I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.
Interpretation
Franzen emphasizes the emotional impact of Laxness's work, suggesting it's profoundly moving.
Jonathan Franzen's quote about Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' highlights the profound emotional experience readers often undergo when engaging with powerful literature. By stating that it's nearly impossible to read the book without shedding tears, Franzen underscores the themes of struggle, resilience, and humanity that resonate deeply within the narrative, reflecting the bookβs capacity to evoke strong feelings and connect with readers on a personal level.
In practice
During a book club discussion, one might say, 'As Jonathan Franzen described, it's hard to finish a powerful book like 'Independent People' without tears.'
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.
Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
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