Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (edição 2010)

LIRE
"hay libros hermosos y luego están los grandes libros. hay libros que emocionan y educan, y luego están los que son menos habituales, los valiosos, los que tienen la fuerza de cambiar nuestra forma de entender la complejidad de este mundo extraño. volver a casa, la primera novela de Yaa Gyasi, pertenece a esa segunda categoría." ( )

I thought this was soap operatic, terribly telling (vs. showing), over-historic (lots of "his uncle's grandmother's dog had done X, leading via some long-winded and mostly tangential set of circumstances to some outcome that caused Y"), very contrived, and not at all deft. I expected something heavy on style and got something heavy on cumbersome setup of plot connections that frankly weren't all that interesting. It read to me like a middle draft of something in need of much condensing and rewriting for style. There are literary gestures, but I've panned other books (e.g. Joe Meno's The Great Perhaps) that are rough but whose literary gestures are better). This is not what I expected from the guy being billed as the savior of American literature. ( )

As with Franzen’s other novels, everyone’s got hangups and skeletons in the closet and he spends the novel dragging these out into the light while the characters kick and scream.

This differs from The Corrections, at least, in that it does all go a bit saccharine at the end. Tying up all the loose ends does seem to me to clash quite a bit with the gritty reality of characters dealing with lives that are less than perfect.

The novel jumps around an awful lot. If you’re not paying attention, you will get lost fast which, in a long book, isn’t helpful. So, hold on tight and keep your hands inside the car.

There’s a fairly tight narrative surrounding a woman called Patty who grows up suffering from the human condition which is compounded by a sexual assault. This results in polar opposite responses from her parents and she never really recovers from the effects of all this.

The point of the novel is that we’re all messed up. I first came across him making this POV 12 years ago when I read Corrections, but, as then, there’s no counterplot to this narrative. The only evolution of his theory that I can discern is that we’re not only doomed personally and interpersonally, but also environmentally too. Yippee.

If you’re into schadenfreude and like to pull the lace curtains back to see what the neighbours are doing, you’ll love this novel. If, on the other hand, you like to get involved in the lives of the broken and see them healed, you’ll have to look beyond Franzen for inspiration. As I suggested back in my Corrections review, only Christ can give you the counternarrative of hope that novels like the ironically-titled Freedom fail to deliver. ( )

It has been a very long time since I’ve read a book which insinuates itself like an epiphany on my unsuspecting self or a disease which I can’t get rid of (maybe the same thing?)

In my own subjective and wholly unqualified ranking of masterpieces Franzen’s Freedom is instantly recognizable as a one if only for the microscopic and tender attention paid to every single detail, no matter how painful or casually exquisite. This is an unfair reduction however: there is at least Carver and Updike and Roth and even sometimes Dos Passos in his genes and a ruthless pursuit of mind-blowing prose and plot on every single page, paragraph and word.

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I read my last Franzen book, The Corrections, ten years ago. I remember very little about it except that I liked it. And I really like Freedom. It's chock-full of real characters I care about, whom I feel I know in some way, and yet who are complex enough that they can still act in ways that are surprising. I like Julia Glass for the same reason, for creating characters whose lives intersect in such real and three-dimensional ways that you just keep turning pages to find what they'll do next. ( )