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 book’s 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.
When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.
Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
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