Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen
photo: Dan Winters for TIME
(source: TIME)
no copyright infringement intended

novelist and essayist; Pulitzer finalist, all that stuff; for his Freedom, TIME put him on its cover with a headline like Great American Novelist; great headline, isn't it; for his Corrections had a feud with Oprah; that's not nice, you'd say (but as the old saying goes, stuff happens); has opinions on almost everything, from the social networks and e-books (it sucks: the ultimate irresponsible medium) to the future of Europe (it sucks: the technicians of finance make the decisions there - that has little to do with democracy - I agree); Lev Grossman considers him practically a Victorian (a devotee of the wide shot, the all-embracing, way-we-live-now novel); says Grossman, his Freedom is not a microcosm, it's cosm; his last novel, Purity, is described in El País as una cruzada contra Silicon Valley (alerta de las ilusiones que las grandes corporaciones de Internet venden en todo el mundo).

Purity can be found these days at the English Bookshop in Bucharest (with a notice: limited stock). On their website it is praised as a magnum opus for our morally complex times, Franzen's edgiest and most searching book yet (the price is also magnum opus: I'll let you the pleasure to discover it by yourselves, by visiting the place; it is a hard-cover edition and there are 496 pages).


(A Life in Books)