Synopses & Reviews
A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic — a personal and intellectual awakening.
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.
In The Kraus Project, Franzen, whose “calm, passionate critical authority” has been praised in The New York Times Book Review, not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult writer, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America.
While Kraus is lampooning the iconic German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine and celebrating his own literary hero, the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Franzen is annotating Kraus the way Kraus annotated others, surveying today's cultural and technological landscape with fearsome clarity, and giving us a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus's work. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.
Review
“Engrossing, highly original....As a declared enemy of the easy response in an instant-access culture, Franzen finds in the unduly neglected Kraus a model of how to provoke readers while at the same time getting them to do some work.” The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Like Kraus, Franzen both loves and hates the journalism of his time, which is why, like Kraus, he writes about it." Slate
Review
“Kraus observations about mass media responsibility for the destabilization endemic to modernity, once unpacked from Kraus's highly stylized sentences, sound eminently familiar. For many readers, however, the highlight of this book will be the coming-of-age story Franzen tells in the footnotes about his own journey through the apocalyptic and the megalomaniacal as he struggled with loneliness, writing, and love. Why can't more literary explication engage one's heart and one's head at the same time?” Booklist (starred review)
Review
“The Kraus Project comes to life...in its notes, because so many of them are autobiographical....A great deal of this personal material is soulful, counterintuitive, revealing.” The New York Times
Review
“[The Kraus Project] is clear, polished, and often funny — no small accomplishment, given Kraus's notoriously difficult to translate prose. Franzen...uses the copious footnotes to provide current analogies for Kraus's targets and reflect on his own studies in Germany, which lead to meditations on his upbringing, relationships, literary aspirations, and search for a literary father. Several footnotes extend for pages, turning Kraus into background music for scholarly speculation and ruminations. When the narratives coalesce, the “spasm of pleasure” amply repays the readers dogged attention, revealing two literary minds operating at the peak of their maturity and strength.” Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels (
Freedom,
The Corrections,
Strong Motion, and
The Twenty-Seventh City), two collections of essays (
Farther Away and
How to Be Alone), and a personal history (
The Discomfort Zone), and the translator of Frank Wedekind's
Spring Awakening, all published by FSG. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.
Karl Kraus (1874 - 1936) was an Austrian satirist, playwright, poet, aphorist, and journalist. From 1899 until his death, he published the literary and political review Die Fackel.