Guest of the ilb 2003
Jonathan Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois, in
1959 and grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. He studied
Literature in Philadelphia and in Berlin.
Franzen, who started to write while in college, is the author of three
novels and one collection of essays ('How to be Alone', 2002), which
contains a revised version of his much discussed article from 1996 on
the future and destiny of the novel ('Why Bother?'). He writes
for the 'New Yorker' and 'Harper’s Magazine'.
With his third novel, 'The Corrections'(2001), Franzen impressively
revived the genre of the social novel. Against the background of a
turbulent globalized world economy, he tells the story of how the
Lambert family falls apart. While Alfred Lambert’s character, whose
life had been characterized by self-control and discipline,
disintegrates through the course of Parkinson’s disease, his wife Enid
is obsessed with celebrating the illusion of a happy life in a final
Christmas celebration together. Their three children try to
'correct' their parents' image of life. But as is stated in the
book, “What made correction possible also doomed it", and while the
next generation is confronted with its respective failure, the book
concludes with a more comprehensive correction: the collapse of the
virtual boom on the financial markets. Franzen goes from the
world of the Midwest in the 60s that is rooted in traditional moral
ideas to present day American cities that are obsessed with technology,
that believe in effortless profit in a never-ending economic boom and
that emphasize mental balance and sexual fulfillment. At the same
time his narrative technique recalls the writing of the great realists
of the 19th century. His language is ruthlessly exact, but at the same
time compassionate in its humor and is characterized by an
unsentimental humaneness. In 2003, the German translation of Franzen’s
first novel, 'The Twenty-Seventh City' (1988), was published. In this
novel, S. Jammu, a young Indian woman from Bombay becomes chief of
police in St. Louis. What starts like another variation of the
American dream develops in the course of the ensuing political
conspiracy into a black comedy. Franzen combines realistic and
fantastic elements, thereby brilliantly and cuttingly taking stock of
American society. His autobiographically inspired novel "The Discomfort
Zone: A Personal History" (2006) is the story of a young person’s life
in the Mid West and a portrait of an American middle class family,
oscillating between comical self-questioning and empathy.
Franzen has received various awards, including in 2001 the National
Book Award for 'The Corrections'. He lives in New York.
© international literature festival berlin
Jonathan Franzen online: www.jonathanfranzen.com | 
