Franny and Zooey

If you are looking for a novel that takes a look at spiritual practice like the "Jesus Prayer" through a secular perspective, then this is the book.The book has assisted me to understand how a person, who doesn't pray look at prayer.This is a wonderfully helpful novel.Thank you.

This book consists of two interrelated stories about members of the Glass family. These kids (seven of them if I remember well) are the children of a showbusiness family from New York and they used to be genius-kids who appeared on a radio show answering quizzes and philosophizing. Apparently the Glass kids had a special education in an ecumenical religiosity and philosophy, and their situation as whiz kids has led to emotional distress, much a-la Holden Caulfield but more illustrated. By the way, in terms of its central themes, this book could be said to be the closing of the full circle of Caulfield's story. The Glasses, just like Caulfield, are intelligent people, very frustrated with the inadequacies of life in general and the people who surround them. They are very neurotic in a New York way. They are angry because people aren't as intelligent as they should be, and because the ways of the world are not what reason and humanism tell us they should be. How to cope with it?In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her preppy and also intellectualizing boyfriend for a football weekend. They go to a cafe to have some food (and drinks and cigarettes). The story is simply the account of their talk. Salinger is one of the greatest masters of frenzied and fast dialogue, and it shows here. Franny is telling his boyfriend about all the phoniness of campus life, about the lunacy and presumptuosness of teachers and classmates. She tells him how she has read a book about a Russian monk who discovers a special Jesus prayer. If you repeat this prayer incessantly, it will become a part of you and repeat itself automatically, bringing you closer to grace and peace. The conversation starts getting out of hand as Franny gets carried away and as the boyfriend becomes rather estranged, until Franny collapses on her way to the restroom. When she wakes up, she is constantly whispering the Jesus prayer.In the second story, Franny is at her parents' home in NY, recovering from her nervous breakdown. In a long talk with her brother Zooey (both of them being the youngest Glass children), they confront each other's traumas, weaknesses, genius and problems with the world. Zooey is also extremely talented and aware of the inadequacies of the world, but he seems to be in a (slightly) better emotional phase than Franny. The dialogue is moving, neurotic and masterful. After they argue rather violently, Zooey goes to another room and calls Franny pretending to be an older brother living away. In a further conversation Zooey forces Franny to understand that following a simple but futile recipe will not do the trick. The Jesus prayer is not enough: we have to accept the world as it is as well as the people around us. We can not be "catchers in the rhye". But we should live an ethical life, just because (which made me think of Kant's "categorical imperative"). As Seymour Glass, the eldest brother, once said to Zooey, sometimes you have to do things "for the Fat Lady", that is, just because it is the right thing to do, even if no one will notice."Frany and Zooey" is written in a lower key. It is unprententious, unlike its characters, but deep down it is about profound questions. How to cope with this mad world filled with people who are not bright nor good? Can you save the world? How to live? Yes, sometimes we have to do things we wouldn't like to do, but we have to do it, if only for the Fat Lady.

FIRST LINE REVIEW: "Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend -- the weekend of the Yale game." With an opening line like that you could expect the book to have something to do with that game, but far from it. The focus is much more narrow, intense and dangerous...for it addresses a young woman at a moment of spiritual crisis. The two lop-sided stories in this "novella" offer different perspectives on this woman (Franny) and the inner struggle she's currently undergoing. My enjoyment, however, was in Salinger's pen more than in Franny's dilemma. It just runs on and on without getting boring...while nothing much really happens. An art, indeed.

I often browse for books in the stores, and when it comes to purchasing, i prefer Amazon. I like my books in perfect condition. Amazon did not disappoint. The book is high quality.I do not rate the stories themselves, that is a personal...

Spoiler Alert. I read and loved The Catcher In the Rye as a teenager, but never read anything else by Salinger until now. Unfortunately, this book has little of the immediacy Salinger evokes for Holden Caulfield. You meet Franny’s rather shallow boyfriend while he waits for her train to arrive for a typical big football weekend at college. Once Franny arrives, you instantly switch your attention and liking from the boy to her; she is so much his intellectual superior. What did she ever see in him anyway? But wait; something is wrong with Franny. She seems to be physically sick, and also, under the sway of some esoteric, nihilistic philosophy that is destroying all her joy in life. Aha, you think, I’ve got it! Franny, at school, has come under the sway of some dynamic philosophy or comparative-religion prof, and is pregnant by him. But no! Franny returns home to New York, sick, not from any physical love affair, but because she has come under the sway of theological ideas alien to her. The problem is, she and big brother Zooey—and pretty much all of her siblings—are intellectual freaks, Having been trained from early childhood in all sorts of esoteric knowledge, for a radio quiz show, they don’t have an inner core of self that would allow them to examine new ideas critically. You can feel sympathy for them, but—after about halfway through—you can’t identify with them.Throughout, Salinger’s writing is beautifully descriptive. You don’t just meet these characters: you know them inside and out, with all their intellectual ego, selfishness, stupidity and generosity. It’s too bad that Salinger doesn’t actually DO anything with them, just uses them as idea-expounders. The ideas themselves are somewhat esoteric, and it’s hard to see how they could take over anyone’s life, however impressionable. My feeling is that Salinger just wanted to set Them down on paper, yet he doesn’t manage to popularize them. So the story fails both as a story and a scholarly paper.

Livro muito bem preservado, com aparência quase nova e muito pouco sinal de uso, muito bom para o preço.

Pour une raison inconnue, j'ai égaré ma copie papier de ce trésor. Je l'ai donc commandé en format Kindle. Toujours aussi délicieux!

Unique characters who retain their individuality throughout

Il y a quand même chez Salinger un penchant pour les troubles psychologiques chez les jeunes adultes et pour les morts prématurées... il y aurait dans ses deux nouvelles une quête spirituelle, "mouais"... Les références littéraires du vieux continent jetées en pâture à quelques happy fews américains sonnent creux à nos oreilles... restent les dialogues et le script qui en feraient probablement un bon moment de théâtre... for the Fat Lady.

Entertaining and thought-provoking, realistic characters, good prose.