The Kraus Project

I'm no fan of Jonathan Franzen, at least not his fiction. I didn't care much for Freedom. But wait. That's the only fiction by Franzen that I've read, so it's unfair of me to say that I don't care for his fiction. All right, point taken - let's just say that, though I read the whole book, I did not like nor enjoy Freedom.

His essay "Farther Away" (it first appeared in The New Yorker and later was included in the eponymous volume, Farther Away) I found brave and engaging. That he would dare convey personal negative thoughts about David Foster Wallace in print was scandalous (to some). I found it refreshing, and interesting. Other essays in the same book are appealing as well. Franzen writes clean prose and his thinking is not trite nor his observations banal. He is a writer worth reading.

Yet he seems to be a lightening rod for animosity. Critics, offended women writers, amateur literary commentators and bloggers, all loathe him. In particular, the techies despise him and heap scorn upon him for criticizing the internet, social media, the fetishization of gadgets and technology. Oh, and heavens, he's a birdwatcher too. Scorn! Caustic flame attack! Ridicule!

His latest publication, The Kraus Project, hadn't been out a week before its contents had raised a firestorm of invective and condemnation. Shame on Franzen! He criticized Rushdie for using Twitter. He dared suggest that the internet and social media were NOT the greatest cultural advances since the printing press. He took Amazon to task for its destructive impact on independent bookstores. Heresy!

Yet lost in all the derision was any discussion (that I read, anyway) of what seems to me the most interesting thing about The Kraus Project, namely the concept of the work itself, and the form it takes. Basically, he presents two essays by the Viennese curmudgeon, writer, critic Karl Kraus (think fin de siecle Vienna) that he, Franzen, translated from the German. Okay, if you're a Karl Kraus fan (and there surely are some out there) or if you're a German lit major or a translator, you might come at this volume from your singular perspective. But if you're like me, who'd never heard of Karl Kraus, who doesn't care about the adequacy (or inadequacy) of Franzen's translation (it turns out that Kraus wrote deliberately opaque & difficult prose), then you'll come at this book from another angle. Or not pick it up at all.

I'm enthralled with it. I can barely read two pages at a time. I don't understand most of the Kraus stuff. And I'm only 40 pages into it. But you know what? It's fascinating! Why? Because the form is very different, very innovative. (Okay, sure, someone has to have done something like this before - who can possibly do anything completely "original" anymore?). Well, this work seems very new and fresh to me.

As I see it, the translations are simply a platform from which to jump off into a wide array of other topics; memoir-ish recollections, social criticism (the aforementioned condemnation of our gadget & internet-obsessed cultural moment), literary history, historical anecdotes, etc. It's collage-like and divergent, informed and curious. It meanders. It rants. It elucidates. It praises.

These days it's as if people who write about books, who review books,  people who read & discuss books, all seem hell bent on either smarmy, wise-ass put-downs, or hyper-critical analysis, all very serious and edgy and pointed. After a point, I get sick of it all and have to throw up my hands with an expectorated "WTF?!" At least when it comes to Franzen, everyone tries to one up the next person in their ability to lay waste to the man's work (or reputation, or hobbies, or choice in glasses or whatever).

Be that as it may .... I recommend this odd book. Even if you know nothing about Karl Kraus and don't care a thing about essays in translations. Actually, it might even be more interesting if you know nothing about Karl Kraus and could care less about the accuracy of the translation from German into English. It's a quirky original dalliance, the best of eccentric intellectual sketching.

Oh, and the footnotes. What I don't mention above is that the Kraus essays seem like just material that Franzen can hang his footnotes on. This is not a bad thing. This is the oddity of the work, the weirdness that makes it so intriguing. The heart of the book are the footnotes. In the footnotes, we get the memoir stuff, the human connection stuff, the divergent interesting literary aside stuff. In short, we get the stuff that transcends the stuffy huffing and puffing of Karl Kraus on, per the first essay, Heinrich Heine.

But what did Franzen think when he decided to go all in with the footnote set-up? Surely he must have been aware that people would call him out on their use and infer that he was aping David Foster Wallace. Oddly, I have not seen that particular complaint leveled at him (though I stopped reading the carping reviews after a few). For what it's worth, I love footnotes. And David Foster Wallace, for all the fame (or infamy) his extensive use of them engendered (technically-speaking, in Infinite Jest, they are endnotes, not footnotes, but they function the same), he did not invent the footnote. He used them to great effect, and Wallace's are brilliant, engaging and, I would argue, essential to the character of the works in which he employs them. But they are not solely Wallace's domain.

So I'll give Franzen credit for crafting his own book around them, it's a courageous undertaking, one that, in my opinion, earns The Kraus Project enthusiastic accolades.

Myers and Tanenhaus on Franzen

B.R. Myers tears apart Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. "[T]he novel is a 576-page monument to insignificance." Ouch.

It's easy to take his point. I didn't much care about these damaged & damaging people, their squabbling and snapping. Reading it was like watching television. Mostly without the commercials.

Contrast Myers's review with the breathy enthusiasm of the Sam Tanenhaus review that graced the cover of the New York Times Book Review, August 19, 2010.

After what must certainly have been a careful reading, Tanenhaus concludes that Freedom " ... illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew."

Hmmm. What is the "world we thought we knew" anyhow? Thought who knew? And who knew what? etc.

Random Notes Written Shortly After Finishing Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

It’s like how you close a plastic bread bag on the loaf, cinching the bread snug and giving the bag a twirl around to tighten its noose, then wedging on the annoying, sharp-edged plastic wrapper tag, the thing that inevitably breaks after a few re-sealings.


It’s like the 4 oz lemon vodka martini drank while reading the last 75 pages, cold, potent on an all-afternoon empty stomach, the butter crunch-coated  peanuts inadequate in their role of absorbent agent.


It’s like the supper not yet eaten, not even cooked, the corn sliced from the freshly steamed ears and sautéed in butter with lime juice, salt, and little nuggets of feta cheese that ooze into melty crust when they stay too long in contact with the skillet face; and fried eggs and buttered toast; a yellow meal. And beer. Like the beer that Walter Berglund supposedly drank only three of by the age of 47 (one of many improbable details encountered over 562 pages).


Here comes Richard Katz, a character ill-suited to his pedestrian name, an unlikely rock star and lacking in conveyed charisma – but who nevertheless lives in this story like the dark circles under a tired person’s eyes. 


It’s the drizzle of an oddly humid late September night in New England, thick cloud skies bringing darkness even earlier to a strangely summer-like evening. 


There’s little Joey, perhaps the most unlikely of all the characters in this saga of our times, the 19 year old war profiteer, the cool one. "[T]hen he went back to Paraguay” and made the deal for the truck parts and sent them to Iraq. As simple as that. As if any 19 year old American boy could actually accomplish such a task in these times of perpetual adolescence when men are teenagers and teenagers are children and everyone has their face stuck in a gadget. How many Americans even know where Paraguay is? And is it landlocked or does it have a coastline? 


And yet. And yet Joey’s money-making scheme, his little University of Virginia young Republican money-making scheme actually brings home perfectly the reality of the contractor fraud and corruption swirling around the Iraq War. Without the polemics. 


The fighting, oh the fighting. But not in Iraq, in the home. All the homes. The bickering. The surfeit of snarky comebacks and gotcha’s. All adding up to capital D Dysfunction. Like television. Reading Freedom was like watching good television drama (is that an oxymoron?) – except better because of the words on the page. Page after page. Pages you don’t want to stop reading. Or watching.


Here’s one of the amazing things. The main characters are people you both dislike and have a great deal of sympathy for. You can understand them, dislike them, ache for them, revile them. Which means – you can connect with them. Notwithstanding the improbability: Connie never getting pregnant by Joey despite fucking, seemingly nonstop, from the age of 14 ‘til the tender age of 21 (when the novel leaves them by coming to the end); Patty’s entire relationship with Eliza, or her attraction to Richard Katz; Walter’s saintliness; Joey’s teenage disobedience. Etc. All possible. But all (to this reader) a little too contrived, a little too unlikely. Yet every character was within this reader’s grasp of understanding/seeing/knowing/relating to. 


Walter’s road rage. Franzen nailed that one. 


But do parents snark at their kids the way Patty snarks at Joey and Joey snarks back at Patty? 


My fridge is making noises, a god is barking in the drizzly neighborhood beyond the backyard fence, cars slash along rain-soaked rt. 12 a block over. It’s my rainy Tuesday night when I’d intended to go listen to James Howard Kunstler (one of the snarkiest of the snarks) reading from his new novel The Witches of Hebron at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge. Bagged Kunstler and the commuter rail for home-shaken cocktail and a few final hours alone reading Franzen. 


This is an American night after all. I could have ordered pizza. Watched TV. 


Funny how the back dust jacket of Freedom is resplendent with blurbs about Franzen’s other book, The Corrections. Was that really necessary? Does this one have to thrive or sink on the basis of a successful novel he wrote almost ten years ago? But that’s just publishing. 


This is no review, just some impressionistic comments in the soon aftermath of reading.