The Twenty-Seventh City

De: Jonathan Franzen

Narrado por: Meetu Chilana

St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.

©1988 Jonathan Franzen (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Distracting reader.

The reader mispronounces so many words, it's distracting. She places emphasis in the wrong places and often doesn't seem to understand the story. Not good.

ok

The story is good, but not riveting. The narrator is distracting. Too many words are mispronounced, badly. Maybe English isn't her first language, but , look it up!

Narration a bit strange at times

The narration was a bit off-putting at times. Meetu's representation of certain male characters was bizarre. She used high-pitched voices and strange verbal affectations. She seems confused about what a lisp sounds like, for example.

A messy, ambitious, prognostic American novel

Franzen's freshman effort is striking. First, just gazing at the picture of Franzen on the back of the original novel and it makes me think this kid must have been gnawing on ideas for this book in his mother's womb. Seriously, he looks like he might be wearing the same deodorant his dad gave him at puberty.

Anyway, I was inspired to read this book because I was heading to St. Louis for a couple days and figured given the recent Ferguson-inspired race tensions, there might never be a more appropriate time to crack Franzen's novel about an Indian woman who takes over as the St. Louis chief of police. There is sex, violence, politics, intrigue, etc.. It is a thriller that aspires to be literary, or a thriller written by someone who is simply writing in the wrong genre.

The book is ambitious, messy (plot threads abandoned all over the place), inventive, cracked in places, but destined to stick around. I say that knowing that there are some serious Franzen haters out there. I also say that knowing this isn't his best work (by far). But in 1988, Franzen wrote a novel that seems to have almost perfectly captured the paranoid, xenophobic, social and race conflict that surrounds President Obama (birth certificate, etc). Imagine while reading this novel that Obama is Jammu and the United States is St. Louis and let the details slide from Ferguson to the Gateway Arch and there you are.

Franzen's fixation on the American family (both in its function and disfunction) is in pupae form here. Family dinners, tensions between spouses, extra-marital encounters, spoiled children, holiday tensions, they all germ here. His prose is great, if a bit uneven (brilliant in parts and boring in others). His plot is complicated. His setting masterful. Again, this isn't a masterpiece, but it was a clear indication of his future ambition and trajectory.

Not my favorite Franzen

I am a Franzen fan but, at least in the audio version, this one was hard to follow and, therefore, it was challenging to get to know and love the characters. There are a lot of them to get to know.

The narrator did a great job. She could have helped the character development by pausing during breaks in the text. Instead, she plunged directly from one to the next, often leaving me to catch up because I hadn't realized there had been a character change.

I still gave it four stars. Franzen is amazing.