Jonathan Franzen Considered

The latest novel, but more Jonathan Franzen and the phenomenon of the Literary Novelist at Biblioklept.

I must confess that I am very put off by the gushing of the critics, by the presence on Time, and by Mr. Franzen himself.  But in the short excerpts I have read, I have been very engaged by the novel.  This is one of those cases where the less one knows about the artist, the better one's chances of enjoying the work.  Precisely the reason I will not read biographies of either Matisse or Picasso.  Don't know what their lives were like, but really, really, really, don't want it to spoil my appreciation for their work.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take...
Read more