Jonathan Franzen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jonathan Franzen (2011)

Jonathan E. Franzen (born August 17, 1959 in Western Springs near Chicago ) is an American writer .

He became known to a wide audience with his third novel The Corrections , published in 2001 , which won the National Book Award , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and sold 2.85 million copies worldwide. In 2015, this novel was chosen by the BBC's selection of the best 20 novels from 2000 to 2014 as one of the most important works of this century to date. The following novel, Freedom , received exceptional media attention when it appeared in 2010. Critics ranked the book among the best of the year.

Franzens novels focus on the breakup of dysfunctional families. The family members are illuminated both as individuals and in their relationship to one another. At the same time, his broad-based works - the corrections as well as freedom each comprise over 700 pages - point to connections and similarities between the individual fate of their characters and social and political developments. Among other things, they deal with modern problems such as globalization , environmental pollution and the “ war on terror ”, but also with capitalism in general and communication in social networks .

Life

Jonathan Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, the youngest of three brothers. His father Earl was a civil engineer, his mother Irene a housewife. In 1965 the family moved to Webster Groves, Missouri , a suburb of St. Louis . Jonathan Franzen studied at Swarthmore College since 1977 and earned a Bachelor of Arts in German studies with honors in 1981 . In 2005 the college awarded him an honorary doctorate . After graduating, he studied at the Ludwig Maximilians University , then as part of the Fulbright program at the Free University of Berlin , so he speaks very good German .

In 1982 he went back to the US, married the writer Valerie Cornell, with whom he at Cambridge (Massachusetts) lived in a tiny apartment, and took a weekend job at the seismological laboratory at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences of Harvard University on to the common To make a living. The two separated in 1994 and are now divorced.

In 1988 Franzens first novel The Twenty-Seventh City (German: The 27th City ) appeared , which is still based on the model of Thomas Pynchons . While it received some benevolent reviews, it failed to find a broad readership. His second novel Strong Motion (German: Schweres Beben ) was not received enthusiastically in 1992 by either the critics or the public. Nevertheless succeeded Franzen because of a 200-page draft, the rights to his new novel The Corrections (German: The corrections ) in 1996 to the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux to sell. When the work, on which he wrote for seven years and which is characterized by a conservative narrative style , finally appeared in 2001 immediately before the attacks on September 11th, it achieved its breakthrough with audiences and critics alike. Among other things, Oprah Winfrey chose the novel for Oprah's Book Club , which usually leads to a sharp increase in sales. After Franzen had been ambivalent about this nomination in an interview, since many of the book club's books are narrow and one-dimensional , Winfrey withdrew the invitation to her TV show and discussed another book instead. The controversy drew wide media coverage, in the context of which Franzen was sometimes heavily criticized for his "arrogant" comments. It wasn't until 2010 that he appeared on the show.

Immediately after the publication of The Corrections , Franzen began work on a new novel, but initially discarded everything he wrote. Instead, he published in 2002 a collection of essays , How to Be Alone (German: Instructions to be alone ), and in 2006 a collection of autobiographical short stories, The Discomfort Zone (German: The Discomfort Zone: A story of mine ) , which differs from the time of his childhood and youth through living with and separation from his wife to the death of his parents and the time after the success of The Corrections . In August 2010 appeared after nine years of work, and accompanied by the greatest attention of the American media Franzens fourth novel Freedom (German: Freedom ) , written partly in Berlin. After he sent an advance copy to Winfrey, she again selected (this time with his express consent) his book for her book club. In the same year the writer became a member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin .

In his free time Franzen likes to watch birds. To do this, he usually gets up at dusk to hear her singing. Wherever he is, he also plans a detour to well-known bird nesting sites. With publications such as Last Song for Migrating Birds in National Geographic magazine , he is actively committed to protecting birds. In 2015 he was recognized by the Euronatur Foundation for his exemplary commitment to nature conservation .

Franzen's partner is the writer Kathryn Chetkovich , with whom he has lived alternately on the Upper East Side in New York and near Santa Cruz, California since 1996 .

plant

Jonathan Franzen at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010

In 1988 Franzen published his debut novel The Twenty-Seventh City , followed by the novel Strong Motion in 1992 .

With his third, highly acclaimed novel The Corrections , Franzen achieved his international breakthrough in 2001. In the same year he received the National Book Award for the novel . The New Yorker magazine had previously placed him on the list of the most important writers of the 21st century.

In 2002 Franzen published the essay collection How to Be Alone . In 2006 the autobiographical story The Discomfort Zone - A Personal History followed . With Spring Awakening , Franzen presented a new translation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening in autumn 2007 .

In 2009 Franzen was a guest at the American Academy in Berlin and, together with Adam Haslett and Daniel Kehlmann, held the Tübingen poetics lectureship .

In 2010 Franzens novel Freedom was published .

In 2015 Franzen published his novel Purity .

His books are published in German by Rowohlt Verlag .

The Twenty-Seventh City

The political economic thriller The Twenty-Seventh City (German: The 27th City ) takes place, referring to George Orwell's dystopia , in 1984 in St. Louis in the Midwest . The city, once one of the most important in the USA, slipped into 27th place in the second half of the 20th century. Due to the high crime rate in individual slums, citizens are scared and migrate to the surrounding areas. The constant changes in perspective, which are used as the main stylistic device, provide a multi-layered, disillusioning picture of American society on a personal level and of the structures dominated by a few closely interwoven families of the pioneering days.

The novel begins with the return of the half-American Susan Jammu from India. She wants to realize her communist revolutionary convictions in St. Louis by submitting to the money aristocracy. After she has been elected as the new police chief, she loses sight of this goal and pursues her private mission, driven by her will to power. With her Indian agents, she stages bomb attacks and blames them on an alleged Indian terrorist organization, the Osage warriors, in order to be celebrated with police actions as the savior of order and to win a referendum for the merger of the city with the surrounding area. At the same time, she unscrupulously uses her position for surveillance to establish mafia- like structures. On the one hand, through seduction up to sexual addiction, on the other hand, through intrigue, extortion and psychological terror, she forces the key figures of the city to work together in order to make big profits with her mother's money through land speculation and compact redevelopment of the run-down neighborhoods. The demolition of the old houses is disguised as a social redevelopment concept (slogan: "Hope City") for the mostly black residents. Your opponents are the conservative entrepreneur Samuel Norris and the successful, but humanly weak building contractor Martin Probst, the chairman of the “growth association”. With him she starts her subtle fight. She has his wife Barbara, who is unhappy in her marriage, kidnapped by her secret service chief Singh and wants to make her disappear without a trace, then she seduces Martin in order to rule the city with him. Their intrigue collapses in the effective showdown . Norris has seen through her machinations, Barbara is killed on the run in a shooting and Probst's house is set on fire by an agent who has gone mad. Jammu kills herself after the uprooted and demoralized provost broke up with her, the referendum was lost and she feared the exposure of her actions.

Strong Motion

Strong Motion (German: Schweres Beben ) is about a broken American family in the eighties of the twentieth century, the Holland. Her story is woven into the narrative of a series of earthquakes on the east coast of America. The quakes serve as a metaphor for the upheavals in the family life of the Dutch, which are largely told through the eyes of the son Louis. The second main character in the book is the 30-year-old seismologist Renée Seitchek. She tries to uncover the cause behind the earthquake.

Franzen said of the process of creating the novel: “I imagined static lives that would then be disturbed from the outside - literally shaken up. I imagined violent scenes that would tear down the facades and cause people to throw angry moral truths at each other. The title " Heavy Quake " was clear to me very early on ". The book is structured as a "systemic narrative". According to Franzen, the core systems of the novel are "the systems of science and religion - two violently contradicting systems to explain the world to one another". Severe quake was not a financial success at the time of its appearance. Franzen later defended the book, however, stating in a 2010 interview in the Paris Review: "I think you [the critics and readers] have a tendency to overlook Strong Motion a little".

The Corrections

The Corrections (German: The corrections) tells the story of the Lambert family from a small town in the Midwest of the United States. After fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert wants to spend one last Christmas with her husband Alfred, who is seriously ill with Parkinson's, and their three children. However, Gary, Chip and Denise have long been leading their own lives, each with their own problems and crises to overcome.

The eldest son, Gary, is a successful Philadelphia banker . However, his marriage is in deep crisis. Gary also suffers from depression, which he vehemently denies. Chip loses his position as a literary professor when an affair with a student is discovered. After he also failed as a screenwriter, he moved to Lithuania under dubious circumstances . There he is involved in a large-scale internet fraud. Denise, the youngest of the three siblings, loses her job as a gourmet cook because of an affair with her boss and his wife.

The failure of the characters is the focus of the novel. However, the children try to "correct" the life models of their parents in order to prevent their own crises or to avoid them. Ultimately, unsuccessful efforts. In the end, a moving picture of a family remains, which is not only shaped by the fate of its individual members, but also by their complex relationships with one another.

Freedom

Like its predecessor The Corrections, the novel Freedom is set in the daily life of a middle-class family in today's USA. The action takes place in the administrative center of the state of Minnesota, St. Paul , as well as the cities of Washington and New York. At the center of the plot is the bitter-sweet, dramatic fate of the marriage of Walter and Patty Berglund. From the mid-1980s until Barack Obama's election as President of the USA in 2009, the opposing couple is portrayed one after the other from the point of view of various figures, especially that of Patty Berglund herself. Their secret, intimate conflicts unfold in a highly dramatic manner ethical dilemma, which is indicated by the title "freedom": how far can freedom be lived out and expected of others?

The relentless but highly respectful drawn figures cover a broad spectrum of social origins and political views in their entirety. Patty is a gifted basketball player, the daughter of a well-known Democratic Party politician, and the black sheep of her respected Jewish family with ties to the Kennedy clan . A central counterpoint to the romantic liberalism of the main character, the lawyer and environmentalist Walter Berglund, are the illusion-free descriptions of his best friend, the rock musician and womanizer Richard Katz. The reader owes exciting insights into the thinking of conservative white Americans to the unwanted entanglement of Walter and his son Joey in business with the armaments company LBI. Here the novel raises current ethical-political questions in connection with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and with dubious government contracts. The question of the limits of industrial growth that Walter has been concerned with throughout his life remains unsolved in this extensive contemporary and social novel.

Purity

Unschuld ( English Purity) - Franzens fifth novel - was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2015, while Rowohlt Verlag published the translation into German. In addition to the eponymous character Purity "Pip" Tyler, the focus of the novel is on the two men Andreas Wolf and Tom Aberant. Wolf comes from an East German Nomenklatura family and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, developed into an internet activist similar to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange . Tyler is a heavily indebted college graduate looking for her father who joins Wolf's project. Aberant is an American journalist who writes an investigative story about Wolf. Their paths cross over a period of thirty years, the focus is on secrets, betrayal and surveillance. Parallels between the surveillance state in the GDR and the Internet become clear. The novel was received largely positively by international critics.

Prizes and awards

Memberships

Works

  • Twenty-Seventh City. 1988
    • German: The 27th city. Novel. Translated by Heinz Müller 2003
  • Strong Motion. 1992
  • The Corrections. Novel. 2001.
  • How to Be Alone. Essays. 2002
    • German: Instructions for loneliness. Essays. Translated by Chris Hirte 2002
    • German: Instructions for being alone. Essays. Translated by Eike Schönfeld 2007
  • The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History. 2006
    • German: The unrest zone. A story from me. Translated by Eike Schönfeld 2007
  • with Adam Haslett : Are we feeling better now? Fiction and autobiography. 2010. (German original edition)
  • Freedom. 2010.
  • Farther Away. collected essays. 2012.
    • German: Further away. Translated by Bettina Abarbanell. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-02132-0 .
  • The Kraus Project. Essays by Karl Kraus. Translated by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York City 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-18221-2 . (bilingual)
    • German: The Kraus project . With the collaboration of Daniel Kehlmann and Paul Reitter; Translated from the English by Bettina Abarbanell. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-498-02136-8 .
  • Purity . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York City 2015.
  • The End of the End of the Earth: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York City 2018.
    • German: The end of the end of the world. Translated by Bettina Abarbanell and Wieland Freund. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-498-02009-5 .
  • What if We Stopped Pretending? In: The New Yorker , September 2019.
    • German: When do we stop fooling ourselves? Let us admit that we cannot prevent the climate catastrophe . Rowohlt 2020, ISBN 978-3-499-00440-7 .

Movie

  • Five days with Jonathan Franzen. Documentary, Germany, 2012, 52 min., Director: Marion Kollbach, production: arte , first broadcast: June 11, 2012, summary by arte with Jeffrey Eugenides, among others .

literature

  • Philip Weinstein: Jonathan Franzen: the comedy of rage. Bloomsbury, New York / London / Oxford / New Delhi / Sydney 2015, ISBN 978-1-5013-0717-1 .

Web links

Commons : Jonathan Franzen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Essays
Interviews
Reviews

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Lev Grossman: Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist. In: Time . August 12, 2010.
  2. ↑ Robin Pogrebin: First in a Decade: A Living Novelist on Time's cover. In: The New York Times . August 11, 2010.
  3. ^ The 10 Best Books of 2010. In: The New York Times . December 1, 2010.
  4. ^ Alisa Giardinelli: Jonathan Franzen '81 First Living American Novelist on Time Cover in Decade. ( Memento from August 5, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Swarthmore News. August 16, 2010. College website, accessed December 5, 2010.
  5. ^ Judith von Sternburg: Franzen in Frankfurt. The affable one. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . October 10, 2010.
  6. ↑ Emily Eakin: Jonathan Franzen's Big Book. In: New York Times . September 2, 2001.
  7. ^ July Weiner: The Corrections: Oprah and Jonathan Franzen Revisit Feud. on: www.vanityfair.com , December 7, 2010.
  8. ↑ Five days with Jonathan Franzen. ( Memento of the original from February 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Documentary by Marion Kollbach, first broadcast on June 11, 2012 on arte @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  9. ^ Jonathan Franzen: Last Song for Migrating Birds. At nationalgeographic.com, July 2013.
  10. ↑ a b Excellent bird lover , press release from the Euronatur Foundation of October 14, 2015.
  11. ↑ Jonathan Franzen. Biography ( Memento of the original from July 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from American Academy in Berlin @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.americanacademy.de
  12. ↑ Wieland Freund : Jonathan Franzen is more popular than ever. In: The world . August 16, 2010.
  13. ↑ Sandra Kegel: Jonathan Franzens new novel: The Internet is the GDR of today. Review on innocence. on: faz.net , August 29, 2015.
  14. ↑ a b c Stephen J. Burn: Jonathan Franzen, The Art of Fiction No. 207 . In: The Paris Review . 2010 ( theparisreview.org ).
  15. ^ National Book Foundation website , accessed September 17, 2015.
  16. ↑ Jonathan Franzen receives the "World" literature award. In: The world. Retrieved October 4, 2013.
  17. ↑ Two years in Germany and the consequences. Acceptance speech for the "Welt" literature award (accessed on November 9, 2013).
  18. ↑ The best nature protection is love , In: Die Welt, October 16, 2015.
  19. ↑ Prize speech
  20. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 14, 2019 .
  21. ↑ The translation of the complainer and "torch": I like it! In: FAZ . October 4, 2013, p. 35.
  22. ↑ Burkhard Müller : Foot sweat of the aesthetes. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . December 6, 2014, p. 21.
  23. ↑ Adam Soboczynski : We are all defiled. In: The time . September 3, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Franzen, Jonathan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Franzen, Jonathan E.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH 17th August 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Western Springs, Illinois