Finally (Foolishly?) Finished Franzen's "Freedom"

I did it! I finished Jonathan Franzen's 562-page novel, "Freedom." If you read my interim reports on 11/8/10 and 11/11/10, you know that I was not enjoying, and was not impressed by, this novel, but because of all the critical attention it was getting, and at a certain point because of all the time I had already invested in it, I felt compelled to continue to the end. So I won! I wrestled the novel to the ground! I was able to leave Walter, Patty, Richard, Joey (although I kind of liked Joey), Jessica, Carol, Connie, and Lalitha behind with relief and no regrets! Hurray! On the other hand, I spent many, many hours on a novel that was pretty unsatisfying and that I had to struggle through, so maybe I actually lost? In any case, maybe I have saved some of you from spending time on this vaunted but disappointing novel.

Still Wrestling with Franzen's "Freedom"

I posted 11/8/10 about trying to get into Jonathan Franzen's new book, "Freedom," but having mixed success. However, I have persisted, and am now up to page 400 (162 to go...). My interest continues to be intermittent. The big chunks of prose about Walter's genuine struggle to do good, and the terrible compromises he is making, are of interest but somehow undigested and trying-too-hard-to-be-great-moral-struggles-of-our-time. I have the feeling that Franzen tried to write a great sprawling novel of ideas and full of interesting characters, like the wonderful nineteenth century novels of Eliot, Dickens, etc., but somehow just doesn't engage our interest on either level -- characters or issues -- as those novels do. As B. R. Myers writes in the October 2010 Atlantic, Franzen's characters are mediocre and uninteresting, and he seems to believe that "The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book's covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be." Myers concludes that "the novel is a...monument to insignificance." Now that I have invested this much time and energy in the novel, I will strive to finish it. It is, after all, the "big" novel of the year, both critically and saleswise, and has engendered widespread talk about Franzen's possibly being the greatest writer of the new generation; thus, I feel I should at least finish it before passing judgment. But it is not looking good....

Novels with LGBT Themes

Some good novels with LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) themes:

Alther, Lisa. Other Women. Kinflicks.
Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room.
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood.
Colette. Claudine.
Donoghue, Emma. Landing. (which I posted about on 7/31/10)
Forster, E. M. Maurice.
Grumbach, Doris. Chamber Music.
Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness.
Holleran, Andrew. Dancer from the Dance.
Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty.
Lorde, Audre. Zami.
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice.
Maupin, Armistead. Tales of the City.
Miller, Isabel. Patience and Sarah.
Millett, Kate. Sita.
Monette, Paul. Halfway Home.
Renault, Mary. The Persian Boy.
Richardson, Dorothy. Pilgrimage.
Sarton, May. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.
Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited.
White, Edmund. A Boy's Own Story. The Beautiful Room is Empty.
Winterson, Jeannette. Oranges Are not the Only Fruit.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando.

"Madame Bovary" Re-translated

I studied Flaubert's work in graduate school and was always gripped and impressed by his portrayal of Emma Bovary. A couple of years ago I tried to re-read "Madame Bovary" and found myself put off by Flaubert's realistic but in some ways misogynist view of Emma. It's true that he famously said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!" so any negative portrayal of her was, in a sense, a purposeful revealing of his own weaknesses as well.
Nevertheless, reading the novel many years later, although I still understood her yearning for romance and for "something more," I found myself impatient with Emma and with the novel. Now there is a new translation into English, by the well-respected author of unusual, very short stories and a translator of Proust's "Swann's Way," Lydia Davis. Davis feels that earlier translations strayed too far from the original, and lost the sense of Flaubert's style. According to a very informative New York magazine article by Sam Anderson (10/11/10), Davis "spent more than two years trying to create the closest possible replica of 'Madame Bovary' that would still make sense to an English reader." Anderson adds that "Flaubert's novel demonstrates the kind of perfect control seen more often in poetry...craftmanship so advanced that the craftmanship disappears....Davis admits that this is the one aspect of Bovary that will never survive translation: an almost superhuman cohesion." I think I will look for this new translation.

"Freedom": A Progress Report

I normally don't write about a book until after I have read it, or in a few cases, have decided not to continue reading it. But the novel I am posting about today is so long (562 pages) that I think it justifies an interim "progress report." Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom" (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010) is both a bestseller and (mostly) a big critical hit. As I said in my 11/2/10 post about "the Jonathans," I very much liked Franzen's earlier well-received novel, "The Corrections," and eagerly waited to get a copy of "Freedom" from my local library. Only slightly daunted by its length, I dived in. At first, the novel just wasn't grabbing my attention. Maybe I had read too many reviews ahead of time, so it all seemed a bit too familiar already. Maybe the characters just weren't that interesting. And then I read a very negative review in the Atlantic that almost discouraged me from continuing. But I pushed on nevertheless, and after about 100-plus pages, I found my interest picking up a bit. I am now -- at 295 pages -- just over halfway through the book. My interest waxes and wanes. I don't particularly like any of the characters, but I find them realistic, at times interesting, and occasionally sympathetic. I am a bit bored with the rather didactic parts about the environment and about one of the main characters' (Walter's) social conscience and the compromises he makes. In any case, now that I have gotten this far, I predict I will keep reading to the end. If/when I do finish it, I may post again about it, and about how I feel about the novel by then. If any of you have read it, or started to read it, or decided against reading it, please do let me know what you think about it, either by commenting here or by emailing me (vandricks@usfca.edu).

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words...

The October 18, 2010 New Yorker cover features a wall of books with mini-faces looking askance at a man sitting in a comfortable armchair in front of the tall bookshelves but with his back to them, completely absorbed in his laptop and i-pod. The books' spines have their own personalities, with various facial features (glasses, mustache, beard, mouth open, eyebrows raised, etc.) and with different facial expressions ranging from horror to sadness to helplessness to resignation. It's a humorous but sad evocation of the way technology distracts people from books.

W. S. Merwin on Reading for Delight

There is an interesting and inspiring interview in the November 2010 issue of The Progressive with W. S. Merwin, the current U.S. Poet Laureate. He talks about his poetry, of course, including his gradual dropping of punctuation from his poems. He also speaks of his progressive political beliefs. Toward the end of the interview, he speaks about the importance of "astonishment," of opening one's eyes and feelings to the possibility of being surprised, an "always marvelous" thing. When the interviewer, Ed Rampell, ends the interview by asking "Any advice?", Merwin replies "Read for pleasure....Read every kind of book....begin in delight and continue in delight."