, the novel is BIG. Nearly 600 pages, to be exact. In a nod to Dickens, there are multiple plot lines, coincidences, and hold-on-to-your-seat dramatic twists. But make no mistake, while Franzen gives a nod to Dickens, this book cannot be construed as a homage to him.

The book is summarized by its title purity. On the surface, Purity is the birth-name of Pip. But is there such a thing as purity? Can there truly be pure motives, pure ideologies, pure goodness, pure connections, pure love? In this Franzenian universe, the answer seems to be “no.” Everything is tainted by a “moral hazard” (a term Pip learns in economics).

Here we meet characters who are struggling with their own definition of “good” Pip-the-pure…Andreas, a Snowden (or more aptly, Assange) leaker from East Germany (and later Bolivia) who is ostentatiously for transparency and yet commits a felonious deed for reasons that others might deem as pure…Anabel who forsakes “blood-tainted” family money to live a chaste-like, pure life of poverty…Tom, Anabel’s ex-husband, a muckraker journalist who is a good, yet pliable person and isn’t, by any means, ALL good.

Woven into this tapestry are Important Themes misguided state ideologies and lack of openness, the vacuity of some experimental films, the failings of feminism, the crush of student debt, the eternal quest for power and connection, the false lure of cults and social media, the narcissism of the famous, and all too often, the damage created by suffocating and often too eccentric parenting. (Parents don’t fare too well in Franzen’s world).

One friend described this book as “flawless” and it’s not quite that; some of Franzen’s romantic dialogue (between Pip and Andreas, for example) made me groan just a bit and some of his female characters skirt a little too close to comfort with being well-written stereotypes (crazy moms, women who want to discuss their feelings ad nauseum, women who only feel lascivious during certain moon cycles). Then again, the men don’t come out smelling like roses either they are often testosterone-driven, narcissistic, love-phobic.

These quibbles aside, this theme-driven book kept me engrossed well into the night, in ways that his last book, Freedom, did not. Ultimately, Purity is a paradox an incredibly hopeful book about the folly of moral absolutism, the bequeathing of a broken world and the impossibility of being good.
Why read literary fiction? Sometimes it's for the beauty of the prose, or maybe for the richness of the characters, or even insights into the human condition. This novel has none of those values, though Franzen can write with pace. PURITY has a great theme the ridiculousness of absolutism, either in person or in social systems. However, it is a really lousy book, in need of an editor or two to cut off the endless side streets and impulsive non sequiturs Franzen seems to enjoy. I read it to the end, wondering what East Germany had to do with anything, or San Francisco or Denver or Bolivia, for that matter. The places were poorly portrayed, peppered with language phrases to add authenticity (fail). The characters were stick figure avatars for the zeitgeist Andreas, the handsome internet crusader afflicted with guilt and hubris; Pip, the daughter of a mysterious un-family, whose mother rejects her capitalist origins; Jason, the sweet boy who brings out the best in all of us; and so on. The women are not written with an authentic voice, which is admittedly hard for a man to accomplish. They all seem like victims or self-absorbed ingenues. The clichés are childish (secrecy is oppression, transparency is freedom; to be killer and killed is the closest form of human intimacy). At times, the prose is excruciating "Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary." So, let me get this straight the authors of the Russian Revolution were risk takers? Fair enough. Or how about, "strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden." Yikes. No wonder "she didn't like having her brains stirred with a wooden spoon." I guess the message of the book, if there is one, is that contemporary Western society is headed off a cliff in the direction of digital hell, but that doesn't mean you can't fall in love. Or something.