Franzen Freedom

Patty épouse Walter Berglund et décide de mener une vie rangée d'épouse aimante et de mère dévouée. Elle renonce à son amour de jeunesse Richard Katz, un rocker, meilleur ami de Walter. L'histoire de ce trio est liée au climat émotionnel, politique et moral des Etats-Unis de ces dernières années et invite à s'interroger sur la façon de vivre au début du XXIe siècle. …

Anatomie d'un mariage et d'une famille, les Berglund, ce livre analyse les illusions, les déceptions et les compromis d'une génération de baby-boomers qui avaient rêvé un jour de changer le monde. Mais c'est aussi un acte d'accusation implacable à l'égard d'une nation qui a cessé depuis longtemps d'incarner ses propres valeurs…

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: "The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues–among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock'n'roll–and in some ways can't be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. –Tom Nissley