Freedom (novel)

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Freedom ( English Freedom) is the fourth novel by the American writer Jonathan Franzen . The work, which is over 700 pages long in the German translation by Bettina Abarbanell and Eike Schönfeld , was published in August 2010, nine years after the corrections , with which the author had attracted international attention and won the National Book Award .

The poplar wood warbler : Walter's favorite bird

content

Franzens Freiheit is a three-generation family story that goes back to the late 1970s and, as a political background, covers the period from Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama .

The focus of the plot is the triangular relationship between the liberal Berglund couple and the musician Richard Katz as well as the tense relationship during socialization with Walter and Patty's parents on the one hand and, in a repetitive cycle, with their own children on the other, with each generation having its own specific, partly socio-political Brings problems related to trends into the plot. Apart from the first chapter, the actions and reflections, oscillating between realism and satire , are essentially presented in personal narrative form, alternating from the points of view of Patty, Walters, Richards and Joey.

Good neighbors

The main characters of the novel, Patty and Walter Berglund, move to St. Paul , where they are renovating a Victorian villa with their own hands as a harbinger of gentrification . This phase of starting a family, the games of their children Joey and Jessica with those of the neighbors as well as the contacts and conflicts with the residents of the street are described from the point of view of the neighbors. They watch with interest how Joey is adored by the unsuspecting Patty, begins a relationship with Connie Monaghan, who is one year older than him, at the age of twelve, and finally leaves home during his high school days to stay with the friend's Republican family. The protagonist feels deeply hurt by this, robbed of her focus in life as a mother, but without developing a professional perspective to fill in her blanks. She changes from a helpful neighbor to a nagging neighbor and wife who appears dissatisfied with herself and the environment, and in summer she often switches to the holiday property by the lake. A few years later, Patty and Walter, whose children are now studying, move to Washington because Walter has taken a job at an environmental protection foundation.

Mistakes were made

The second part of the book consists of Patty Berglund's third person autobiography , "written on the advice of her therapist". The autobiography is divided into four chapters; the fourth subchapter is only in the penultimate position in the overall narrative.

Chapter 1: Sociable

In her youth, she lived in Western County, New York with her parents and three younger siblings Edgar, Abigail and Veronica . Father Ray Emerson works as a wealthy lawyer free of charge for poor clients, mother Joyce is in the Party of Democratic involved. In her liberal middle-class family interested in art and politics, the basketball daughter feels alien; This distance increases when the parents cover up the rape of the seventeen-year-old drunk Patty at a party by the son of a family friend.

Chapter 2: Best Friends

At college at what her mother said was mediocre State University of Minnesota , her life, as before, focused on her favorite sport and coexistence with her teammates until she befriended the drug addict Eliza and through her because of his frequent use brief affairs of disreputable punk rocker Richard Katz and his gentle, abstinent, intellectual friend Walter Berglund. He falls in love with her, invites her to the cinema or theater and likes to hold conversations with her that are focused on environmental protection and nature conservation and other socially relevant conversations.

Chapter 3: Free Markets Promote Competition

With her fluctuating feelings for both of them, Patty's thirty year-long split in personality between reason and sexual fantasies begins. Under the pretext that she is looking for a ride to her parents' silver wedding party, she travels with the musician in his bus to a concert in Chicago . But after he ignores her advances out of consideration for his boyfriend, she immediately returns to Walter, starts a relationship with him and marries him a year later after her graduation. She decided not to have a big wedding reception in order not to have to invite Richard and her family. She no longer maintains contact with the Emersons, who see their marriage as more of a social decline, and prevents grandparents-grandchildren from visiting. Walter quits the Nature Conservancy and takes a well-paying job at 3M to buy and renovate an old house in St. Paul with his wife. Patty takes care of her two children Jessica and Joey as a housewife. When Richard goes touring Minnesota, he visits the Berglunds alone or with his girlfriend, singer Molly Tremain. In a creative and financial crisis after his separation from Molly, Walter invites his friend to regenerate in the holiday home at the lake, which he inherited after the death of his mother Dorothy, where Patty, who was lonely after the loss of Joey to the girl next door, and who was dissatisfied in her marriage, came to him seduced into a two-day affair. However, she does not want to leave her family and falls into depression because of her insoluble tensions. Soon after, she and her husband moved to Washington, where he found a new job in environmental protection.

2004

The novel jumps to New York in 2004 to the story of Richard, who has since become famous with country music . However, since the public interest that success brings with it does not correspond to his self- image as a non-conformist artist, he decides to work as a craftsman again and build roof terraces (chapter dismantling peaks and it's enough ). Walter now works as managing director of the Waldsänger Foundation and has signed a contract with coal companies in what he believes is a total win-win situation that they will renaturalize the area of Wyoming County (West Virginia) after the landscape-destroying mining (chapter summit mining ) Declared nature reserve. Together with his 27-year-old secretary of Bengali descent, Lalitha, he negotiated with the landowners and persuaded them to sell their properties, thus preparing the deal. On a control trip (chapter The Anger of the Nice Man ) to the mining area after the resettlement is complete, they confess their love for each other.

For his second project against overpopulation , Walter tries to benefit from Richard's popularity and win him over to recruit young musicians for an advertising campaign across the country. During their conversation, he notices that the young assistant is in love with her boss and wants to disclose the disharmonious marriage situation of the naive friend who is unenlightened about his wife's antics, although not entirely unselfishly, especially in a situation in which Patty has herself meanwhile a part-time job at the reception of a fitness center, at a further level of her emotional confusion more interested in her husband again. On the one hand, she is disappointed that the lover did not want to continue the casual affair behind her husband's back, and on the other hand, she feels a great jealousy of Lalitha, which makes her aware of Walter's attraction to people who are soulmates with him.

Richard passes Patty's confessions on to Walter without her knowledge, who learns about his wife's feelings for his friend (chapter The Devil of Washington ). He is deeply hurt, does not accept her explanation that in a phase of depression she only wrote down the situation she felt at the time as therapy and has since changed, does not want to see her anymore and puts her in front of the door. He begins a relationship with Lalitha and continues to pursue his environmental projects with her. He uses his speech at the inauguration of a protective vest factory that earned money from the Iraq war , in which the resettled farmers found new jobs, to restore his moral reputation. He settles accounts with the corporations, whose henchmen he feels, and publicly presents the business motives and the connection to the armaments industry, whereupon he is beaten up by the workers and dismissed as managing director of the foundation. But through the television broadcasts he finds many new followers, sponsors, etc. a. his son Joey, and music groups who want to take part in the actions against overpopulation. Walter travels with his girlfriend in a camper from one venue to another. Before the final concert in Wyoming County, where they tried to make a reservation, Lalitha is killed in a car accident.

Mistakes were made (end)

Chapter 4: Six Years

In a kind of letter to her reader, Patty continues her biography after six years of silence and tells of the several months she lived with Richard in New Jersey after her separation from Walter. Partly out of revenge, partly out of jealousy of Lalitha, she moves into his apartment without great illusions, learns about her husband's fate, his liberation speech and the accident of his assistant and finally separates from the musician because of constant disputes over his love affairs. Since then, the now 52-year-old has worked as a basketball teacher at a private school in Brooklyn and reconnects with the Emerson family when her father is dying.

The Canterbridge Lake

Walter retires to the weekend home in Minnesota. His forays as an area administrator for the Nature Conservancy enable him, as he puts it, to graciously forget the unfortunate events. He makes himself unpopular with the neighbors when he tries to protect the birds from their stray cats. After Jessica's unsuccessful telephone attempts to get her father to contact her mother, Patty drives to his house, and Walter finally overcomes his bitterness, ends the six-year separation and goes with her to New York, where she has her job and her family and Richard live. The weekend property becomes a bird sanctuary secured by a high fence from cats, a plaque commemorates Lalitha.

Joey

In a parallel plot that is integrated into the main story and consists of two chapters ( Frauenland and Bad Nachrichten ) , the changeable relationship with his mother, who still lives with her mother in St. Paul, is seen from the perspective of Joey, who is now studying at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Friend Connie, who works as a waitress, tells (Chapter: Frauenland ): At first it is a one-sided bond. While she wants to wait for him and is ready to accept his contradicting wishes, he tries to break away from her, does not care for long periods of time, that Connie becomes depressed at times, takes drugs and starts an affair with her married boss out of loneliness . For this she punishes herself after she confesses to Joey and although he also confesses to her infidelities at parties, for each meeting with a knife cut in the arm in the direction of the wrists. Then Joey brings her back to boarding school on weekends when his roommate Jonathan visits his parents. During a vacation stay in his aunt Abigail's apartment in Manhattan , which he looks after while she is away, they marry spontaneously and Connie trustingly leaves him her assets, which were earmarked for his studies, so that he can get a bank loan to handle his risky business, which is a high one Promise profit.

At the same time, Joey plans his career and spends a few holidays with the wealthy family of his Jewish friend in McLean, Virginia , where he, who sympathizes with the Republicans , hopes to make contacts and meets his sister Jenna on a trip to New York. She surprisingly invites him to take his already booked riding vacation to Argentina instead of her sick mother (chapter Bad News ). The moody young woman, spoiled for affluence, apparently does not allow him his girlfriend and, difficult to see whether she has really separated from rich Nick, drives her selfish game with the substitute companion, in which he quickly discovers his stopgap role. Joey breaks off the trip and flies to Paraguay to buy cheap spare parts for old Polish Pladsky army vehicles, which his client Kenny Bartles sells at a profit to the US Army for the Iraq mission, although they are rusted. Now, when he sees the junk, he has moral scruples, but is bound by contract and carries out the dubious action in order to be able to return the money to his wife, with whom he wants to live after the repair of their relationship and who is now also studying . His father, who has been taken into the trust of the previously kept secret marriage, accepts the private and professional decisions of the son and advises him to use his profits for charitable purposes. For example, Joey supports Lalitha's anti-family campaign.

reception

Even before it was published, the book met with great media interest in the USA. For example, Time magazine celebrated the author as a “Great American Novelist” and summarized: “In his new novel Freedom , Jonathan Franzen shows us how we live today. The way we live now. ”US President Barack Obama received a preprint and declared himself a fan of Franz. Although some critics saw his expectations disappointed, the novel was largely positively reviewed and among others was one of the most important books of the year by the New York Times counted.

German literary criticism essentially recognizes freedom as a “great family novel” and compares it to its 2001 world success. “Freedom” [is] the continuation of the “corrections” with more sovereign means. Jonathan Franzen “write more casually, more easily, less obviously with an impact” and “don't even try to force the fragments of our disparate society back together”.

Several reviewers refer to an essay by the author, published in 2002, in which he presents his view of the literature. He differentiates between status novels with high claims to works of art, but little publicity, and his contract novels , with which he wants to win back or recruit the audience from the social psychological television family sagas. Franzen claims that the old social function of 19th century literature. to revive, to uncover the great processes in the world, "to create understanding for one's own existential insecurities." The features section generally recognizes this concept, using the example of a middle-class family, a fictitious picture of American society over the past thirty years and thus "A valid portrait of our time". to draw, with the "lost decade" as the focus, when "liberal America fell into a deep crisis": "Bush America and neoconservative doctrine, reurbanization, fundamental ecological change, return of religion, post-feminism and the educational crisis" His novels, hopes one, would also show later readers "the western world before and after the millennium in a nutshell, condensed as a sensation."

It is unanimously stated that "[a] quality owes [e] freedom to the characters, their characters and entangled psyches who come close enough to us that we can immediately empathize with their terrible difficulties with life", but "[the] reader never think that these could be your own problems, although they [are] certain ”. In this way, with all empathy, a distance is created that enables reflections. "Franzen [want] to write literature that does not bother the reader, and yet, in its effortlessness, is much stronger because it creeps out insecurity."

In this context, the critics address a thought experiment, starting from the autobiographical approach and ending with Lalitha's death, of a freedom of choice between family and the rejection of this model in order to escape the entanglement of wanting to spare one's own children the frustrations of socialization , but at the same time on them to project one's own dreams and thus install another coercive apparatus.

In a continuation of this thought, however, the course of action, and above all the conclusion, are assessed differently. On the one hand, in focusing on personal relationships, freedom is praised as "a highly moral, but never moralizing book about the power of habit and the fear of change, and at the same time a meditation on the amazing adaptability in relationships, neighborhoods, societies" [...] doubts about his relationship, [the novel] could show that in the long run the greater effort, but ultimately also the deeper happiness, lie [e] than in the variety. It is not only in relationships that the constant optimization mania proves to be a curse. According to this positive assessment of the lines of development of the novel, it is "a great book of comfort and hope for the disheveled, exhausted, in itself maddened American liberalism". Because "with Franzen, the staunch environmentalist and democrat, the private is always political." This assessment fits in with a statement by the author: "Perhaps [...] it makes sense to exchange a little freedom for beliefs and act accordingly."

However, some reviewers criticize this "rescue of the white, liberal middle-class family", as well as the necessary removal of Lalithas, the representative of the anti-family principle, from the fictional game by the author - as compensation, the cat-protected game Bird reserve named after her. This correlates the miraculous purification of the morally lost Patty, Walter and Joey with the increase to a family-with-friends apotheosis at the end. "What Jonathan Franzen is offering here, [is] an astonishing recovery project for American society, one of which is suspected of being kitsch". In the “balancing act between ambition and affirmation entertainment”, freedom has “parts of both”. As a guideline, the novel pursues “the ritual that is called apology and enjoys some rank in American life mythology”, a “therapeutic paradigm”, according to which “apology” is followed by “ Repentance ”follows. In this sense, Franzens work is the "literary purgatory of the Bush era", the "message [leads] to the idealism of national conversion and self-purification".

expenditure

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Robin Pogrebin: First in a Decade: A Living Novelist on Time's cover in: The New York Times , August 11 of 2010.
  2. ^ Lev Grossman: Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist In: Time , August 12, 2010.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f The novel "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen. Mirror No. 36, 2010.
  4. ^ BR Myers: Smaller Than Life . Review in The Atlantic , October 2010 issue
  5. ^ The New York Times : The 10 Best Books of 2010 , December 1, 2010.
  6. ↑ a b c d Jonathan Franzen: Freedom. The ineradicable belief in deeper happiness. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . September 4, 2010, accessed May 10, 2016 .
  7. ↑ a b c d Lothar Müller: Jonathan Franzen: Freedom. Mustermann, you go ahead. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . September 8, 2010, accessed May 10, 2016 .
  8. ↑ a b Wieland Freund: literary event. Franzens “Freiheit” is a masterpiece. In: The world . September 13, 2010, accessed May 10, 2016 .
  9. ↑ a b "FREEDOM". The great reconciliation . The time . No. 37, 2010. http://www.zeit.de/2010/37/LB-Franzen