Tag Archives: Jonathan Franzen

Great Opening Paragraph 108… ‘The Corrections’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after guest of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.”
Jonathan FranzenFrom ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen

Read my review of PURITY, also by Jonathan Franzen.
And here’s the #FirstPara of FREEDOM.

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Collector’ by John Fowles
‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue
‘The Crying of Lot 49’ by Thomas Pynchon

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2xx via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Purity’ by Jonathan Franzen #mystery #contemporary

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I admit to feeling disappointed by Purity by Jonathan Franzen. The root of this disaffection is partly my high expectations, having loved The Corrections and Freedom, and partly the subject matter. Unlike his previous two novels, which focussed on an extended family, the central narrative of Purity is a young woman’s search for her father, a search which brings her into contact with some seriously dodgy people. Jonathan FranzenA large chunk of the novel is about Andreas Wolfe whose Sunlight Project brings light to the world by leaking secrets. His backstory as a young man in East Germany as the Wall crumbles is historically interesting but I found his character unpleasant. On his first foray into West Berlin, Wolfe meets a young American journalist, Tom Aberant, who becomes another constant throughout the book. Great chunks of the book are dedicated to Wolfe and Aberant’s relationships with, respectively Annagret and Annabel, who confusingly merged together in my mind.
So what kept me reading? Pip, the Purity of the title, a young woman burdened by student debt and a curiosity about the identity of her father, is lured to Bolivia to work for the Sunlight Project, in the belief that she will find out the name of her father. Pip’s story inevitably becomes entwined with Wolfe and Aberant but at times it seemed as if Franzen was writing two separate novels, I wanted to skip the Wolfe parts and get back to Pip.
Purity is not just Pip’s real name, it is the big theme. Purity in terms of information freedom, in terms of intentions and objectives, and old-fashioned secrets and lies; and there are a lot of the latter two. All the characters are hiding something, or avoiding someone, or longing for someone, or seeking something unattainable; and all must consider whether, in seeking the truth, they actually want to hear it when they find it.
This is not a bad book, Franzen couldn’t write one, and parts of it are written beautifully. He has a wonderful economy of phrase sometimes which encapsulates a big observation in a few well-chosen words. Unfortunately for me, other parts of it were stodgy and over-long and I skipped over some paragraphs.
Is it an epic book? It is certainly big [576 pages, but not the 736 pages of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life] but that is not in itself a problem, I like reading big books – big in terms of length, and subject matter. My real problem was that I didn’t engage with the characters, I didn’t care about them and found them at times over-the-top, verging on hysterical. I don’t need to like them, but I do need to care about them.
A full-fat novel with extra sugar and extra caffeine.

Read the #FirstParas of these two novels by Jonathan Franzen:-
FREEDOM
THE CORRECTIONS

If you like this, try:-
‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara
‘A Spool of Blue Thread’ by Anne Tyler
‘Some Luck’ by Jane Smiley

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview PURITY by Jonathan Franzen via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Sq

Great opening paragraph… 21

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freedom (3)“The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally – he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St Paul now – but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in the Times, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in the nation’s capital. His old neighbours had some difficulty reconciling the quotes about him in the Times [“arrogant,” “high-handed,” “ethically compromised”] with the generous, smiling, red-faced 3M employee they remembered pedalling his commuter bicycle up Summit Avenue in February snow; it seemed strange that Walter, who was greener than Greenpeace and whose own roots were rural, should be in trouble now for conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people. Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.”
‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen

Great opening paragraph 21 ‘Freedom’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally – he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St Paul now – but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read The New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in the Times, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in the nation’s capital. His old neighbours had some difficulty reconciling the quotes about him in the Times [“arrogant,” “high-handed,” “ethically compromised”] with the generous, smiling, red-faced 3M employee they remembered pedalling his commuter bicycle up Summit Avenue in February snow; it seemed strange that Walter, who was greener than Greenpeace and whose own roots were rural, should be in trouble now for conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people. Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.”
Jonathan FranzenFrom ‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen

Read my review of PURITY, also by Jonathan Franzen.
And here’s the #FirstPara of THE CORRECTIONS.

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Haruki Murakami
‘A Bouquet of Barbed Wire’ by Andrea Newman
‘After You’d Gone’ by Maggie O’Farrell

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen https://wp.me/p5gEM4-7s via @SandraDanby