Thursday, December 30, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
A Review of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Freedom is a sweeping expanse of a novel, covering many decades, locales and trips around the country. It is the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, a married couple living in Minnesota and trying to navigate their marriage through parenthood, nature conservancy, infidelity, politics, more infidelity, religiosity, depression, need I go on? This is a seriously heavy novel, both literally and figuratively. At 560 pages, it covers quite a bit. It is told from multiple perspectives; twice Patty writes an "autobiography" in the third person. The rest is told from the perspective of several of the main characters: Walter, Richard Katz (Walter's college roommate, best friend and worst enemy) and Joey Berglund (Patty and Walter's cold, calculating son).
This story covers so many wide and varied topics that it is hard to describe in a succinct manner. The Berglund's marriage is extremely flawed; they eventually separate partway through the novel. Walter is very much into his convictions about conservation on the planet, especially of varied bird species. But he also is very into a "nonpopulation" approach, encouraging people not to have children. He is almost radically concerned with world overpopulation.
While this story is quite a masterpiece it was also one of the most tedious books I have ever read. The author has an amazing command of the language. But he is overly verbose, using as many 50c SAT words as he can in each sentence. He takes far to long to get to the point, and often, after an entire paragraph or even a whole page of set up, he would finally make his point, which was usually somthing very simple. This was irritating to read over and over.
I enjoyed some parts of this story, and it was not at all predictable (which is it's most redeeming aspect, in my opinion). It was very difficult to get into the flow of the story, 100 pages or more, and I was struck by how much of the dialogue was fighting between the characters. One part of the story, a fight between Walter and Patty, was multiple pages of capital letter screaming. Again, the word tedious comes to mind.
I do feel that Jonathan Franzen is quite a talented writer, and I know his writing has been lauded by many, but this book was not my favorite.
This story covers so many wide and varied topics that it is hard to describe in a succinct manner. The Berglund's marriage is extremely flawed; they eventually separate partway through the novel. Walter is very much into his convictions about conservation on the planet, especially of varied bird species. But he also is very into a "nonpopulation" approach, encouraging people not to have children. He is almost radically concerned with world overpopulation.
While this story is quite a masterpiece it was also one of the most tedious books I have ever read. The author has an amazing command of the language. But he is overly verbose, using as many 50c SAT words as he can in each sentence. He takes far to long to get to the point, and often, after an entire paragraph or even a whole page of set up, he would finally make his point, which was usually somthing very simple. This was irritating to read over and over.
I enjoyed some parts of this story, and it was not at all predictable (which is it's most redeeming aspect, in my opinion). It was very difficult to get into the flow of the story, 100 pages or more, and I was struck by how much of the dialogue was fighting between the characters. One part of the story, a fight between Walter and Patty, was multiple pages of capital letter screaming. Again, the word tedious comes to mind.
I do feel that Jonathan Franzen is quite a talented writer, and I know his writing has been lauded by many, but this book was not my favorite.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
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