The Discomfort Zone
Category: Livres anglais et trangers,Biographies & Memoirs,Memoirs
The Discomfort Zone Details
The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen’s tale of growing up afraid of spiders, school dances, urinals, music teachers, boomerangs, popular girls and his parents. It’s also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its mid-century idealism and became a more polarized society. Whether he’s writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka’s fiction on his own protracted quest to lose his virginity or the web of connections between birdwatching, his all-consuming marriage and the problem of global warming, Franzen’s recounting of a mid-western youth and a New York adulthood is warmed by the same blend of comic scrutiny and affection that characterize his fiction. Funny, insightful and daringly honest, The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen at his most engaging.
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Reviews
This is in fact a series of essays about the author's adolescence and young adulthood. It starts off all right with his having to deal with the sale of his late mother's house; even the essay about the comic strip Peanuts was mildly interesting. When he had to resort to diagrams in his essay about high school pranks I thought "What's the use of being such an important writer if you can't even get your descriptions across ?" I skimmed through his article about German writers (quoted in German, mind you, and translated!!) When he got into bird watching I just gave up.I know the purpose of a memoir is to be personal but he came across as being so self important I just couldn't go on. We've all been teenagers , so what's the big deal !!My advice -- avoid this book.
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