Download PDF Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen
Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen. Is this your downtime? Exactly what will you do then? Having extra or spare time is really impressive. You can do everything without force. Well, we suppose you to exempt you couple of time to review this e-book Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen This is a god e-book to accompany you in this downtime. You will certainly not be so hard to recognize something from this e-book Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen More, it will assist you to obtain better details as well as encounter. Also you are having the fantastic tasks, reviewing this publication Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen will certainly not include your thoughts.
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen
Download PDF Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen
Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen. In what instance do you like reviewing so much? Exactly what concerning the type of guide Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen The should check out? Well, everybody has their very own reason why ought to read some books Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen Mostly, it will relate to their necessity to obtain knowledge from the publication Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen as well as wish to read simply to obtain entertainment. Novels, story book, as well as various other amusing books end up being so popular now. Besides, the clinical e-books will likewise be the most effective need to select, particularly for the students, teachers, physicians, business owner, as well as other professions who enjoy reading.
This Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen is very correct for you as beginner visitor. The viewers will certainly constantly begin their reading habit with the preferred style. They could rule out the author as well as author that produce the book. This is why, this book Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen is actually ideal to read. However, the principle that is given in this book Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen will certainly reveal you numerous things. You can begin to like additionally reviewing till the end of guide Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen.
On top of that, we will certainly discuss you guide Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen in soft file forms. It will certainly not disrupt you making heavy of you bag. You need only computer system tool or gizmo. The web link that we provide in this site is offered to click and afterwards download this Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen You know, having soft documents of a book Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen to be in your gadget could make ease the visitors. So in this manner, be a good user currently!
Merely connect to the net to acquire this book Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen This is why we mean you to use and use the industrialized modern technology. Reviewing book does not mean to bring the printed Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen Created technology has allowed you to read just the soft file of the book Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen It is same. You might not need to go and also obtain conventionally in browsing guide Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen You may not have sufficient time to invest, may you? This is why we offer you the very best method to get guide Freedom: A Novel, By Jonathan Franzen now!
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 neighbor, 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, total 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 college best friend and rival―still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbor," 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 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 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.
- Sales Rank: #215000 in Books
- Published on: 2010-08-31
- Released on: 2010-08-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.28" h x 1.79" w x 6.41" l, 1.82 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 576 pages
- Epic Fiction
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: "The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues--among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock'n'roll--and in some ways can't be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. --Tom Nissley
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Nine years after winning the National Book Award, Franzen's The Corrections consistently appears on "Best of the Decade" lists and continues to enjoy a popularity that borders on the epochal, so much so that the first question facing Franzen's feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own voice in its predecessor's shadow. In short: yes, it does, and in a big way. Readers will recognize the strains of suburban tragedy afflicting St. Paul, Minn.'s Walter and Patty Berglund, once-gleaming gentrifiers now marred in the eyes of the community by Patty's increasingly erratic war on the right-wing neighbors with whom her eerily independent and sexually precocious teenage son, Joey, is besot, and, later, "greener than Greenpeace" Walter's well-publicized dealings with the coal industry's efforts to demolish a West Virginia mountaintop. The surprise is that the Berglunds' fall is outlined almost entirely in the novel's first 30 pages, freeing Franzen to delve into Patty's affluent East Coast girlhood, her sexual assault at the hands of a well-connected senior, doomed career as a college basketball star, and the long-running love triangle between Patty, Walter, and Walter's best friend, the budding rock star Richard Katz. By 2004, these combustible elements give rise to a host of modern predicaments: Richard, after a brief peak, is now washed up, living in Jersey City, laboring as a deck builder for Tribeca yuppies, and still eyeing Patty. The ever-scheming Joey gets in over his head with psychotically dedicated high school sweetheart and as a sub-subcontractor in the re-building of postinvasion Iraq. Walter's many moral compromises, which have grown to include shady dealings with Bush-Cheney cronies (not to mention the carnal intentions of his assistant, Lalitha), are taxing him to the breaking point. Patty, meanwhile, has descended into a morass of depression and self-loathing, and is considering breast augmentation when not working on her therapist-recommended autobiography. Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family's facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving at--incredibly--genuine hope.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
The Big Theme: Freedom--or Darwinian Survival?
"One of the ways of surrendering freedom is to actually have convictions," Franzen told Time magazine (8/12/10). "And a way of further surrendering freedom is to spend quite a bit of time acting on those convictions." Certainly, the novel's title announces its big theme--what freedom means to ideology, family, career--and the picture is not pretty. Patty, who recounts the Berglunds' past in a third-person autobiography, reflects that "all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable." It turns out that Franzen, too, thinks that America's obsession with personal liberty is illusory and ruinous. Even more tragic, Darwinian competition defines freedom: Richard and Walter compete for Patty, and Patty and Walter compete for their children's love, for example. Certainly, wrote Slate, "everyone in the novel comes to rue freedom, their own and others'." Many critics thought this leitmotif truly reflects modern American life. But a few called it heavy-handed. "Unfortunately," noted the Washington Post, "the novel doesn't offer its themes so much as bully us into accepting them with knife-to-the-throat insistence." Then again, that kind of "insistence" is Darwin for you.
The Approach: A Tolstoyan Perspective
"Given his book's scope and its repeated allusions to War and Peace," noted the San Francisco Chronicle, "Franzen seems intent on writing a full-throated 19th-century-style novel--the personal played out against the backdrop of history"--9/11, the war in Iraq, late free-market capitalism, suburbanization, profiteering, wildlife conservation, and gentrification. Yet while his wide lens allows him to use the Berglunds as a filter to explore contemporary America, Franzen keeps his characters' messy tensions in sight and absorbs "Tolstoy's astonishing capacity for [individual] empathy" (Slate). Franzen turns his characters' private lives into public discourse as well: through the Internet, blogging, and YouTube, the Berglunds broadcast their concerns until their "personal crises are thus framed as a microcosm of a national obsession with freedom and global pre-eminence" (Wall Street Journal). Could Franzen, as Slate suggested, be "the Tolstoy of the Internet era"?
The Result: How Does It All Stack Up?
Nine years have passed since the publication of The Corrections, and almost every critic made the inevitable comparison. "Here's another Midwestern family, another surgical exploration of the spent body and wretched soul of America, another ... inquiry into the paradox of being human," said the San Francisco Chronicle. A few opined that Franzen breaks little new ground with Freedom, and the Washington Post went so far as to call it "stale." Others thought that the novel "sharpens the focus of [Franzen's] investigations, avoiding the excesses of the earlier novel" (Los Angeles Times), and that, more tenderly and soberly, it walks the line between social satire and realism. "Franzen's characters still fail here, and fail spectacularly, but the writer's final instinct, having given complex life to the Berglunds, is now to catch them when they fall ... where once he would have mocked," wrote the Telegraph. Most agreed that Franzen has evolved as a novelist since The Corrections--and that Freedom is equally enjoyable, "equally dire" (Slate).
"[To] do something new is not to develop a form for the novel that has never been seen on earth before," Franzen told Time magazine. "It means to try to come to terms as a person and a citizen with what's happening in the world now and to do it in some comprehensible, coherent way" (8/12/10). Critics agreed that Freedom, heralded as a Great American Novel, offers a crystal clear portrait of our times, for better or for worse, and that, like The Corrections, it is a sweeping canvas of contemporary American life. Through richly nuanced characters whose large and small concerns we all recognize (from recycling batteries and using cloth diapers to wrestling with values), Franzen delves deep into the disturbed state of American life and its denizens, "confused, searching people capable of change and perhaps even transcendence" (New York Times). They may not all be likable, but they're human. Many critics thought Patty--and her autobiography--one of the most compelling, wrenching characters in recent literature. And there are few prose stylists as masterful: "Love him or hate him ... you've got to admit [Franzen is] an extraordinary stylist, America's best answer to Martin Amis," wrote the Washington Post.
Of course, with a novel built with such great expectations, criticism was inevitable, even from reviewers who professed to be enthralled with the work. A few took issue with what they described as Franzen's superior tone and dialogue, which sometimes "lapses into filibuster" (San Francisco Chronicle) and threatens to undermine the novel's liberal politics. Some also faulted Patty's manuscript, which plays an important role in chronicling the source of the Berglunds' problems, as inconsistent, confusing, and acerbic. A few far-fetched plots (including Joey's involvement with a corrupt, Halliburton-like corporation) confounded others. But most disturbing of all, perhaps, is Franzen's bleak view of human nature. "The only way to get through hell, Mr. Franzen suggests, is to resign yourself to living there," noted the Wall Street Journal. But classic works--those destined to live long lives on our bookshelves--always raise questions about the questions they raise. To sum it up: "If Freedom doesn't qualify as a Great American Novel for our time, then I don't know what would" (Telegraph).
Most helpful customer reviews
874 of 1016 people found the following review helpful.
"Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head."
By BrianB
I will avoid the plot review, because so many others seem compelled to summarize, and the repetition becomes tiresome. I enjoyed this novel, and I think you will too. I gave it four stars because it is not perfect, but it is better than most current fiction. Franzen may be a "serious" writer, but he is also highly readable, with an interesting story that can be enjoyed for itself alone, absent any considerations of literary aspirations.
This is a big, rambling tale of modern Americans in their modern lives, people who reminded me of real people, a plot which kept me turning the pages of this compulsively readable, mostly entertaining novel. The tone is slightly condescending, as the quote above my review would suggest, mostly cynical, and ultimately hopeful by the end of the story, when his battered, bruised and bruising characters emerge from the wreckage of their lives, and bravely carry on.
In many ways this novel is similar to his previous work, The Corrections. I remember enjoying that novel a few years back, although I could not understand why the critics raved about it. Franzen proves yet again that he is a very good writer, building a complicated but workable plot, creating characters who are real, complex and often disappointing, showing us his American self-portrait in 2010. He reaches for a big theme, as the title implies, but he doesn't quite achieve his goal of demontrating the illusory nature of our freedom (or alternatively that all this freedom is killing us). Like Sophocles, Franzen seems to take a dim view of freedom. I probably should not compare Franzen to Sophocles, or other great writers, past or present. He has a genuine voice, a straightforward style, but he does not possess lyrical abilities, nor great thematic breadth. His writing style is similar to Paul Murray's, serving up a cast of mostly unremarkable people who screw up their lives by means of their character defects, giving you a funny and sad slice of everyday life, saying something profound in the process.
Amazon reviewers were much less enamored with The Corrections than the professional reviewers: they gave only three stars on average, with almost as many one star reviews as five star. Franzen's self portraits are closer to the world of the publishing industry than the world of amazon readers. His characters are based in the Midwest, at least in the beginning of the novel, but they are not the American everyman or woman. They are highly educated, well read, socially evolved and spiritually lost in the manner of the wealthy white specimen liberalis americanus. This writing feels too focused upon their world to allow for universal appeal. Nevertheless, Freedom is a very well and carefully written novel. Only time itself will reveal if this is the work of the moment, or a work for all time.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
I really enjoyed this book
By C.Erickson
What can I say? I really enjoyed this book. I liked the way Franzen began with a tapestry, a lifescape for his characters, I liked the way he meticulously unraveled this tapestry before our reading eyes, and continued to unravel it such that it seemed impossible for the characters, the events, the plot, and the setting to be unraveled any further, and then they are unraveled further, and then the author throws the threads on the ground, tramples on them, and then brings them up again, and carefully, thread by thread, re-weaves the tapestry until it is bigger and grander than it was before. The whole effect is utterly cathartic. I laughed at so many sections, and re-read certain sections that I felt were incredibly odd but delightful. I identified with the characters, mostly with their constant pools of embarrassment, guilt and shame that come with being a human--especially the kind who continues to make terrible mistakes (shame and guilt are exactly those emotions which Franzen enjoys drawing mercilessly, as if to show that once out, it’s no big deal). It’s a satire, but in a subtle way—so yes, laugh, especially when Walter loses himself into all CAPS and Patty sleepwalks against her will. And read with a hearty attitude—it’s no breezy stroll in the park. More like a hike along the ocean in a cold but invigorating gale that blows into your face no matter which way you turn, but which occasionally breaks to allow you fleeting glimpses of magnificent sun-streaked cliffs, reminding you how deep and wide the experience and scope of life can be.
493 of 572 people found the following review helpful.
Cycles of Excitement and Tedium
By Cary B. Barad
Excellent writing when dealing with the painfully intimate and intricate details of adolescence, marriage, childrearing, infidelity and romantic yearnings. In fact, it approaches the true-to-life fictional style used so successfully by Tom Wolfe in the "Bonfire of the Vanities," and "A Man in Full."
Yet, this saga ominously hits a brick wall when it becomes enmeshed with any number of environomental, social and political issues (incluing mining and overpopulation) that seem to go on for far too long and which consume an excessive amount of time and space. Very "preachy", didactic and repetitive if you will.
As a result, we are confronted with a lengthy novel that is only partially rewarding. It is constucted on cycles of excitement and tedium which make for an erratic reading experience. You really have to invest a good deal of time and effort searching for the literary nuggets that make the effort worthwhile in the end.
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen PDF
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen EPub
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen Doc
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen iBooks
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen rtf
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen Mobipocket
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment