Following the heroine in her courageous search for herself, Jonathan Franzen touches upon the most important problems facing modern society: this is the totalitarian essence of the Internet, and weapons of mass destruction, and the legacy of socialism in Eastern Europe. However, despite the unchanging monumentality and loyalty to the classical tradition, "Purity", according to critics, has become Franzen's most personal and subtle novel.
"The lightest, least rational and most personal of Franzen's novels … A new octave has been added to Franzen's range." - The New York Times
It happens that you are waiting for a new book from a writer to whom you have a special relationship, you wait and wait in every sense, you read in September, as I remember now, last year, that according to this long-awaited book they are also going to shoot a series with Craig, waiting is akin to a film about Hachiko and his fingers tingle with anticipation. And then, when the coveted brick is on the shelf - this moment, open the cover, breathe in the smell, well, this is all book-worming nerd, so dear to some (to me, of course, too) - it's just like diving into the water for the first time, and water in general -that's not warm. Everyone is swimming, well, EVERYTHING in general - and you are standing and you are downright cold, you know what will be normal afterwards, but that's not all. Such a protracted prelude that just in the end, out of a feeling (where is your self-respect?), You take it and go into the water.
It was the same with Franzen - he is from the cohort of those writers about whom, after centuries of torment and seconds of disgust, you want to go to a bar at the end of any story and say that he is a great guy. It is hard and sometimes almost unbearable with him, he is a little strange and, obviously, with his quirks, but when he speaks - it is impossible not to listen and not answer, even if it is slightly in one gate. Some jealous feeling arose when Sergey Kumysh casually noticed the same in the daily poster, but this only emphasizes. Emphasizes all this.
Too much has been said about "Purity" deservedly - Franzen is one of those who are clearly not looking for simple ways, and the birth of any text for him is akin to paying a mortgage for some. For me to write Purity, he says in an interview, it took me 35 years of writing, however, it was written in two years; summing up - “Purity” is such a mark after all these years, tortured accumulated experience, the quintessence of all the words spoken earlier and animated characters, reduced by a pinch of autobiography, from which one even more wants to recall the opening bar: Franzen in several interviews admitted that this the long-suffering image of the mother is not taken from the ceiling. Yes, all the women in the book are a little crazy, but who would not agree with such a truth in life? All Franzen's mothers are sick to varying degrees - the disease most often dictates changes in the psyche, which is undermined like a bark beetle. The trash that remains in the remnant drives others crazy. Women drive crazy those who are near and love them, however - in some actions it is difficult not to see the painful root causes born in childhood, suffered in turn through relationships with fathers.
Parents and children in "Purity" are almost as paramount as in "Amendments", but if the guts of parental love and hatred of children were turned inside out there (or vice versa), then in "Purity" this theme is paramount among others - sad unions of love leading to endless suffering for two once in love, the modern world with its realities, dirty, like the antipode of the word that heads the novel, Facebook with its infinity, people with their imperfection (and it's normal that there are no ideal ones in the novel at all); closer to the finale, Franzen will speak in the sense that children are not responsible for the sins of their parents, this phrase, which is important, is put into the mouth of one of the normal women of "Purity", a character, however, to the boredom of a secondary and, which is typical, childless, but speaking important things that Fraznen denounces into reality: “... it seemed unfair that she was sent to live in a shitty world made by her parents. They are responsible for the impossible circumstances in which she personally finds herself, they belong to a generation that has done nothing with the problem of nuclear weapons and less than nothing with the problem of global warming; her guilt in all this is not ", just as there is no guilt in many other things, for example, in what she is, what they are, what they are - we, in a sense, bear the burden of someone else's life and only when we throw it off, we comprehend something about ourselves and about all these people, about the whole world and we can build our own without looking back.
The construction of an ideal family should have a healthy foundation, just as the construction of any future should have such a foundation - what could be expected from a story full of pain, madness, actions bordering on hysteria, actions committed in the confusion of high-profile events of the past, what kind of children could grow up with mothers who made themselves paramount, while providing their motherhood with a fair amount of madness? What foundation could those who crumble their own have built? The fathers in "Sinlessness" are not much healthier - men, however, prone to other people's insanities and therefore seemingly weak to unhealthy, but strong enough to find a cure for insanity, to escape, to become themselves, because any obsession is a himself, a sickening period of wandering in the dark of corny sexual impulses with an overtones of abnormality.
The heroine of the novel named Pip (Purity) got her name from her mother, who hides her past, changed her name and place of residence and gave birth to a daughter, telling different stories about a tyrant father who, if he finds them, will destroy them - Pip, of course, is also looking for herself, sometimes also slipping into this purely feminine madness, but coming out of it only (or, more precisely, including) because she finds herself, figuring out who her father was and is, who her mother really is and who she herself is, finds consolation in previous ordeals and a sense of life in a certain veil of deception, finds her point of sinlessness in order to understand exactly enough to voice the very last thought of “Purity”: maybe I can even cope with it.
Maybe we can all cope with this too - in the end, we all got the same world in varying degrees of similarity, in which it is not easy, but worth it.
You can buy «Purity» at "Barnes & Noble"
This article was sponsored by Ken Haraguchi.
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