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.
People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.
A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
I am not going to get into it myself, except to say (1) if I am writing "boy fiction," who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings? and (2) thank you, geek girls! I love you all.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
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