Even in his new novel “innocence” creates Jonathan Franzen compelling characters. His analogy of Internet and DDR unfortunately convinced less.
Jonathan Franzen leaves in his novel “innocence” an East German dissidents to be whistleblowers. | © dpa
As the old continent after two world wars lay in ruins, entered “brave boys, honest, simple, clean, as it can only be Americans,” Europe. “But the Americans are able to move more freely and with smiling grace under dirty, starved, unhappy people This is not a sign of insensitivity. It is a sign of optimism and at the same time of innocence.” Unlike the Europeans, the Americans believed “that misery, hunger, suffering, that you can fight all this, … that there is against any evil a remedy. They do not know that evil is incurable.”
These are not quotes from the new book by Jonathan Franzen, but from Curzio Malaparte’s infamous, pretty stark postwar novel The skin (1949), in which he predicted the Americans, that they of the Europe debt would be infected, “It always meet so after a war there are always the vanquished, which bring the culture in the Siegerland..” And the culture of the Europeans consisted of view Malaparte from continuing, mythical excesses of violence that only culminated in the Second World War – which the radiant laughing “boys” can not comprehend. The old continent should the new move to the Cold War, which was known as cold not.
When the Second World War finally ended, and that happened in 1989 is located in Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Innocence (Purity) of the American reporter Tom aberant in Berlin, where it meets the young East German opposition Andreas Wolf, who initiates him into a terrible crime. Wolf’s father belongs to the Secretary of the political elite of the country, his mother is Anglistin. He fell out with them because of a regime-and parents critical poem and lived henceforth in one of those churches that organized the resistance. He deceived not only all the young women who are politically active, he fell in love with the innocence and beauty of an unapproachable 15-year-old girl, in Annagret who was abused – and indeed, perhaps a bit obvious, from an evil Stasi informer. Andreas Wolf So says Tom aberant midst of revolutionary commotion that he had killed these Stasi spies to save Annagret, and that its corpse still had to be brought to a safe place – prompting him to the Americans, the lot of morals, but little of the mythic-tragic entanglement of people know helps to bury the victims. Tom aberant is an accomplice, and Europe, more precisely, the “Republic of bad taste”, as the GDR is at Franzen, put again the seed of evil in the USA.
Andreas Wolf rises after the collapse of the Eastern bloc on the world’s most famous whistleblower at a. Unlike Assange he is very integrity as morally, although an illustrious circle of women with American world urge improvement in Bolivia rally around him, celebrating him as feminists and get into bed with him. From here, Wolf prevails not only over an empire of hackers, exposing the larger and smaller political scandals – he also rules the act of Francis novel. Man discovers only gradually that many characters, especially the central, namely Purity, which is known to everyone as Pip, are steered by him. Wolf drives the young, unbalanced in a sympathetic way woman living by doing odd jobs and lives in a rundown WG, not only in Bolivia, but determined to solve its riddle of life, namely the question of who her father is. That it is in fact concealed persistently from her mother, and that is to remain hidden here, because Franzen developed with reference to the origin question over hundreds of pages and a wealth of characters a criminal novelistic tension that is resolved late. Pip is an almost educational novelistic character who tries with difficulty to a free, individual development of their personality in order to achieve a higher, a positive goal. The reconciliation of their unclear and dysfunctional family background
Franzens book is the prime example of an analytical novel: the real action lies before its inception and met very slowly in numerous, interwoven storylines – as incidentally thus unfolds a kind of emotional panorama of the GDR and the USA, are the battered and tainted the east of Germany and the corrupt , decadent, but at the same time curious and idealistic US artfully taken into account. The novel teems with vegans, pacifists and other world conspirators of the middle class and upper class who suffer from their more or less secret alcoholism and her sexual addiction (“tail” is perhaps the most commonly used vocabulary of the novel, there is hardly a protagonist who would not strongly fixed on its own life). Ever since the repressive, but meaningful family corset civil blank ceased, one suffers much of the self-realization that one the other hand, does not want to miss – even corrections and Freedom Franzens world bestseller of the noughties years, revolved around these findings.
Purity , so the title of the novel, which one should better translate with purity instead of innocence would have it all. Rein is the Madonna-like girl Wolf sees in the Church that is with him a murderer and partner. Rein is capitalism, which has its roots in Puritanism and sullied the world through environmental destruction and injustice. Rein is the idea of socialism and leads straight to the Gulag. Clean the network activists and think but only to their fame and their vanity. If you can the novel whose savvy complexity, sovereign character guide and psychologically subtle unfolding of the characters are admirable hold something, then perhaps this: purity is such a universal category that it fits on just about anything, which is why, unfortunately, not a lot of it follows that we have a purity and innocence nostalgia, but always all and everything is somehow tainted. The fact that we have tasted the tree of knowledge, and not get out of the mess, however much we toil. That our desire (for sex, murder and meat) can not be precisely correct – despite eagerly consumed sleeping pills. Purity fantasies provoke quickly tautologies – so many relationships in Franzens book know that so familiar on-the-spot-kicking of marriages, that circling the same old misunderstanding and the constant disparity between expectations and reality, which is perhaps sometimes demonstrated little too detailed. Morality would, though basically everything is polluted, here and there to take back a little and not always all instrumentalize unnecessarily around you. At the end, in this great novel, all wisdoms are simply exhausted and the metaphor. That all striving purity pursuit would be likely by the way be a preferred American thought
Purity culminates in a mind game. The socialist states with their spies and had the desire animates still on the finest mysteries its citizens, and there are trivialities of being informed. From this uneasy curiosity, so it suggests Franzen, had the power activists in the world met – even they believed revelations are the key to a better world. The web as the DDR are totalitarian – each with strong claim to replace the belief in the individual through faith in the collective: “The answer to every question, whether large or small, was socialism were replaced socialism through networks, had one. the Internet.” In both socialist dreams of the collective few individuals would be manipulated. It distrusts these unfolded in Roman analogy but very. If only because the dictatorship has a monopoly of power, of which a net activists can only dream of: She has the ability to physical violence and to access the body
Certainly, the Internet companies and networks with their data thirst. animates “to define our existence” by the urge, as it is in Purity . In what way and to what extent they can act, but still regulates the democratic rule of law. The network is not a major export of the GDR, which have the good, honest, clean “boys” have managed alone. And it borders on a trivialization of the dictatorship, to view them as the prelude of the evil Internet. Franzens novel unfolds its power through the characters that touch one in the best sense and which we follow to enter into its depths with pleasure. A novel, as Franzen recently said in an interview, finally solves no problems. He embodies.
No comments:
Post a Comment