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Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) by…
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Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (original 2010; edition 2010)

by Jonathan Franzen

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9,523408803 (3.78)321
The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.
Member:RoxanneMcT
Title:Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Authors:Jonathan Franzen
Info:Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2010), Hardcover, 576 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:want to read

Work Information

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (2010)

  1. 41
    The War Room by Bryan Malessa (Anonymous user)
    Anonymous user: Both are 500+ page modern epics whose stories originate in the Midwest but this one moves far beyond the territory and scope of Freedom. Represented and sold by same agent as Franzen's book and same UK publisher.
  2. 21
    Matrimony by Joshua Henkin (susiesharp)
    susiesharp: They are both about the lives of people you learn to care about yet don't always like
  3. 10
    A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle (JuliaMaria)
    JuliaMaria: Umweltschützer
  4. 22
    The Privileges by Jonathan Dee (BillPilgrim)
    BillPilgrim: Another modern family story. Jonathan Franzen recommended The Privileges to the New Yorker book club.
  5. 22
    In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (allenmichie)
  6. 11
    The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (hairball)
    hairball: Similar tone.
  7. 11
    Unless by Carol Shields (Cecilturtle)
  8. 12
    May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes (GCPLreader)
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» See also 321 mentions

English (358)  Spanish (18)  Dutch (11)  French (5)  German (3)  Swedish (3)  Italian (2)  Finnish (1)  Catalan (1)  Hebrew (1)  Danish (1)  Norwegian (1)  All languages (405)
Showing 1-5 of 358 (next | show all)
Family Drama
  BooksInMirror | Feb 19, 2024 |
Great for the first half. Then it turned preachy. ( )
  nogomu | Oct 19, 2023 |
Sort of like if you could listen to the captivating inner monologues of your intelligent but neurotic friends. ( )
  emmby | Oct 4, 2023 |
This book was disappointing in so many ways, in part because so much beautiful writing fills its pages that it's hard to believe the sum total is so boring and annoying. The entire time I was reading "Freedom" I kept thinking that it was a more tolerable version of the ridiculous and horribly written "Infinite Jest," but that isn't really a compliment. I tried but couldn't care about the characters--they were whiny and miserable, their portraits over time were inconsistent and their motivations less than believable. These weren't authentic characters, but they weren't cartoonish exaggerations either, just something fuzzy in between. The themes of family dysfunction and betrayal by siblings and close friends are so rich, but they weren't explored well here, unlike in Anne Tyler's "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant," another book that kept popping into my mind as I read Freedom. ( )
  lschiff | Sep 24, 2023 |
This book would have earned five stars, but the end felt entirely disconnected from the rest of the book. It was inauthentic, and felt like it was designed to appeal to a movie going audience.

The rest of the book is brilliant, though I found the entire mountain top renewal section to be superfluous. It felt like it was crammed into the book so Franzen could expound upon his environmental issues; in particular, his devotion to songbird ecology. Personally, I'm a lover of birds, and especially songbirds, but even I found no value in the constant discussion of feral and outdoor cats, the populations decimated by our technology, and the destruction of habitats. This is a book about family, and when he sticks to that, Franzen delivers a virtuoso performance.

Slight Spoiler Below This Point.

In the end, this book is weaker than The Corrections, which felt like a perfect novel about family. One of the themes that Franzen seems to be exploring on a consistent basis is the idea of the prodigal son, and I found the prodigal son of The Corrections (Chip) much more enthralling than Freedom's Joey. Joey and Walter's reconciliation felt forced (though, in all honesty, reconciliation can often feel that way.) Reconciliation, agreeability, and of course, freedom(more precisely, the excess of freedom), are the resounding themes of this book. The book mostly succeeds in exploring all of them in a fascinating and authentic way.

But man, I hate the ending. ( )
  dogboi | Sep 16, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 358 (next | show all)
One keeps waiting for something that will make these flat characters develop in some way, and finally the Nice Man is struck by a great blow of fate. But rather than write his way through it, Franzen suspends things just before the moment of impact, then resumes Walter’s story six years later—updating us with the glib aside that the event in question “had effectively ended his life.” A writer’s got to know his limitations, but this stratagem is clumsy enough to make one want to laugh for the first time in the book. It certainly beats the part where a wedding ring is retrieved from a bowl of feces.
added by danielx | editAtlantic, BR Myers (May 13, 2012)
 
Franzen is an amateur ethnographer impersonating a fiction writer. His novel is overstuffed with finger-puppet characters and the clutter of contemporary life: there's no reason to know that someone is wearing "Chinese-made sneakers" or that someone else watches Pirates of the Caribbean during a transatlantic flight. Freedom is crammed as well with rants passed off as dialogue and dialogue that either serves no narrative purpose or reeks of research done in the lifestyle pages of the New York Times.
added by lorax | editThe Nation, John Palatella (Nov 15, 2010)
 
The freedom of Freedom isn't freedom of choice, it's freedom from it; not an expansion but a narrowing. The book's movement is from the abyss of the abstract to the surety of the concrete, from the potential to the actual. You get there not by reinventing yourself in the American vein, by hatching a plan or heading west or donning a disguise. You do it by going home again, by seeing, as if for the first time, what you've already done, and claiming it as your own.
added by zhejw | editHarper's, Christine Smallwood (pay site) (Nov 1, 2010)
 
I didn't buy one of the characters, I didn't buy one of the plot twists, I found the stuff about a Halliburton-esque company rather convoluted and I was completely absorbed by the rest. Without question, Freedom is a book that grabs hold of you. When I was in the middle, I thought of its characters even while I wasn't reading about them, and when I was reading it, I read several lines aloud to my husband.
 

» Add other authors (24 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Franzen, Jonathanprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Abarbanell, BettinaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Abelsen, PeterTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Carlsen, MonicaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
LeDoux, DavidNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Pareschi, SilviaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Schönfeld, EikeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Strick, CharlotteCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
Go together, you precious winners all; your exultation partake to everyone. I, an old turtle, will wing me to some withered bough, and there, my mate, that's never to be found again, lament till I am lost.
The Winter's Tale ----
Dedication
To Susan Golomb & Jonathan Galassi
First words
The news about Walter Berglund wasn't picked up locally -- he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now -- but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times.
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Wikipedia in English (2)

The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbour who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's old college friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbour," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of too much liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time. [Amazon.co.uk]
Haiku summary
What does Freedom mean?
Free to use, free to preserve
Free to love, to live
(StevenTX)

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