Mein Lieblingsroman des Jahres 2012 war Franzens "Die Korrekturen". Mein Lieblingsroman des Jahres 2013 war Franzens "Freiheit".Wird Franzen auch im Jahr 2014 seinem Spitzenplatz auf meiner Bestenliste behaupten können?Leider lautet meine Antwort dieses Mal: Nein! Auch wenn das Genie immer wieder durchscheint, erreicht Franzen hier noch nicht die Virtuosität seiner späteren Werke. Aber hey, als "Schweres Beben" 1992 erschien, war Franzen gerademal 32 Jahre alt. Das soll ihm erstmal einer nachschreiben. Und darum geht's: Der Rundfunktechniker Louis Holland zieht zu seiner Familie nach Boston als kurz nach seiner Ankunft Erdbeben die Region erschüttern. Die Seismologin Renée Seitchek vermutet, dass ein lokaler Chemie-Konzern die Beben verursacht. Als Louis und Renée zusammenkommen, erlebt ihre Beziehungen ganz eigene Turbulenzen. Wie schon in "Die Korrekturen" und "Freiheit" geht es auch hier um eine dysfunktionale Familie aus der akademischen Oberschicht. Auch andere wiederkehrende Themen seiner Bibliographie wie Wachstums- und Kapitalismuskritik, Umweltzerstörung, Depression und die Spiegelung des Zeitgeists ziehen sich durch den Roman, der im klassischen Franzen-Stil aus ständig wechselnder Perspektive erzählt wird. Mal gibt es einen historischen Exkurs, mal einen Abschnitt über künstliche Intelligenz und ein paar Seiten erlebt man sogar aus der Perspektive eines Waschbärs!So gut wie alle Hauptcharaktere haben einen massiven Sprung in der Schüssel, was für den Leser auf eine voyeuristisch-sadistische Weise recht unterhaltsam ist. Man wird das Gefühl nicht los, dass Franzen seine Figuren mit großer Lust leiden lässt. Wobei er hier und da aus meiner Sicht über die Stränge schlägt. Was ihm in Schweres Beben noch nicht so gut gelingt ist ein stimmiger Erzählrhythmus. Vor allem die erste Hälfte des Romans ist aufgrund fehlender Kapitel sehr mühselig zu lesen.Dabei muss man aufpassen, dass man während der zäheren Passagen nicht die teils anbetungswürdig geschriebenen Passagen überliest, die immer wieder hier und da auftauchen und den Erfolg seiner späteren Romane ausmachen. Ein Leitthema des Romans ist die Gegenüberstellung von Religion und Wissenschaft hier dargestellt in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Seismologen und Abtreibungsgegnern. Diese Diskussion wirkt zwanzig Jahre nach Erscheinen des Buches weit weniger brisant und etwas angestaubt. Fazit - Franzen für FortgeschritteneSchweres Beben ist kein einfaches Buch. Wenn man aber Verständnis und Durchhaltevermögen mitbringt, kann man dem 600 Seiten starken Roman durchaus einiges abgewinnen. Der aufmerksame Leser wird das Potential erahnen, das Franzen den Erfolg seiner späteren Werke beschert hat. Wer jedoch noch keinen Kontakt mit der Bibliographie des Autors hatte, dem würde ich raten erst "Die Korrekturen" oder "Freiheit" zu lesen. "Schweres Beben" ist Franzen für Fortgeschrittene. awesomatik KuriosumWenn Jonathan Franzen eins kann, dann schreiben. Wer also in dem Bereich Ambitionen hat, sollte sich seine zehn Schreibregeln zu Herzen nehmen:1.The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.2.Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.3.Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.4.Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.5.When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.6.The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".7.You see more sitting still than chasing after.8.It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction [the TIME magazine cover story detailed how Franzen physically disables the Net portal on his writing laptop].9.Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.10.You have to love before you can be relentless.Alle awesomatik Rezensionen auf einen Blick:http://awesomatik.com/buchfuhlunghttp://www.facebook.com/awesomatikBloghttp://twitter.com/KenTakel
In Strong Motion, Franzen's second novel, new college graduate Louis Holland moves to Boston to work a minimum wage job at a radio station. An earthquake kills his step-grandmother, his mother inherits her $22 million estate, and Louis has a conflicted relationship with his older sister Eileen, who is very mean. Eileen's boyfriend's father works for an evil chemicals manufacturing company who has been pumping toxic waste deep into the earth, which a Harvard seismologist named Renee believes is causing earthquakes in the Boston area. Louis falls in love with Renee, but maintains a crush he had during college; Mrs. Holland's new inheritance causes lots of familial problems, partly because she's inherited a big chunk of the stock of the chemicals company, and because Eileen is very greedy. The plot accelerates with a final earthquake, and corporate malfeasors wishing to do Renee grave harm.Grading on writerly talent alone, this would be a 4-star read. Franzen crafts some of the most deft and comical sentences in contemporary fiction, perfectly capturing moods, people, and relationships.Louis's father, with his academic's respect for lecterns, had already taken a seat.She looked up at him beseechingly, leaning forward, seeming to want to pour her breasts out at his feet.He unhooked her bra and freed her breasts, those female things that it had seemed, tonight, that he had never seen before. They were soft and animate little scones. (These are different breasts from the prior example.)In another scene revolving around breasts, Eileen and her boyfriend Peter are vacationing on the Côte d'Azur and Eileen is debating whether to take off her bikini top. This scene wonderfully expresses volumes about Eileen's idiocy and self-absorption. Franzen is also capable of writing pages and pages of seemingly effortless and fairly ordinary prose, allowing you to float through them without troubling yourself with the labor that went into them. He writes brilliantly about human relationships and dysfunctional families, here in his second novel as well as in The Corrections and Freedom. A flashback Renee has about her mother's old but chic wardrobe, which is being donated to charity, and which Renee desperately wants but her mother refuses to give her, says absolutely everything about their relationship (in the way that Patty's mother not attending Patty's basketball games in Freedom said everything about theirs). He's a preternaturally astute observer of both the natural and man-made environment:Her apartment was on the eighth floor of a modern high-rise, a tower of concrete that loomed above the ambient brick and clapboard like a thing that had failed to erode...But there's also a squalor, sometimes emotional, sometimes physical, in his writing, that makes me squeamish. It makes me want to go read Jane Austen or Edith Wharton, novels without acne, used tampons, or deeply repugnant sex scenes. I'm overemphasizing the physicality here because it's hard to explain the emotional squalor; it's a way he has of writing very nakedly and explicitly about characters' failings. It contributes to my inability to actually have strong positive feelings for any of the characters in Strong Motion, with the possible exception of Bob Holland, Louis's father, who seems like he might be the lone sane and emotionally stable person.If I had my druthers novelists wouldn't write any dialogue about characters' favorite, or most despised, bands. There's a discussion between Louis and Renee about music that goes on for pages and made me feel unpleasantly trapped in the minds of 20-somethings in the early 90s. The novel, over 500 pages, is about 20% too long.Franzen always brings sociopolitical issues into his novels. In integrating these storylines, and in making them seem truly important to the novels, he is consistently less successful. Freedom covered disappearing warblers, the protection of avian habitats, and overpopulation. Here it's industrial/corporate malfeasance and the anti-abortion movement (the latter an unnecessary and distracting subplot). His sociopolitical storylines bring the books down a notch, aligning him with a lower-caste writer like Tom Wolfe, whose novels strive to capture some Zeitgeist more than to delve deep into the complexity of humans.
What do You think about Strong Motion (2007)?
I wish I'd written this review sooner, when the novel was fresher in my mind, but suffice to say I enjoyed the hell out of this book. It's more plot-driven than I've come to expect from Franzen, but the character building is just about as exceptional as it is in his later works. In fact, the characterization here may be even more interesting because when the perspective shifts midway through, we get almost a diametrically opposite view of one of our central characters. This got me asking who defines a person's qualities, and how consistent are those qualities not just over time, but from interaction to interaction, moment to moment? Anyway, I had fun.Check out Elliott Holt's great review of this book (which is what prompted me to pick it up) if you want more details about the story, and also to read her insights about the motifs Franzen plays with throughout. I'll just say if you've never read this early Franzen work, it's well worth your time.
—Matt
Jonathan Franzen must have had some hellish experiences with human beings, because his characters are often some of the most despicable and frustrating people I have come across. Yet somehow you end up feeling something for them, which in my case invariably means a switch from almost pure hatred to one of sympathy.The other contradiction with Franzen is his technical sensibilities. his attention to details is so minute at times that you almost feel like you're reading through a manual for a piece of heavy machinery that you spell with numbers and hyphens. Yet, he manages to surround these sometimes seemingly endless descriptions of the mundane with some of the most beautiful and insightful prose you can imagine.This wasn't my favourite of Franzen's books, and at times I found it a little difficult to continue enjoying, but the story sucked me in and I was sorry when it ended.
—Craig New
First, a caveat: Strong Motion is not The Corrections. It does not deliver the scintillating prose, caustic wit, and epic scope of Franzen's National Book Award winning later novel. It's an eccentric and lengthy book that, for better or worse, dons a variety of identities: suspense, romance, family melodrama, didactic political novel, bildungsroman, perhaps more. There are subplots and mere meanderings, but Franzen ties them all into the relationship between Louis Holland and Renee Seitchek, and especially Renee's role as a Harvard seismologist examining earthquakes that have recently disturbed the Boston area. Unwittingly, Renee manages to become involved in abortion protests, thus adding another element to Franzen's agenda, er, plot. The varying subplots of the novel would've been handled deftly, but there are simply too many coincidences that are just too convenient for the plot. Strong Motion does, however, exhibit traces of brilliance, particularly in the characterization of Renee Seitchek, a 30 year old self-conscious seismologist who falls in love with the novel's 23 year old protagonist, Louis Holland. Franzen's attention to the nuances of Renee's struggle for identity are brilliant, as Renee ruminates on everything from egotistical and insular women who join "the sorority of child bearers" to being a "boring scientist who lives in a computer room but considers herself less boring than others like her because ten years ago she went to Clash concerts". Franzen certainly highlights the finer points of the spectrum of femininity. It is with Louis, Franzen's austere protagonist, that the problem first begins. I cannot bring myself to like him. At all. He's a spineless, masochistic ham radio buff fluent in French. He's smart, occasionally witty, and has a hipster's palate for music (revealed in postcoital bliss as he questions Renee about her music habits: "Lou Reed? Roxy Music? Waitresses? XTC? The Banshees? Early Bowie? Warren Zevon?")Franzen has furnished him with the right amount of quirks, but Louis simply doesn't hold the novel together. He seems to float through it, swaying where Franzen's well-thought out plot diagram takes him. There are other problems, too. This isn't exactly experimental, avant-garde fiction Franzen is writing, and yet the omniscient narrator decides to peer into the life of a raccoon for much of chapter 11. Admittedly, sometimes the veering of the narrator is humorous, but in chapter 13 readers get a brief history of the founding of America, complete with Jonh Winthrop and archane Elizabethan spellings. It appears that this is an attempt to add a more epic dimension to the novel, and a playful and pedantic use of English before the days of standardization. The novel is not an epic, though it tries. Clearly, Franzen has a story with immediacy and scope that spans the range of American lives, particularly in the late 80s and early 90s at the dawn of abortion clinic bombings, the reawakening and strengthening of Christian fundamentalism, and the emergence of a more outspoken environmentalism coupled with questions of corporate responsibility. Franzen includes a Broadway dossier of characters with whom we can sing along for a few chapters, but ultimately, the characterization of these peripheral figures is stock. (Korean immigrant, vacuous Harvard MBAs, lecherous old man, Marxist professor, southern antiabortion minister) and Franzen quickly ends their stories with a sentence here and there in the whirring landfill that constitutes the last few pages.
—Jen Padgett Bohle
