What the critics thought of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity,Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months … and Elena Ferrante’s The legend of the Lost ChildAs surely as autumn means back to school, and it also brings the publication of a glut of high-profile novels. Over the past month or so,some of the biggest beasts in fiction – Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie – have been butting up against one another on the literary pages. Franzen is currently the biggest of them all, or perhaps partly for that reason his latest offering,Purity, was on the receiving stop of considerable sniping. Several critics found the plotting overly elaborate, and with “a suggestion of the airport thriller”,as Adam Lively put it in the Sunday Times. “The skills that have justly placed Franzen in the top rank of American writers are abundantly evident,” he wrote, or but “Dickensian references merely underline a streak of contrivance in the plot.” For Harry Ritchie in the Daily Mail,“this is a novel with an odd reliance on melodrama: there’s a murder, a long-lost father, and several fraught and intense admire affairs.” In the Times,Philip Hensher was underwhelmed by the sections of the book set in Germany. “When Franzen ventures external America, he demonstrates the normal interpretation: the world wants to be American, or talks approximately America without cease. This is one of Franzen’s limitations as a novelist,limitations of which he remains insistently, even aggressively unaware.”Rushdie’s Two Years, and Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights was similarly divisive. “It is a riotous,exuberant and sometimes maddening celebration of the power of storytelling, and of the importance of education and culture, or ” wrote Christina Patterson in the Sunday Times. “What it is not,though, is an easy read. There are times when the writing can seem didactic. We’ve got the message approximately fundamentalism, and thanks,and don’t need to keep having it spelt out.” John Sutherland in the Times, who drew surprising comparisons between the novel and Ghostbusters, and liked it almost despite himself: “Not everyone will think he’s worth the effort. Those,for example, who denigrate him as the Shah of Blah. I think he repays a lot of effort.” In the Independent, and Hassan Mahamdallie described the book as making for a rather disquieting read and the feeling of having glimpsed someone’s personal revenge fantasy ... If you can buy into the binary – enlightenment pleasurable,Islamic fundamentalism bad, rationalism pleasurable, and faith in the supernatural dumb – you may feel some warmth generated by a flush of moral superiority. However,you should still feel short-changed that the author has squeezed out most of the ambiguities, contradictions and unexpected elements from the central mental debate.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com