Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Up There with the Best, 4 Jan 2003
I came to the pc this Friday evening, midnight thirty, to look up more Franzen writing, having just finished The Corrections. If you are reading this, I beg you to disregard some of the downbeat reviews submitted by other readers and believe the general acclaim that has greeted this wonderful book. I rate this huge, wonderful, funny, touching, involving novel right up there with other recent great reads, from Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin to Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. It is, as intelligent reviewers have commented, so distinctive that any comparisons risk being misleading, but it's not a million miles off the mark to say that there is a whiff of Catch 22 in the author's virtuoso handling of his material. As I experienced it, this is a book, like all great novels, about the extraordinary canvas of human life. It focuses on an ageing couple - their twilight years sympathetically, sometimes hilariously, portrayed - and on the three startlingly different adults who were once there children (and whom the mother wants to reunite for one last Christmas together in the family home). Over the course of a gloriously big book that is not a page too long, Franzen interleaves the stories of his characters with a sureness of touch that reminded me of Saul Bellow and Humboldt's Gift: the narrative at any given time is so involving that you only realise when a storyline is resumed that you actually left a situation many pages back in order to focus on another situation that has completely absorbed you... Ultimately, no theme is left unresolved in this hugely rewarding modern symphony of a novel. The prose is a joy - never a need to reread a single poorly formed sentence in over 600 pages (only an urge to reread some of the most insightful and wonderfully observed paragraphs in recent fiction); the dialogue and characterisation are terrific; the themes relevant to anyone who calls himself/herself a human being. Tremendous. Do yourself a favour and read it.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book of the Year!, 2 Jan 2003
Without a doubt, this is my Book of the Year for 2002. It's a giant, rollicking, complicated, multi-layered novel about an all-American family facing up to the reality of the past as two aging parents, Enid and Alfred, plan one last Christmas dinner for their three adult children. On initial reading, it's a bit difficult to know exactly where it is that Franzen's novel is going; there are stories within stories and, at times, characters appear to go off on bizarre tangents. But, upon closer inspection, this rambling chaos is, in fact, cleverly planned out and well plotted as the many and varied threads of the story become woven into one amazing and beautifully written tome. The characters are complicated and believable, with their own particular flaws and insecurities, the settings are rich, closely observed and capture so very well the chaotic disorder and visual bombardment of today's world, the individual storylines which make up each character's progression through childhood and beyond are touching and wholly realistic. There are passages which are laugh-out-loud funny and others where you can feel yourself cringing with embarrassment. It's the kind of book that you might imagine Anne Tyler and Tom Wolfe collaborating on, deftly weaving as it does a fantastic blend of journalistic realism with touching pathos. Despite it's 653 pages, I ploughed through this novel at a frenetic pace and wished it would last forever. Funnily enough, the Christmas dinner, which is the lynch pin of The Corrections, is nowhere near as fascinating as the journey upon which each character embarks to get there. Franzen takes each character and gives them wonderful back stories upon which to base their current situation; he makes them lively and entertaining, he reveals the complicated relationships they share with each other, he shows their desires and dreams, their successes and failures. He does this with intelligence, wit and psychological insight. This book whole-heartedly deserves all the praise and awards that it has reaped. I look forward to reading more from this amazing writer. . .
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing stuff, 22 Nov 2001
By A Customer
I was enormously impressed by this novel. Franzen has crafted a strong, deep ,tightly woven tale of a family, encompassing themes such as love,death and aging, sex, money and much more besides.It succeeds in being both a novel of the heart and the head. There are plenty of ideas in this book but Franzen doesnt let the ideas and themes obscure the characters in the book, of which there are several, all realised in clear detail. Apparently the author wrote parts of this novel in the dark to avoid cliche and if so his technique certainly worked. The writing is witty, loaded with insights into our routine and habits: in short the way we live our lives. Franzen tackles a variety of subjects with aplomb. He can be humorous, touching, sexy, informative, sad, farcical, but is always, always, honest. And, as he gropes around the edges of the story, riffing on the things that interest and intrigue him, he always reins evrything in for the greater good of the structure of the novel. A book which,like so much good literature, shows you the way the world works, in a way you always knew but never realised you really did until you were told.
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