Sometimes it is scary to peer into the unfathomable space of the current novel. Under the umbrella of the contemporary, all kinds of themes can be sheltered that perhaps, with the passage of time, will be organized into their proper genres. Because making the formal and avant-garde nature prevail in the form cannot take precedence over what is truly relevant, the substance.
So when any type of novel is written with its flash backs or parallel stories that branch the tree of an underlying idea, or is conceptualized based on a modern estrangement, it is better to stick to the background, to what the author tells us, so that the contemporary narrative is not a mixed bag where the reader can easily get lost.
But… there are always virtuous exceptions. Cases like that of Paul auster with such a brilliant way that it addresses the existential from the best choice of words or, on another wave frequency, when we talk about Jonathan Franken, maker of a contemporary prose that also crystallizes in its form through a masterful literary melting pot, where the idea of the individual, full of nuances but absorbed by the mass, merges.
Franzen sometimes makes use of the typical chronological destructuring that is so associated with the current. But in his case, with his skills as an essayist on current topics, he fills each scene with diverse characters with dialogues that are always inspiring or revealing and that achieve the idea of a chronicle of our days.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Jonathan Franzen
Crossroads
An isolated world, as if floating on a reality that passes under the feet of the protagonists with the magical suspension of the moment torn from the future of the world. That is what Franzen achieves with this story where the familiar is a melting pot of unexpected circumstances. Will and deeds that point to tragedy with that centrifugal force of all existences determined to escape otherwise, from the centripetal force of nothingness.
On the eve of Christmas in 1971, a great snowfall is announced in Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, a pastor at a progressive suburban church, is about to break free from a marriage he considers unhappy, unless his wife, Marion, who also has her secrets, anticipates him.
Clem, the first-born, comes from college infused with an extreme moralism that has caused him to make a decision that will wreak havoc. Her sister Becky, until then the queen of her class in high school, has veered sharply into the counterculture.
The third son, the brilliant Perry, who has dedicated himself to selling drugs to his classmates, has set out to become a better person. While the youngest, Jay, tries to fight his way between uncertainty and amazement. Thus, all the Hildebrandts pursue a freedom that the other members of the family, each on their own, threaten to restrict.
Libertad
If one of the great virtues in Franzen's style is the meticulousness in its most internal aspect of each character, delve into this book that leads us among all the human sensations that we could conceive.
In the peaceful life of the Berglund family, a calm is sensed, that calm of the middle class that knows itself to be subordinated to morals and customs. The idyllic construction of the family nucleus is presented at times as hilarious due to the sum of contradictions that this crystal world entails. Only the fragile glass can end up succumbing to the opportune sound wave.
Schemes of life and planned systems, the family as a meccano made up of souls that one day begin to move independently, without possible harmony. The times of conflict have come, of the inescapable contrast between youthful perspectives on life and the adult feeling that those perspectives may be the only true thing.
A novel that can be contemplated with the curiosity of someone observing a family album in which no photograph can be removed as inappropriate. In the lives of Patty, Walter and son we learn how everything could change so much.
Pureza
Sometimes the strategy to title works does not have to be correct. And for me, with everything that Franzen's books contain, that concise title in which it is intended to say so much in a single word does not seem appropriate.
Of course, knowing Franzen, readers always know that we can go beyond this claim to get into a good novel. Pip begins a journey that sounds appetizing from the start.
She never knew her father and his image has occupied her imagination since she knew that he, whoever he is, occupies a place in the same world as her. The old need to reveal the identity treated as a process of recovery from an impossible paternity, since the time of being a daughter as the basis for learning life is over for Pip.
He only has doubts and questions ... But in addition, the trip is also physically so, because to find his father Pip he will have to travel to East Germany, as a metaphor for the obscurantism of a past that little by little is becoming very much our own. …, Because the search for identity, beyond parenthood, concerns us all.
Other interesting books by Jonathan Franzen ...
The corrections
The reference to the family nucleus as a starting point is a recurring aspect in Franzen. In this, the novel that elevated him back in 2001, we meet the Lamberts, a family in that alienating moment in which the children are no longer here and the parents succumb to ailments or manias as a somatization of the loss.
Alfred and Enid, inhabitants of the same house and separated by the light years that already run through the wide corridors of the house. Then there are his children, fled to the other coast of the country like souls carried by the devil.
They, the offspring, have sought their luck and end up discovering the most and least kind of success or failure, the abandonment of personal plots and the uprooting that seems to lead them to the refusal to accept an invitation to dinner at Christmas on the part of his mother.
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