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[title]By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $28.
The notably dyspeptic Jonathan Franzen is America’s own crabby, beloved-by-some middle-aged man of letters. When he’s not busy showing us the way we live now or telling people to get off his lawn, the Freedom author occupies himself translating essays from fin de siécle gadfly newspaperman Karl Kraus.
Due mainly to difficulties in re-creating Kraus’s wordplay as it exists in the original German, much of Kraus’s work has not made its way into English. Franzen, who discovered Kraus while studying abroad in Berlin, here translates several of the Austrian’s more important works, including short articles “Heine and the Consequences” and “Nestroy and Posterity.”
Many of the specific people and places Kraus attacks in the book are long gone, but his arguments are as relevant as ever. (Franzen, in one of the book's countless asides, derides the "tyranny of niceness" that pervades fiction criticism today, something Kraus would also find abhorrent.) Franzen uses the extended footnoting both to explain Kraus’s frequent obscurity and as a springboard for telling his own angsty coming-of-age stories. Ultimately, Franzen’s collegiate tales hinder the appreciation of Kraus’s singular ability to champion the underdog and eviscerate the venerated, though it’s still a small price to pay for introducing the original “anti-journalist” to a new audience.
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