Freedom (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

- 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.

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.

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!