اصلاحات بالاخره تموم شد، چجوری میشه ۷۰۰ صفحه رمان بخونی ولی نتونی براش دو خط ریویوو بنویسی.
دیشب میتونستم یک متن بلند براش بنویسم از احساسم بهش اما امروز حس میکنم چقدر همه حرفام پرت بودن و مزخرف و بی ارزش. چه بهتر ننوشتم.
این کتاب هدیه باارزشیه که دلم میخواد بهش ۵ ستاره بدم ولی متاسفم که نمیتونم به داستان یا احتمالا ترجمه بیشتر از ۳ بدم.

I can't think of a single other book where I got to end and wanted to ask someone for my time back. Most books that I've strongly disliked or thought were crap were genre books, typically short and relatively fast reads. At close to 600 pages, there is nothing short or fast about The Corrections, and nothing to savour in its slowness either.

The story - about a depressingly typical and dysfunctional, middle class Middle American family from the 60s to the present - is a thief. It steals your time, your energy, and any passion you may have. And it does this simply by telling the story of Alfred and Enid and their three children, Gary, Chip and Denise. Alfred and Enid you've already met. You may not know them intimately, but you have definitely met them. They don't even have to be American. Every white, ex-British colony is bound to have them. Any tacky, showy 50s suburb. They are the cliché that begat all clichés. The husband/father who works and works, is taciturn and sexually repressed at home, who is dull and conservative and safe and a non-presence who nevertheless creates in his children that intense desire to prove themselves, who is a European immigrant (we're all immigrants somewhere down the line but those who emigrated in the mid-20th century are the stuff of countless stories). He is supposed to be from somewhere in Scandinavia but he reads more like an Eastern European - which is where Enid is from. Poland, I believe. Another cliché. Obsessed with appearances, with saving coupons and jars and anything else that accumulates easily; obsessed too with what her "friends" think, with impressing said friends with her children's accomplishments (of which she lies about or embellishes), she could easily be my own grandmother, minus Poland.

Their children are no less miserable. Forty-something Gary, married to rich heiress with three boys, is clinically depressed and in denial. Academic Chip, having been kicked out for sleeping with a student and then stalking her, is writing an awful manuscript designed to take vengeance on the women who ruined his life. Sexually-confused Denise is a successful chef who has an affair with her boss's wife and then sleeps with him too. What's especially depressing about them is that they've all absorbed this need to succeed from their parents, and this fear of failures - but they're all failures, failures as human beings. They're also incredibly ordinary, no matter what stupidity they commit. Deeply unlikeable, they are mirrors held up in contemptuous fashion to American culture and the American dream.

"What is the author trying to achieve?" is what I kept asking myself. In the highly narrative style of prose used there lies a tinge of smugness, a hint of the author behind the scenes, an author exerting such a neutral tone that I was left with the impression that he didn't like these people either, or feel any respect for them. So why bother writing it down? Loosely plotted around Enid's attempt to get her wayward children home for "one last Christmas", before Alfred succumbs completely to his Parkinsons and dementia, I had little patience for their tribulations and even less for their excruciatingly depressing family get-togethers.

There are plenty of stories written about equally middle-everything families. Plenty of stories set in the most life-sucking suburb you can find. Ones that take a wise approach, or a humorous one, or a reflective one - something. The Corrections has been described, and I quote, as "a masterpiece", "the first great American novel of the twenty-first century", "wild, breathless and sharp as a knife" and "dazzling". Any time I see a book described as the next great American novel, I cringe. It's so ... American. Gotta be the best, gotta be better than everyone else. The competitive streak is something that really puts me off. So when you get a novel like this one, lauded as being revealing and wise and so deep, so deep - it becomes less about the quality of the story, the prose, the skill and talent and craft involved in creating it, the sheer hard work, and more about being better than other books. There's a pomposity about that that turns me off even more.

It doesn't help that Franzen famously refused to let Oprah include The Corrections in her lucrative Book Club, not wanting her stamp to sully his work. Many people found this to be pretty arrogant. I confess I wouldn't want Oprah's sticker on my book either, but if you want to make a living from writing it'd be pretty stupid to turn it down, financially speaking. It's ironic, is what it is - the kind of people (and I'm generalising again, bear with me), who watch Oprah and read her books are predominately middle class, people whose lives are nothing out of the ordinary - and she often picks books that speak directly to them. So it's ironic that Franzen would have written a book that fits Oprah's criteria to a tee, and then gone all elitist snob on her and essentially, by turning it down, said "it may be about depressing middle American people, but I don't want it read by them. They wouldn't understand."

One thing I did find quite fun in the book, especially after having read The Shock Doctrine last year, was the piss-take regarding Lithuania: an ex-politician set up a scam whereby he sold shares in Lithuania itself - the first country to be privatised and incorporated. After being shafted by neo-liberal economic policy, ordered to sell everything off by the WTO and the World Bank, the country, like all the others who were told the same thing, lost pretty much everything. It may not have ended well, but it was funny and satisfying while it lasted: selling a country off to rich foreign investors, predominately American, on false pretext and lies. And they bought it (the fabrication). It was quite clever.

I can't deny that there were some clever things about this book, or rather, about the story (not so much the prose), but it's not enough to make the entire reading experience worthwhile. And after all that exhaustive commentary and narrative, to have such a rushed, convenient ending (especially the bit about Chip), was, to use a word I try to avoid, lame. It took me nearly two months to read it, and another couple of weeks to summon up the energy to write this review, so that's about 9 weeks Franzen owes me. And yes, I will take instalments thanks.

The Corrections represents a giant leap for Jonathan Franzen - not only beyond his previous two novels, but beyond just about anybody else's.

This omnivorous comedy about a midwestern family dealing with chronic dysfunctions radiates the kind of dark insight that the priests of serious fiction worship. (Last week, The New York Times ran three adoring features about the book, and The New Yorker published an essay by Franzen about his father's illness - the inspiration for this story. If you haven't already heard how great the novel is, you're hopelessly out of the loop.)

Under this torrent of hype, I tried to dislike "The Corrections," but it's no use. The book is wildly brilliant, funny, and wise, a rich feast of cultural analysis. Though it runs to almost 600 pages, I'm stunned by how much Franzen manages to cover and how compelling the story remains throughout.

The Lamberts are a Norman Rockwell portrait in acidic hues. The retired patriarch, Alfred, spent his life working honorably and stoically for the Midland Pacific railroad, but in the 21st century his values retain the currency of those powerful trains now sold for scrap or sitting in transportation museums. The parts of his mind not already ravaged by the new, consumer culture are wasted by Parkinson's disease, described here with great empathy and sometimes gruesome accuracy.

As his grip on the family falters, his wife, Enid, begins to exert more power through her traditional avenues of control: food, holiday guilt, and tyrannical optimism. Her current campaign is to hold one last Christmas all together at their house.

It's a request not well received by her three adult children. Gary, the perfect son, is locked in a wicked and wickedly funny battle with his wife, a monster of self-actualization. Denise, the only daughter, is in the process of losing her spouse, her restaurant, her boyfriend, her lover (the boyfriend's wife), and her self-respect. And finally, Chip, the radical son, is trying to rebound from his dismissal for sexual harassment by writing a screenplay of "turgid academic theorizing" called "The Academy Purple." (Never to open in a theater near you.)

All these children have escaped to the East Coast, and they react to Enid's invitation to return to the Midwest with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Franzen has a perfect ear for the cadence of selfish children and their carping parents, the taut, unspoken resentment between generations.

Through weeks of negotiation that display the desperate selfishness of their marriage, Gary cannot persuade his wife to endure the madness that is his mother at Christmastime - her giddy excitement about the advent calendar, the Winterland light show, and salads involving canned fruit. "Although Enid generally fell far short in her Christian beliefs," Franzen writes, "she was devout about her ornaments."

Denise, still desperate to be the good daughter, is willing to make the sacrifice and attend, with all the bland cheer that her acquiescence implies.

Chip, meanwhile, states flatly that he couldn't survive the holiday with his family and immediately escapes to Lithuania. Civil war in the former Soviet republic looks more restful to him than confronting the Hummel figurines on Enid's mantel.

What all these adult children dread most about Christmas with their mother is her vision of the perfect holiday. It's an image so gaudily gilded with fantasies about what once was that they can't endure it. They love one another with a dull ache that never manages to be as articulate as their petty disapproval of each other. Franzen's powers of description are exhaustive but unfailingly witty. His vision is at once enormous and minute, scanning the whole world but still attending with remarkable sympathy to the challenges of this one family.

Tracing the sale and dismemberment of Alfred's employer by a pair of opportunistic raiders, the story arrives at the Axon Corporation. Trains were the neural network of the old century, but reincarnated, Axon now has much bigger plans. It hopes to market a medical procedure called "Corecktall," capable of rewiring people's brains. In a wonderful send-up of biotech hype, Wall Street hucksterism, and pharmaceutical hubris, Franzen weaves the private tragedies of the Lambert family through a culture gassed up on the American promise of self-invention.

Despite its hooting comedy, "The Corrections" is ultimately the tragedy of people who believe that their minds, their very thoughts, are essentially chemical. Franzen diagnoses the empty horror of this notion with searing precision. The coroner here is brilliant, but frankly some readers may not have the stomach for his 12-hour autopsy on the American family.

Bristling with energy and erudition and comic observation, "The Corrections" would careen into chilly satire if it didn't love these characters despite their maddening flaws. With such clarity, Franzen manages to both inflame and dampen the despair of modern life.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0913/p1...

"اصلاحات" همان کاری را با شما می‌کند که از هر شاهکار دیگری انتظار دارید.
درگیر کننده و به شدت همدلی برانگیز با خانواده(جامعه) ای که شاید در ابتدا عجیب و حتی غریبه باشند ، اما آرام آرام در بطن و ذهن شما رسوخ میکنند،آشنا و شبیه شما میشوند.با آنها زندگی می‌کنید و در مصائب و مشکلاتشان شریک میشوید.
خواندنش به شدت لذت بخش بود.

tA la pregunta sobre qué obra de hoy en día se le seguirá leyendo dentro de un par de siglos suele seguir un debate. ¿Qué tanto va a perdurar su influencia? ¿De qué modo se va a convertir en un documento de cómo vivíamos en este cambio de siglo? Hay quienes apuntan a los bestsellers masivos de hoy para argüir que éstos se seguirán leyendo, pero uno se puede disuadir de esta idea una vez que ve las listas de lo que más vendía hace cincuenta años para ver que son pocos los que sobreviven el furor.

t¿Entonces? ¿Qué obra sobrevivirá en doscientos años como parte del canon? (no vengan ahora con discusiones sobre la naturaleza del canon: me dan flojera y no es el punto). El tema es que quiero proponer Las Correcciones como una de las novelas más importantes de la década pasada, como material a perdurar y como un firme contendiente a eso que los gringos llaman ‘The Great American Novel’.

tUna parte fundamental del libro es ver cómo captura el zeitgeist del Estados Unidos triunfal de la década de los noventas. Esa sensación de que hay algo mal, algo que no cuadra, esa idea de que algo está por romperse. No estoy diciendo nada que no se haya dicho antes, pero que esta novela se haya publicado a días del 11 de Septiembre fue una coincidencia trágica. Algo se rompió.

tOtro tema, por supuesto, es la maestría narrativa de Franzen. Dicen que es un hijo estilístico de Pynchon y así. Y sin haber leído a Pynchon, veo que Franzen utiliza buena parte de los trucos narrativos de la caja de sorpresas literaria con aplomo. Hay partes que lógicamente se hacen truculentas para un lector casual de este tipo de literatura (grupo al que sin mucha vergüenza pertenezco), pero son muy pocas -en realidad dos en todo el libro-, y a consecuencia el resto es una verdadera delicia. Uno va más o menos sufriendo y más o menos divirtiéndose de las desgracias de una familia norteamericana del medio oeste bastante disfuncional.

tPero dentro de todo, lo que se ganó mi aplauso fue el retrato de lo sencillo, lo fácil y lo humano que es oprimir y fastidiar a los demás. La gente no necesita ni siquiera diferencias religiosas o políticas para ser mezquina una con la otra: sólo necesitan estar frente a alguien que tiene una manera ligeramente distinta de siquiera ver la vida para sentirse agredida y responder en consecuencia. Esto genera un juego de mezquinidades tan apabullante que hay vidas completas sin realizar en la trama. Es fascinante.

I'd never read THE CORRECTIONS before and let me assure you, I am well aware of how cool it is these days to bash Jonathan Franzen, but after meeting him at a reading in Ann Arbor, I decided it was finally time to sit down with his Big Boy and give it a thorough read. In person, Franzen is a kind and funny, if somewhat shy, guy. And for someone who has put up with as much criticism as he's received (some of which is certainly well-deserved), he's remarkably down-to-earth and "normal." All that said, sure—he was doing a public reading and on his best behavior no doubt, but still—let's focus on his fiction for a bit.

THE CORRECTIONS was quite an astounding bit of work. The multi-layered storyline of a Midwestern family scattered across the country making their miserable way through a brand new 21st century perfectly captured what it felt like for a subset of select Americans at that time. True, much of Franzen's characters' concerns may not be universally relatable, but to me, that doesn't distract from the quality of his writing and his clear penchant for telling an engaging, witty, and devastating story of grief, loss, and family turmoil.

That said, Franzen can indeed be a bit wordy; some of his sentences are a little highfalutin for their intended purpose and his word choices occasionally make you feel as if one of his aims for this book was to bump thesaurus sales, but if an author keeps you reading despite looking over at a dictionary once in a while, I'd say they still did their job.

In all, I'm not looking to make some grand statement here about how we must all rethink our collective "Franzen hate" and slap him on the cover of TIME once again, but a writer's most important work (for me, at least) will always be what they put on the page within their books. Is Franzen a brilliant writer? I believe so. Does he still deserve readership? Absolutely. Will his books connect with everyone in this new era of American modernity? Probably not. But for those who enjoy reading about a tangled web of unhappy people, struggling to make the best of a world that is all their own alongside insightful musings of a bygone America, then THE CORRECTIONS is well worth a read.

4/19/17 update: I appreciate that so many people have "liked" this review and/or commented on it, whether we agree or not. Please know that I will not be interacting with any comments as I remember almost nothing about this novel other than the repulsion I felt toward it. I cannot add anything worthwhile to a discussion or engage in any intelligent discourse unless I read it again.... which I think we all know I am not going to do. That being said, anyone using the comments section to make a personal attack on my character or ability as a reader (a decade ago, mind you), will have their comment deleted. Kindly agree to disagree and move along.

**********

A seemingly unending stream of word vomit.

I can think of no other way to describe this thing.

I really, really despised almost everything about The Corrections. I finished it solely so that I could write a horrible review and have it be valid.

At no single point before the last 10 pages of this 566-page monster did I feel a shred of sympathy with any of the characters. There were several moments where I thought Franzen would have been better off writing dialogue-for-the-average-Joe instead of the trumped up and out of place Dawson's Creek-esque vocabulary in almost every human interaction. His insistence on using the "25-cent word" at every turn made reading the story choppy at best... aggravating and unenjoyable.

I also couldn't help but see the author in a lot of his characters' worst personality traits. Annoying hipster-lecher I'm-better-than-capitalism-but-still-depend-on-it Chip. Whiny too-good-for-anyone Gary. Ungrateful I'm-a-bitch-but-require-all-your-love-and-attention Denise. The parents? Alfred is the only one for whom I felt any sympathy and that didn't happen until the last dregs of the book... and I think maybe even then it was a knee-jerk reaction at being so close to the book being over. Enid's issues rubbed me the wrong way for many reasons, not the least of which being that I could see my own mother in her... which means, I suppose, that Enid was probably the most well-represented character in the novel.

The secondary characters were almost entirely a sorry lot with personalities to the extreme in any number of directions - too smart, too stupid, too needy, too plain, too EVERYTHING.

I know that I'll never understand the praise this book received from critics and readers... and I'm ok with that. I do wish, however, that I could meet some of the people who relate it so easily to real life. Meeting them, perhaps, would truly terrify me.

On the other hand, there are IMPULSIVELY READABLE works of fiction. The much appreciated "The Corrections" is a prime example of what can occur if all you do is describe members of a family (it is not even all that dysfunctional--which is why the pathos is all too real). The Lamberts have a fallen patriarch, a mother who is on the verge of being taken under by her spouse (in other words, she's The Mother), a sibling who cares too much, another one too little, & a younger sister who may be a serious workaholic. These are fully-fleshed creations and the mother's only wish, that they all convene for one last Christmas dinner at their original nest, is also the reader's. One cannot help but root for them all to make it! Will the father survive his Parkinson's in 1 piece? Will Gary (Son #1) change for the better, be less of the older sibling, and therefore less of an asshole? Will Chip leave Lithuania just as civil unrest hits, in time for all five Lamberts to come together? Will the mother beat her new addiction to pills, let go of her husband? Will Denise embrace something other than lame work?

These people have very interesting points of view, have deviated briefly from their prime roost, sure. But once they come together in the climax that comes too soon (some 450 pages after all the character development! [why o why can't it extend until another holiday?!?!:]), once we finally get to where we were supposed to get to all along---well, aren't we all at least one of the Lamberts? It hurts to realize that, as an older sibling, I am a Gary. & like him, some corrections could definitely be made...

I understand the relevance of this and why it has been so popular in the past, though I see it more as an interesting artefact of the early 21st century rather than a particularly enjoyable story.

No doubt Franzen can write, and his crafting of characters is second to none. The Lamberts jumped off the page, and through their stories he was able to explore so many topics and themes that plagued minds around the Y2K. From economics, gender, sexuality, religions, pharmaceuticals, and more, The Corrections explores and criticizes the ways in which our Western American culture handles these topics.

Something I didn't love about this book is the feeling I got that the author didn't even like these characters. Whereas in Crossroads, Franzen's most recent novel and the only other one of his I've read, the Hildebrandt family was often unlikeable and flawed as the Lamberts, I sensed a certain empathy and compassion for their struggles. However, in this novel it felt more like the characters were under an academic microscope, being probed and tested on by the author to explore the themes mentioned above. Of course there are small glimmers of compassion, but the overall tone I got was of criticism and moralizing, rather than relatability.

That's not to say what Franzen does is bad. He's very good at what he does in this novel, I just didn't particularly enjoy it as much as Crossroads because I would rather read about unlikeable characters who are *trying* and given that room to grow, and I didn't see much of that growth in the Lamberts' stories.

Wow!

What a hard read!

I did struggle throughout the book. It’s such a slow burn.

This book is packed with 198k words.

There is practically no space wasted (unlike so many popular books) and there is a very small number of chapters.

The fact that I did not like any of the characters was not the problem.

Someone said “The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century -- a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.” Well, I was bored to tears.

The story revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to one last Christmas together near the turn of the millennium.

I frankly cannot understand the hype that this book received.

Although I found the writing to be excellent, I thought that the storyline was far from being interesting, thrilling or gripping.

It was quite pointless, in my opinion. Perhaps I’m not smart enough for this kind of work.

There are some funny dialogues and situations but nothing remarkable.

There are also sad moments and the mention of depression, Parkinson’s and dementia/Alzheimer’s, but unfortunately I was numb to everything.

I’m giving it 3 stars mostly because of the writing, but this one was definitely not for me, although it felt that it was written for men only.

The only reason I purchased a copy (at the time of its release!) was because it was picked by Ophra’s Book Club. And to think that the author was totally against it.

First let me say that this Franzen guy, he can write. That by itself justifies a minimum of 3 stars. He turns a phrase as well as anyone in modern literature, with a style that is both artful and incisive. His brainpower is on display just about every page. In a way, though, that’s part of my frustration with the book. When someone as clever as Franzen is sharing insights, you might hope for some traits to borrow or views to adopt from his characters—something to include in your own eclectic portfolio. But the Lamberts (the family he profiles in the book) lack the people skills that could redeem them. They’re relationship nitwits, in fact, especially with each other. It’s like they can’t see one move ahead on the chessboard of human interactions. It’s apparently a mystery how pointing out each other’s warts can lead to hard feelings all around.

Despite the corrections each is meant to have made, they show precious few signs of growth. Alfred and Enid, the elderly parents, are less developed probably because Franzen can’t imagine much depth for their demographic. Alfred has failing health, both mentally and physically, and was never very engaging even before. Enid is defined by her idée fixe—that a Norman Rockwell Christmas should be the family’s loftiest goal. The adult kids fall well short of the happy ideal. Gary is financially savvy, but in a sad trap partly of his own making with his wife and boys. Chip, who I’m guessing is the one Franzen relates to himself (intellectual, idealistic, and in a funk due to bad luck, not bad intent) is given some hope, but we’re never sure how real it is with him. Denise, the baby of the family, had a bumpy ride, too—up and down with relationships (mostly down), her career, and her empathy quotient.

The many flaws are not entirely far-fetched, though. On a bad day you might imagine going part of the way to their dyspeptic extremes before impulse controls contravene. The author is wise in that cool, disaffected, modern American way about the assholishness of the world. I’ll add another star to the rating for his snarky elan in revealing it. I like character studies, in general, sometimes including characters I dislike. Besides, I don’t want to seem so middle-aged, middlebow, and Midwestern that I missed the point: that of the hipster’s “tragedy as farce”.

Şaşırtıcı derecede "kusursuz" bir romandı Düzeltmeler. Franzen ile ilk tanışmamdı ayrıca, daha kitabın yarısındayken diğer kitaplarını da arşivime ekletti.

Neresinden başlayayım bilmiyorum ama kitabı hep "tam bir roman" diye izah ettiğimi fark ettim. Sanırım onu muazzam yapan şey tam da bu. Okura roman ziyafeti yaşatıyor. Hatta öyle ki bazı yerlerde "biraz fazla mı geveze" diyecekken geri dönüp düşündüğümde ya da birkaç adım sonrasında verdiği ayrıntının, işaret ettiği şeyin büyük bir depremin artçıları olduğunu keşfettiriyor.

Amerikalı Lambert ailesini konu alan 500 sayfalık bu kitap, oluşturduğu beş ana karakteri ve mekanları hafızamıza adeta kazıyor. Ben şuan yolda görsem hepsini tanırım örneğin :) Benim gibi "her şeyin kökte başladığına" inanan biri için de konusu oldukça idealdi. Küçüklükte yaşadığımız olayların, travmaların, kurduğumuz arkadaşlıkların ve hatta yan komşumuzun kim olduğunun bile geleceğimizi nasıl etkilediğini anlatıyor roman. Ana hattı bu. Bir ailenin zamanla gevşeyen, gevşemeye mahkum aile bağları. Yine bu hatta bağlı halde örülmüş bir de Amerika'nın ve değerlerin yozlaşması konusu eşlik ediyor romana. Yaşadığımız coğrafyanın bizi zamanla yoğurup en sonunda öğüterek birer çöpe çevirmesine tanık oluyoruz. Sonra bir ara, ana karakterlerimizden biri sayesinde Litvanya'ya uğruyor oradaki siyasi gerginliği ve kopmayı yaşıyoruz. Lezzetli Amerikan lokantalarına uğrayıp lezzetli batı yemeklerini ve Alman sosislerini tadıyoruz, oysa Amerikadayız.

Ve en sonunda kim tarafından büyütüldüysek ona benzemeye başladığımızı fark ettiriyor kitap. Hem de maalesef en kötü huylarını alarak başlıyor dönüşüm. Bunun altını çiziyor.

Franzen'in dehası, gülümsettiği ya da üzdüğü yoğun bir sahnenin akışı esnasında, halıyı kaldırıp derinlere baktığımızda altında inanılmaz bir kapitalizm eleştirisinin gizli olması ve alttan alta oradan size sırıtıp hiç romanın "roman" olan kısmının tadını kaçırmaması. Yani öyle güzel bir araya getirmiş ki meseleleri, adeta iç içe geçirmiş, artık yapı homojen hal almış. Birbirinden ayrı okunmuyor aksine bir bütün olarak "tam bir roman" şöleni sunuyor.

Geçtiğimiz dönemlerde Günden Kalanlar (Ishiguro), Denizi Yitiren Denizci (Mişima) ve Kader (Tim Parks) okuduğumda böyle derinden sarsılmış ve etkilenmiştim.

Kesinlikle tavsiye ederim.