Friday, October 09, 2015

Good teeth

Lucy Kellaway lunches with Jonathan Franzen for the FT. I am laughing, I have been a Franzen defender in my time (his books are better than 95% at least of those with a reasonable claim to be worth reading, why trash him?), but he does have a nearly unprecedented ability to say things that make him sound utterly insufferable!

I bogged down halfway through Purity (might finish it this weekend) - the East German scenes seem to me embarrassingly bad, and the limited range of characters and emotions (especially female characters and female emotions) struck me more here than with his last couple books, but it is certainly well above the bar of basic readability...

3 comments:

  1. I used to read your blog once in a week. Very good blog.
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  2. He is hopelessly dickish. Also what is wrong with the FT comments filter?

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  3. Found the first 20 pages utterly repellent (had only read the first two when I wrote above and they put me to sleep at bedtime last night). Should I continue?

    ReplyDelete