Farther Away
In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns 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 from the reader.
3.5 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Essays, Journals & Letters |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
352 |
| RRP |
|
| Date of Publication |
June 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0007459513 |
| Publisher |
Fourth Estate |
| |
In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns 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 from the reader.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Reviews
The Economist
The Economist
“The reader learns a great deal about Mr Franzen’s quirks: he loves birds, finds mowing lawns “despair-inducing”, plays golf but at heart dislikes it, and after many false starts, has learned to love the fiction of Philip Roth … Mr Franzen is on slightly less firm ground with his book reviews ... However, Mr Franzen is a sturdy enough authority elsewhere. His essays are riddled with aphorisms (“One half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love”) and, surprisingly, humour (theory and sex prove incompatible bedfellows when his wife-to-be declares: “You can’t deconstruct and undress at the same time”).”
28/04/2012
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The Evening Standard
Sarah Sands
“As with Martin Amis, Franzen believes literary excellence trumps all other considerations. I especially like his focus on detail. There is a funny short essay entitled Comma-Then. Franzen says that if you use the following construction, he will never take you seriously as a writer. “She lit a Camel Light, then dragged deeply.” Real people would say: “She lit a Camel Light and dragged deeply.” This is a book for those interested in how to live as well as how to write.”
07/06/2012
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The Observer
Geoff Dyer
“These essays are exemplary instances of reader-friendly criticism in that they can be studied profitably even by people unfamiliar with the works in question. They also display two related side-effects of becoming a great novelist. First, the ease with which Harold Bloom's idea of the anxiety of influence can be swept aside as an amusing irrelevance. Second, that the great novelist is, by default, a great reader.”
10/06/2012
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The Sunday Telegraph
Paul Clements
“Though seemingly preoccupied with writing and literature, his essays travel many subjects and moods: the longest, “The Chinese Puffin”, is an evocation of what happens to bird habitats when ecology gets in the way of an emerging economy. The funeral address he delivered for his friend, the novelist David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, is a masterclass in generous but unsaccharine eulogy. There is also gentle humour, and the odd laugh-out-loud moment — notably the short, salutary tale in which he recalls using petrol to rid a friend’s house of hornets.”
07/06/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
James Kidd
“If Farther Away has a theme, love seems as good as any. Franzen provides touching insights into his parents' marriage (a Valentine's letter from his father to his mother), alongside frank admissions about the failure of his own. Then there's his love for David Foster Wallace ... In that opening address to Kenyon graduates, Franzen said: "What love is really about is a bottomless empathy, born out of the heart's revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are." At their very best, his essays live up to this definition, crossing divides of form, time and space to speak as wisely and warmly as a close, clever and eminently real friend.”
10/06/2012
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The New York Times
Phillip Lopate
“Here are some reasons, I think, that Franzen’s essays do not match his fiction. While his prose is always cogent, he is not that consistently stylish a sentence writer. Essays put a different kind of pressure on the sentence, calling for more aphoristic compression and wit. His novels work best through patient accumulation of social detail and character development. By contrast, the I-character in his essays is not as strongly developed, nor as vivid. He is better able to convey moral irony by dramatizing a fictional conflict than by baldly stating his views. Finally, since, as he puts it, “fiction is my religion,” he may simply be a literary monotheist who has never fully grasped the imaginative and expressive possibilities of nonfiction; he’s not trying to catch that fire. When he speaks of the authors who influenced him, they are all fiction writers.”
18/05/2012
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The Scotsman
Stuart Kelly
“[A] sad, petulant book ... If nothing else, Jonathan Franzen’s Farther Away is revealing, though not always in an especially pleasant way … There is a tone throughout of testy tiredness which seems almost determined to alienate the audience … The reader may well wince at some of the more blatant misanthropy ... The overwhelming tone of Farther Away is defensive and disdainful, perhaps exacerbated by Franzen’s insistence that he is interested in what the novel and the novel alone can say — in which case, why this?”
26/05/2012
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