Freedom

By: Jonathan Franzen

Narrated by: David Ledoux

The new novel from the author of The Corrections.

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 neighbour 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, 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 old college friend and rival – still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbour," 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 too much 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 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Much ado about twaddle

This book has been rated as the height of contemporary American literature. It is in fact a retelling of a fairly mundane sequence of events from the perspectives of several of the characters in the book. It is effectively a stream of consciousness approach but in truth it provides insight into minds so shallow, characters so one dimensional with diction so flat and lives so ordinary that I cannot truly understand what the author is trying to show - it is consciousness not worth streaming(!) It is to literature what porridge is to cuisine: bulky, filling but certainly not tasteful and definitely not art. What inspired Oprah to recommend this drivel to her countrymen is beyond me. I did manage to finish listening to the "saga" but kept asking myself "why?". The narrator is excellent.

Loved it. Such well drawn characters

This is a novel where there isn't a major plot as such but characters you will love and hate with the most fantastic narration

Unexpectedly riveting.

At first the book seemed too much like a complicated soapie, but I stuck with it for the first chapter or two and before I knew it I was hooked. Brilliantly written and a truly engaging story, I was sad when it ended.

Fab audiobook

This was me best Audible experience yet. The narrator David Ledoux is a gem - I started to look for more stuff he has read after hearing Freedom. And what a book! Definately one of my alltime modern favourites! This was my first Franzen-experience and I just went directly to The Corrections after finishing this one. The characters in the book are so intriguing, cool and crazy, you kind of fall in love with all of them in a twisted sort of way. This is the one audiobook that I will re-listen within the first 6 months after heard it the first time. There's nothing to wonder about - this is a fantastic experience! Envy you guys that still have this one to come!

Brilliant

I loved this book utterly. Franzen's characters have stayed with me in the weeks since I listened and the environmental issues explored in the novel really had an impact on me.

Often, even when I really enjoy a book I find it leaves my head immediately when I finished. This was an engaging and lasting experience for me, and I highly recommend it.

didn't want it to finish

Johnathan Franzen managers to dig deep into the souls of the characters who are, on the surface, just ordinary folk. Like us all there are deep angers, fears and love which he slowly teases out and examines.

Great Portrait of Liberal America Today

I loved this book. I was completely engaged from beginning to end. It's light on plot and heavy on character study, which means it won't appeal to everyone. But I was quite engaged because there were so many levels of insight into these characters and the book seems to define the life and times of middle class americans born in the sixties.

So much description, so little story

Time and patience is what you need to read this book. I would never have finished it if it wasn't an audiobook that kind of read itself... The character descriptions are pretty much amazing and go into immense detail. The story however isn't really moving forward. The book goes from one character to the other, and then back to the first and sure they do things and things happen, but the great underlying story is missing. But perhaps that is life, small things happen and there isn't that great big narrative? Glad to have read it!

narrator detracts

I am a big fan of Franzen. I agree with an earlier reviewer that the narration of Freedom is a spoiler. I was happy to quick-march though the book in its audible version and went on to buy a hard copy and read it again. Not only does the narrator characterize Lolitha with a bad approximation of her accent, it is difficult to sympathize with the wife because of the narrator's vocal characterisation. I got a completely different impression reading it.
I have found this true for several audible books and would greatly value recommendations from other audible "readers" of books which are delightfully interpreted. Jeremy Northam reads George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" deliciously. Mary Gordon's latest book "The Love of My Youth" was also badly narrated. I found "The Maids" well read.

Don't do it to yourself.

I hated this book. I got through about 1/3 and that was only because we were reading it for book club. The characters were unappealing and the story line boring. someone said it was the best book ever written. They obviously don't read much.