The Discomfort Zone
A Personal History
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A brilliant personal history from the award-winning author of ‘The Corrections’.
Jonathan Franzen, bestselling author of ‘Freedom’ and the highly acclaimed ‘The Corrections’, arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. ‘The Discomfort Zone’ is his intimate memoir of his growth from a ‘small and fundamentally ridiculous person,’ through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal insight into the decades in which America took an angry turn away from its mid-century ideals.
He tells of the effects of Kafka's fiction on Franzen's protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.
Sparkling, daring and arrestingly honest, ‘The Discomfort Zone’ is warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction. It narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.
Reviews
'His discreetly devastating comic timing derives from the tension between the optimism of his ambition and the reality of the attempts to deal with the experiences that have marked his career as one America's best novelist and essayist.' Times
'Franzen's memoir is cleverly written and often fun to read…He's funny and self deprecating…' Sunday Telegraph
‘Wonderful and supremely personal…' Time Magazine
'Reading such honest, awkward, tender pieces as these, the socially isolated individual may feel that little bit less lonely.' New Statesman.
'The close of this book is almost miraculous; we are reminded that Franzen, at his best, can write like a dream.' FT Magazine
About the author
Jonathan Franzen is the author of ‘The Twenty-Seventh City’, ‘Strong Motion’ and ‘The Corrections’. His fiction and non-fiction appear frequently in the New Yorker and Harper’s, and he was named one of the best American novelists under forty by Granta and the New Yorker. He lives in New York City.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Book Award winner Franzen's first foray into memoir begins and ends with his mother's death in Franzen's adulthood. In between, he takes a sarcastic, humorous and intimate look at the painful awkwardness of adolescence. As a young observer rather than a participant, Franzen offers a fresh take on the sometimes tumultuous, sometimes uneventful America of the 1960s and '70s. A not very popular, bookish kid, Franzen (The Corrections) and his high school buddies, in one of the book's most memorable episodes, attempt to loop a tire, ring-toss style, over their school's 40-foot flag pole as part of a series of flailing pranks. Franzen watches his older brother storm out of the house toward a wayward hippe life, while he ultimately follows along his father's straight-and-narrow path. Franzen traces back to his teenage years the roots of his enduring trouble with women, his pursuit of a precarious career as a writer and his recent life-affirming obsession with bird-watching. While Franzen's family was unmarked by significant tragedy, the common yet painful contradictions of growing up are at the heart of this wonderful book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker): "You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do."
