Franny by J.D. Salinger.
Title: Franny.
Author: J.D. Salinger.
Genre: Fiction, novella, literature, family saga.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1955.
Summary: Takes place in an unnamed college town during the weekend of "the Yale game," and follows Franny Glass on a date as she is becoming disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ Lane himself lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.
♥ “If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you’re talking about don’t leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn’t have to be a poem, for heaven’s sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings - excuse the expression.”
♥ “As a matter of fact, about a month ago, if I remember correctly, you said he was darling, and that you--”
“I do like him. I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect…”
♥ She brought her knees together very firmly, as if to make herself a smaller, more compact unit. Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black. Her extended fingers, though trembling, or maybe because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty. She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment - then broke down. She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped, without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst. When she stopped, it was as though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body.
♥ “I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete - that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”