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Loading... Freedom (2010)by Jonathan Franzen  
No current Talk conversations about this book.  br77rino | Feb 10, 2015 |  A whirlwind of emotions. The book spans a long period of time, and a long list of settings, as well of a long list of themes. (  ) tpollack | Jan 11, 2015 | I paid a dollar for this book at a book sale-I had seen the cover around quite a bit, but I had absolutely no expectations. I loved parts of this book; couldn't put it down at times. Towards the end it started to drag a little, but overall, I really enjoyed it. It's incredibly well written, and I didn't hate the characters as much it seems I should have/everyone else did. I loved the current cultural references - there were a few times that I thought "a person reading this in 50 years will not understand this reference." I felt a little thrill at the immortalization of our everyday lives in such a book. Dorky, I know. (  ) carebear10712 | Dec 31, 2014 | I really tried to like this book. Carried the tome all around with me and gave it a valiant effort, it really wants to be the great American novel. After plowing through over half the book, I was forcing myself to keep reading without caring anything about these wretched characters. The writing style is fine, the story moves along at times, but I didn't find myself hoping for, empathizing with, or understanding why we'd care about these people. I don't often put a book down, but I kept imagining all of the books I'd much rather be reading. I give. (  ) asawyer | Dec 31, 2014 | I'll start off with the good points, which is easy and short. Frenzen is certainly a fine writer in the technical sense, so one can appreciate his writing on the scale of sentences and paragraphs. That sums up the only positive aspects of this book. Despite the skillful prose, none of his characters hold any appeal for me. Nearly all of them are afflicted by self-pity to the point that I cannot sympathize with them, and one wonders just what their problems with life are. While this may be the author's point - i.e. that life in America makes one vulnerable to self-absorption and depression, I still cannot see the characters as any more tangible than the author's own creation, with no real life of their own, as if they were Frenzen's own projections of what upper middle-class liberals are like. While characters are just that in any piece of fiction,, (i.e. a projection of the author's imagination), the trick is to make the reader feel otherwise, and that was not the sense I got reading this book. They seem to have been formulated in a very clinical way, like two-dimensional, generic prototypes with little substance. The book clearly is in sore need of substantial editing, which is probably the greatest weakness according to this reader. For example, there is one part, where two characters, Walter and Lalitha, are explaining their environmental activities to a third character, Richard, and the rather boring details of their campaign take up 16 tedious pages. Overall I found the book boring, and reading it was akin to a chore, hoping it would somehow click for me at a later point, which it did slightly, but only at the very end. It is not, in my mind, the Great American Novel that Frenzen and others have claimed, but, as some other reviewers on this site have commented, merely a long winded soap opera. (  ) BBcummings | Dec 24, 2014 |
 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. 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.  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. 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.  Franzen's daring has been to take on soap operas and HBO mini-series, demonstrating that if you want modern emotional dramas, the novel can provide them today as effectively as it did in the 19th century. But, he also offers something no HBO series can – the solitude and moral introspection of the novel, the beauty of prose, the imaginative love affair you form with characters you alone see in the way you see them. Freedom is the novel of the year, and the century.
No descriptions found. 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.… (more) |
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After this, I picked up The a Corrections, and found I didn't like it at all. I guess just once for Franzen's tone was enough for me. (