Jonathan Franzen is the king and god of the American novel. Franzen decided to make his reader not only reflect, but also have fun: we have a pretty lively plot in which there are a lot of flashbacks, places of action and a variety of characters for every taste.
My friend even compared the reading of "Sinlessness" with Akunin's novels: they say, it is also delicious and exciting in the best meanings of these words. If you want, you can follow the Dickensian story of an orphan in search of her father, remade in a new way, in accordance with the modern artistic paradigm, if you want, plunge into the wilds of confusing love stories, in which it is both disgusting and apart, it is impossible, but if you are devoid of sentimentality, here is a journalistic investigation with a missing bomb and a story about how a German guy flunked a Stasi informer.
If I hadn't read the text, I would have thought: what a game, again the similarity of all these David Mitchell's cat stories, when a bunch of separate lines are trying to weave into a good plot. But Franzen, fortunately, is not Mitchell, and everything is really intertwined with him, while in such a dense tangle, from which the ends do not stick out in all directions, but there is only one single thread in the face of Purity, which is able to unravel everything smoothly and smoothly.
We are initially faced with a kind of disordered chaos that exists in the life of each character and in society as a whole: everyone here moves and lives not according to any laws, but as it is necessary, so, in general, the plot can be brought both to East Berlin and to Bolivia. Everyone seems to be trying to do good, to save this world, or, at least, themselves, but it turns out only zilch:
Andreas Wolf is a wolf who once led no Little Red Riding Hood astray and eventually lost himself. For some - a charismatic leader, for others-a handsome man, for others-an unhealthy person who is confused in himself, who rushes all his life and does not know how to atone for his guilt. He covers himself with "Sunlight", but his soul has long been full of darkness.
Tom Aberant is another talking surname ("wavering"), under the sign of which the whole life of the hero passes. A feeling of guilt the size of a house in front of his inadequate runaway ex-wife, with whom love-hate reached the limit time after time, year after year, but the comrade was unable to break the vicious circle, for which he pays 20 years later, hiding behind the editor of the investigative journalism agency, whose task is to pull to the surface all the black secrets of those who need to be buried deeper than those who do not need to be.
And here is Purity, who has hated her name all her life (Sinlessness, Purity, Innocence - you will hate it here), penetrates deeply into the lives of each of them, without realizing it herself. What does it bring to them? Deliverance? Absolution of sins? A mirror in which you can see your true reflection? It seems that the girl is not the embodiment of innocence in her Orthodox understanding, but at the same time, she is guided exclusively by some kind of her inner radar, which subtly feels the sins of this world. Perhaps even for this reason, all the sexual scenes of the work with her participation are obviously doomed.
Trying to solve only its pressing problems, it does much more for everyone than entire corporations and companies, than creators and journalists, than murderers and lovers. And, by the way, against the background of other women of the novel, each of whom has her own rather big tricks, it looks very adequate.
The apparent lack of development of the character of the title character is actually a kind of artistic move: on the one hand, she is literally groping, blindly, trying to find something about her origin (her mother even changed her first and last name, not to mention her place of residence, leaving Pip's father), which means, to some extent, about herself, because one way or another we are all children of our parents, for good or bad.
On the other hand, she is so undecided about who she is (on the surface of throwing with work, for example) that the only thing left for her is to adapt every time to the person with whom she is dealing, because if the true Pip looms at least a little-wait for trouble.
Do you remember the heroine of Julia Roberts in "The Runaway Bride", who liked to eat eggs differently with each groom? About the same, but thinner. And now a certain harmonization in the Pip itself brings order to the chaos that awaits it around.
Another interesting aspect of the novel that connects it with the works of Milan Kundera is physicality. In general, the idea of Kundera was prompted by Pip's rumbling stomach at the beginning of the novel, I immediately, absolutely unconsciously, remembered the "Unbearable Lightness of Being" and Teresa, who appeared on Tomas ' doorstep with her entire digestive system.
So then, having finally found confirmation that it was no coincidence (Kundera eventually mentions it quite openly), I was not surprised at all. For Franzen, as for Kundera, the heroes are not just some disembodied images, but living people embodied in words, who can not hide anywhere from all the incidents of their earthly shell, and therefore they are destined to suffer.
Example: one of the heroines, by virtue of her physiology, can receive sexual discharge only on certain days of the cycle, this turns out that making love on all other days is meaningless for her - if a man and a woman are equal, then they should enter into the act on equal rights, and not for the pleasure of only one.
Sick stomachs, intestines, paralysis, an uprising of organs in the pelvic region, when neither the time nor the place, and much more-all this without vile physiological details, but it says quite a lot about those who live on the pages of the novel. Personally, it made absolutely no difference to me whether Pip would find his father or not, for me the search was originally a flirtation with literature of other eras and literary trends, some kind of starting point to move the plot further.
But for some reason this fact turned out to be important to Franzen, which slightly leads the plot astray - this is probably the only negative that I can find in "Sinfulness", but even then it is a matter of taste, for sure, if the idea of searching was abandoned at some point, I would be sitting and writing about it right now.
Otherwise, this is a wonderful novel, which on the one hand seems "about nothing", but on the other, you start thinking and can't stop, because rabbits keep climbing out of the hat: here Raskolnikov's torments can be combined with Goethe's questions of good and evil, here Dickens ' lost child can face radical feminism, information war and credit problems.
Here Nabokov's Lolita turns into a gentle Turgenev young lady, and the Berlin wall collapses outside the window... But the main thing is that the range of emotions that the reader receives in the process is simply limitless. Absolute helplessness before feelings that capture you with your head and do not allow you to breathe fresh air, undisguised irritation, because of which you are ready to strangle someone, simple human pity-all this can be provided even by one character.
In general, if you do not know which book to spend the New Year's holidays in, I advise you, only a warning: you can read for hours, so there is a chance to "overcome" the novel faster than you expect.
1015.183 SRY