Freedom

A Novel

De: Jonathan Franzen

Narrado por: David LeDoux

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

©2010 Jonathan Franzen (P)2010 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"The Great American Novel." ( Esquire)

"It’s refreshing to see a novelist who wants to engage the questions of our time in the tradition of 20th-century greats like John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis . . . [This] is a book you’ll still be thinking about long after you’ve finished reading it." (Patrick Condon, Associated Press)

“Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy as he is at grown-up tragedy; as skilled at holding a mirror to the world his people inhabit day by dreary day as he is at limning their messy inner lives . . . Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet—a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)

An American Classic

I spent a wonderful 24 hours listening to "Freedom", examining my own political leanings and marital history and consumerist tendencies as Franzen's characters displayed theirs. I am roughly the same age as Walter and Patty Berglund, so the subject matter - a beautiful and complex story of a modern American family - was as familiar to me as my own personal history.

The narration was excellent (except for the female Indian character, who tended to sound like a caricature at times). I found myself rapt with attention, stopped in my driveway, unable to bring in the groceries and unwilling to tend to my email and cell phone messages.

Highly recommended.

A complexly written modern masterpiece.

I laughed, I cried ... And just about everything else, but I was never bored.

The book examines the life of a group of people who personify modern American Homo sapiens.

The story vomits up the underlying restrained desperation of a lost generation in the last century of a dieing Empire.

5 STARS +, One of the best books Audible has to offer in my opinion.

Sublime

One of my top five all-time favorite audible selections, this novel is a joy for the listener in every way. The narration is fabulous, the characters incredibly real and complex and the story a perfect balance between medium highs and mid-range lows lows, with nothing too tragic or stupendous, but an authentic and compelling mix of the ebbing and flowing of life. It was like eating the most satisfying meal one can imagine.

Incredible depth of characters

I typically read (listen to) non fiction but was drawn to this book by all the hype. I must say it lives up to the hype. I was riveted by the narrative and sucked in to the story. The characters, despite their frequently despicable choices, came alive for me as if they were someone I knew from the past. It helped that I'm from the upper Midwest and familiar with the different locations of the story. For lovers of fiction, I think this is must.

Good

The subject matter isn't my cup of tea (family issues) but it moved along nicely and was well read. I liked the characters and it had a good ending and I wasn't sorry to see it end.

worth the time

This was pretty good and pretty well read. the main problem is with the characters. They are just not interesting enough to spend so many hours of your own life on. but the reader was good and i enjoyed it more than my wife did who struggled through the print version

Amazing author, decent narrator

I can't praise enough about Franzen as an author and others will do it much better.
I can say that the narrator was engaging, made dialog between characters intriguing, and easy to follow. Only reason for 4 stars on narration was an Indian accent that was as tragic as this novel. Otherwise, well done.

Worthy of much of the praise

Or so I thought. In dissecting the lives of a somewhat dysfunctional middle class family, Franzen shows an incisive understanding of the way people make and rationalize bad decisions, then later find them difficult to live with. On a scene-by-scene level, the way the characters struggle with each other, themselves, their neighbors, and the country as a whole is believably complex and readable. I often felt frustrated and annoyed with Franzen???s protagonists, but the messiness of their lives also felt familiar to me, and part of me wanted them to succeed.

I think that many of the reviewers who attack "believability" are confusing reasonable behavior and realism. Based on my decade-and-a-half of adult experience, depressed people really do act like Patty, frustrated environmentalists really can turn into seething cranks a la Walter, angry sons sometimes do move out of the family home after big fights, like Joey, and aging bad boys do flit between relationships in a Richard-like way. And it???s not hard to real-life examples of shady Iraq war profiteering similar to the one here. It may be a dramatized, ???literary??? version of America, but it???s the real America.

That said, I do understand a little of the backlash. Some characters are a little uneven and/or stereotype-ish, and could have been better fleshed out -- for example, Connie is a bit of a blank outside her unhealthy relationship to Joey. Though, as a liberal, I thought Franzen was pretty honest about some of the inconsistencies of the American liberal, Walter's rants get a little soapbox-y. And there???s the matter of the ending, in which the characters redeem themselves perhaps a little too neatly. As for the audiobook narrator, his arch tone will either fit the novel, or further compound what people already don't like about it.

Is this the great American novel critics want it to be? I don't think it quite has that resonance, but it's certainly one of the better works of 2010, in my opinion.

Can't Believe it Got all the hype it did

The first 35% of the book was good and then it went on and on and on and then all of a sudden he wrapped it up.

An Unexpected Delight

Jonathan Franzen staged an ambush with Freedom-- from the outset, I was determined not to like any of the characters, and I didn't expect to like the book much. However, despite the extremely unlikeable state in which the main characters are introduced (particularly Patty, who monopolizes the beginning of the book and insinuates herself throughout the rest of it), I somehow found myself loving them for their humanity. And it's all very naturally produced by Franzen-- he neither contrived nor manipulated my feelings. David LeDoux puts forth a great performance in the reading, as well, and executes even the female voices in a smooth, natural way. It's been about a year since I listened to this audio book, but it was so memorable that the story and the lush pictures that it painted in my head are still with me.