|
Freedom
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
‘Deeper, funnier, sadder and truer than a work of fiction has any right to be’ Independent on Sunday
'Head and shoulders above any other book this year: moving, funny and unexpectedly beautiful. I missed it when it was over' Sam Mendes, Observer, Books of the Year
'A cat's cradle of family life, and if the measure of a good book is its afterburn, ‘Freedom’ is a great book' Kirsty Wark Observer, Books of the Year
'I loved ‘Freedom’. His acute observations of emotional faultlines, his dialogue and above all his wry humour are delightful' Antony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year
'Franzen pulls off the extraordinary feat of making the lives of his characters more real to you than your own' David Hare, Guardian, Books of the Year
'No question about it: ‘Freedom’ swept everything before it in intricately observed, humane, unprejudiced armfuls. There was no novel to touch it in 2010' Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
'By the end of ‘Freedom’ you may feel you understand its protagonists better than you know anyone in the world around you' Nicholas Hytner, Evening Standard, Books of the Year
'The novel of the year. Its portrait of a marriage, luminously and wittily drawn against a backdrop of modern America, is as good as literature gets' Sarah Sands, New Statesman, Books of the Year
Product Description
An international bestseller and the novel of the year, ‘Freedom’ is an epic of contemporary love and marriage.
This is the story of the Berglunds, their son Joey, their daughter Jessica and their friend Richard Katz. It is about how we use and abuse our freedom; about the beginning and ending of love; teenage lust; the unexpectedness of adult life; why we compete with our friends; how we betray those closest to us; and why things almost never work out as they ‘should’. It is a story about the human heart, and what it leads us to do to ourselves and each other.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
- if you enjoy searingly astute psychological portraits of other human beings, their entire families, their friends , their neighbours and their interlocking lives.
- If you enjoy a very generous smattering of blow-you-sideways in-their-entirety quotable sentences
it's very likely then that you will enjoy Freedom.
it's set during the Bush 43 era and is about the Berglund family and their two kids. But it delves into their pasts and I left it feeling that jonathan franzen is deeply intelligent and very astute about our very human frailties and foibles (however much we like to kid ourselves that we are so perfect and wise)
He manages to tell a very compelling story through the eyes of all the various participants with a rare skill in the use of language. He's also by turns very slyly witty and deeply humane in his view of how we conduct our lives.
This is novel-writing in a league of its own, whatever its faults and it has been vilified and attacked, it's wonderfully interesting, warm and just as importantly highly readable and enjoyable.
My own guess is that Franzen is an extremely hard working writer and he won't release a book into the world, until he has worked it and worked it to a thoroughly satisfying wholeness and unity.
- If you enjoy a very generous smattering of blow-you-sideways in-their-entirety quotable sentences
it's very likely then that you will enjoy Freedom.
it's set during the Bush 43 era and is about the Berglund family and their two kids. But it delves into their pasts and I left it feeling that jonathan franzen is deeply intelligent and very astute about our very human frailties and foibles (however much we like to kid ourselves that we are so perfect and wise)
He manages to tell a very compelling story through the eyes of all the various participants with a rare skill in the use of language. He's also by turns very slyly witty and deeply humane in his view of how we conduct our lives.
This is novel-writing in a league of its own, whatever its faults and it has been vilified and attacked, it's wonderfully interesting, warm and just as importantly highly readable and enjoyable.
My own guess is that Franzen is an extremely hard working writer and he won't release a book into the world, until he has worked it and worked it to a thoroughly satisfying wholeness and unity.
124 of 142 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Ten years after "The Corrections", Franzen finally comes up with the 562 pages of the follow-up, "Freedom". Such an evocative and multilayered, if unimaginative, title, shows that Franzen is up for the inevitable Great American Novel considerations. It's a lot like its predecessor in being a panoramic view of an average middle-class American family, here the Berglunds, moving back and forward in time to show how they became what they are, and each generation's interactions with the next. Then there's all the environmental stuff: the father of the Berglund family, Walter, is a conservationist nut, albeit one who's kind of in bed with the coal industry for a while: cue much soul-searching.
Over a third of the book is told from Walter's wife Patty's point of view, but she's writing in third person, on her therapist's suggestion. This gives rise to the one glaring technical fault with the book: her voice is exactly the same as Franzen's own omniscient narrator's voice: arch, amusedly distant, and so forth. That means it's still fun to read, but it's easy to forget, and hard to accept, that it's supposed to be Patty writing. There's also comment on the Iraq war, 9/11, lots of anti-consumerist stuff. There's a secondary character called Jonathon, a very conscientious young man, vocally anti-war - I'm guessing his first name's not accidental.
Another qualm I had about "Freedom" is the dialogue. Franzen is very good at dialogue, his dialogue is very contemporary, he's up with all the latest slang, but he goes too far in this direction in this book, for me. The dialogue is too quirky, too many little nuances and plays on words, people don't talk like that.
Overall, this book is a bit self-consciously engaging in all of the hot-button problems of our times. It's slightly didactic, and will probably annoy persons of a right-wing persuasion, as it seems to have a political bias. It's witty, and smart, and well-written, sometimes funny, some great lines, and some endearing characters. Whether it's as great as its champions proclaim it, or as bad as the people who don't like it say, - well, it's probably somewhere in the middle, like everything. It's definitely worth reading. It'll give every reader something to chew on. Further than that, I really cannot say.
Over a third of the book is told from Walter's wife Patty's point of view, but she's writing in third person, on her therapist's suggestion. This gives rise to the one glaring technical fault with the book: her voice is exactly the same as Franzen's own omniscient narrator's voice: arch, amusedly distant, and so forth. That means it's still fun to read, but it's easy to forget, and hard to accept, that it's supposed to be Patty writing. There's also comment on the Iraq war, 9/11, lots of anti-consumerist stuff. There's a secondary character called Jonathon, a very conscientious young man, vocally anti-war - I'm guessing his first name's not accidental.
Another qualm I had about "Freedom" is the dialogue. Franzen is very good at dialogue, his dialogue is very contemporary, he's up with all the latest slang, but he goes too far in this direction in this book, for me. The dialogue is too quirky, too many little nuances and plays on words, people don't talk like that.
Overall, this book is a bit self-consciously engaging in all of the hot-button problems of our times. It's slightly didactic, and will probably annoy persons of a right-wing persuasion, as it seems to have a political bias. It's witty, and smart, and well-written, sometimes funny, some great lines, and some endearing characters. Whether it's as great as its champions proclaim it, or as bad as the people who don't like it say, - well, it's probably somewhere in the middle, like everything. It's definitely worth reading. It'll give every reader something to chew on. Further than that, I really cannot say.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Having loved The Corrections I bought Freedom,the hype about typos in the first release aside! for the first few pages I wondered why I had bothered, I didn't fancy the in depth psycho character analysis, but as I was on holiday I had time to drive on and soon fell in love with this book. It offers alot:-a good yarn, interesting perspectives on life, aging,our imperfections as people,children and parents and sometimes just how fast it all seems to go!you dont have to be good to be part of life and you dont have to be bad either.Sometimes it takes so long to figure out who you are it can be too late to enjoy what you have!they say you change when you reach 21 and that was true for me, they say you change at 40 but I say your eyes start to open to who you actually are and can be and this book confirms this to me.well worth the read!!Super!
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Good soap opera not a Great American Novel
Darling of the Liberal elite Jonathen Franzens novel freedom arrived a midst much expectation and cooing adulation. Read more
Published 6 days ago by One view
New York depressives being depressed
There's no denying the writing here, albeit it tedious at just a few points, is good. This is a good novel. You likely will not be disappointed. Read more
Published 14 days ago by Chris Cope
Born free, as free as the wind blows
I read this book and it was great. But there was one small thing, as soon as I finished reading I just could not get that song out of my head, you know the one:
'Born Free, as... Read more
'Born Free, as... Read more
Published 19 days ago by wendy jones
My best book so far in 2012
I read at about 100 pages an hour so normally get through books same day or at least same week. Not this time. Read more
Published 19 days ago by powderhound
Playing Unhappy Families
Tolstoy said that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but I've never really believed that. Read more
Published 1 month ago by S. B. Kelly
I'm gutted to have finished and I miss the characters!
I don't know what to say here - i just had to give this book the 5 stars. There are many themes running through this book, and not being the most analytical, literary person I was... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Ssejy
I had to give up 80 odd pages in
This is only the second book I have ever gave up on. I just couldn't get on with the way the book is written. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Lainy
Refreshingly honest
I really liked this book's take on the world - life is full of dysfunction. The Patty character was really convincing.
Published 2 months ago by Keren Blackmore
Far too long for such a flimsy story
The late academic and writer Sir Malcolm Bradbury once said that 'It is the sign of bad writing that it is always enlarging itself into significance through rhetoric' and this is... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Jeremy Persaud
Middle-class Middle-aged saga
I was looking forward to this, having read The Corrections not so long ago. Perhaps if I'd left it longer the similarities between the two books wouldn't have been as painfully... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Paolo Fiori
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
