Scan barcode
A review by frogwithlittlehammer
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
I don’t know if I’ll ever understand what attracts me so much to the post-modernist novel; with its seemingly never ending lists of objects in painstaking detail, pages on pages without dialogue, racist characters, mostly unbearable women redeemable only in the vein of a male gaze, pretentious academic and historical references, loose and eye-rolling imbues of western philosophy, and so much more.
Perhaps the redeemable factors include the non negotiable allusions to the Eastern Bloc or Bolshevism, what I might precariously call the normalization of self harm via a kind of body-horror magical realism, frequent older man/younger woman relationships, manic inner dialogues that don’t quite become paranoid fiction, inter-referential literary cameos, and fragmentations from reality due to the crumbled bridge between subject and object.
Today I felt on the edge of mania as I was reading this book—breathing so heavily to the point of almost having a panic attack. Literature in theory should provide an escape for the reader, a pathway of imagination, a transportation to, if not a better world, at least to a different one. But I prefer to enjoy cruelly the world that seems so familiar to me, slightly worse and at the same time slightly better, the same story told again and again. I read these books for torment and out of passion (after all, pain and passion come from the same etymology, though I don’t know if I’m passionate about anything in life.) These books make life sound so terribly daunting, and they leave me with an empty pit inside my heart that neither motivates me to do something with my life nor further entrench myself into pessimism. But for some reason, I love to read them, maybe they make me feel young in an aged mindset haha. “Good” wouldn’t be the word I would use to describe the reading experience, but perhaps, necessary. To pick apart in a panicky manner where my life divulges from those of these fictional characters, and when they come together again. And there is relief in both of these confirmations.
Through Egan, DeLillo, Ferrante, Pelevin, Vonnegut?, Calvino and now Franzen I’ve only scratched the surface of postmodernism and it excites me and overwhelms me that there are still the bulwarks out there that I have yet to come to know—Pynchon, Joyce, Borges, Eco, Acker, Dick, DFW, Mann, Beckett, and infinitely more.
Perhaps the redeemable factors include the non negotiable allusions to the Eastern Bloc or Bolshevism, what I might precariously call the normalization of self harm via a kind of body-horror magical realism, frequent older man/younger woman relationships, manic inner dialogues that don’t quite become paranoid fiction, inter-referential literary cameos, and fragmentations from reality due to the crumbled bridge between subject and object.
Today I felt on the edge of mania as I was reading this book—breathing so heavily to the point of almost having a panic attack. Literature in theory should provide an escape for the reader, a pathway of imagination, a transportation to, if not a better world, at least to a different one. But I prefer to enjoy cruelly the world that seems so familiar to me, slightly worse and at the same time slightly better, the same story told again and again. I read these books for torment and out of passion (after all, pain and passion come from the same etymology, though I don’t know if I’m passionate about anything in life.) These books make life sound so terribly daunting, and they leave me with an empty pit inside my heart that neither motivates me to do something with my life nor further entrench myself into pessimism. But for some reason, I love to read them, maybe they make me feel young in an aged mindset haha. “Good” wouldn’t be the word I would use to describe the reading experience, but perhaps, necessary. To pick apart in a panicky manner where my life divulges from those of these fictional characters, and when they come together again. And there is relief in both of these confirmations.
Through Egan, DeLillo, Ferrante, Pelevin, Vonnegut?, Calvino and now Franzen I’ve only scratched the surface of postmodernism and it excites me and overwhelms me that there are still the bulwarks out there that I have yet to come to know—Pynchon, Joyce, Borges, Eco, Acker, Dick, DFW, Mann, Beckett, and infinitely more.