Jonathan Franzen, you bespectacled metrosexual, you. What a great book. 4.5 stars! Now hang with me, I know this book is pretty divisive.

HERE'S WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK: at some point in your life, you will make a very difficult decision on how to provide medical/hospice care for an aging, ailing family member. Most likely that family member will be a parent (or a Baby Boomer), and that decision will not be accepted--not by the member, not by your siblings. The decision will most likely occur at an inconvenient time. But it will have to be made, nevertheless, and it will rip your soul apart.

The Corrections has little to do with the final decision made by the siblings regarding their father. But, it has everything to do with the characteristics of the adult siblings, and why that decision is ultimately so difficult. This is like real life, in gory detail...like reading about your friends, their secret lurchings, their unusual compunctions, and their sexual errors.

There's 3 kids. Despite the same nuclear upbringing in a small Midwest town, each kid is radically different. They're all adults now and immersed in their lives, their 30's, their most productive years. They don't want ailing parents; they don't want this decision foisted on them; they don't want to convene and talk about this uncomfortable topic; they especially don't want to revisit the past, which is painful to them. This story, then, is told by each child and their parents, reminiscing in very long, seamless chapters, moving eloquently between present and past. It's funny, sad, gross, revealing, and probably biographical for most of us. Franzen's writing reminds me a lot of John Updike's, his awesome way of slicing mundane Americana, and graphically exposing--like a cut of shank meat--the pallid bone, the waxy gristle, the flaccid muscle, and the thin layer of skin with its hair, glands, wrinkles, and dead color.

Oh, how we grow up and lose our innocence. I was a boy once, and loved Christmas in our cramped apartment. Of course, I didn't think it was cramped; and I didn't think we were struggling for money; and I didn't think our traditions would crystallize into personal habits that years hence would drive me nuts. I was a boy once, and respected my siblings and thought my dad was a hero. Of course, I didn't think my dad would ever routinely piss his pants and be so friggin' hard-headed that I'd rather chew bricks than hear his unrequested advice; and I didn't think my siblings would grow up and do THAT; and certainly there's things I've done that, revealed, would embarrass me beyond contact with the family. Yes, this is life, and Franzen has revealed it for us in highly readable prose.

The key to this 4.5-star novel is its careful and authentic transcription of real life. Have you met these characters? The youngest boy is fired from a great university gig for having relations with a student, and spends the rest of his time barely solvent but chasing money wherever it pools. The middle sister is swept away from school in big city life, and bumps around in the food industry, eventually beginning an ill-conceived relationship and an ill-conceived business. The oldest boy, the martyr, the reluctant sibling leader, is sub-clinically depressed and is used like a pliable tool by his unfaithful wife and spoiled kids in their middle income exurb. The parents are stuck so deep in wagon-wheel ruts that their moods, manners and characteristics are predictable, routinized and lifeless. Each family member is explored in detail. Each person is handled judiciously. Each character acts realistically--albeit a bit zany at times for effect. Franzen investigates the riddle of family life and why we grow so far apart. And then, suddenly, dad has dementia, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's and we all have to come together again for tough decisions. And then, when we're together, it's all banana hands and left feet. We're retards in our parent's old home.

Franzen's writing leans a little toward being hip or pop-cultured (and perhaps a bit oversexed, even scatological), but once you understand his rhythm, once you engage the hyper-descriptive and lengthy sentences, you're in for a ride. His narration is exquisite and his backstories are lurid and savory. The adult siblings are leading lives that are wholly believable (except the bit about Latvia, ostensibly done for humor). If you can't connect with these characters in some way, through some experience, then you've grown up in ways and in places I've never heard about--you've grown up in ways that are so foreign to me that I'm scared to know you. Franzen nails it, real life, again and again. Sure, there's a stretch here and an exaggeration there, but the bottom line to this story is that you can't run from your history, that life is made of floundering starts and failures, that you oughta give folks more space to be themselves, and that your parents will always love you (mostly because they don't know you).

The Corrections won the National Book Award, and I hope it won hands-down. From a rather unknown writer, this is the Great American Novel, and then Franzen drops back into obscurity. I can't wait for his next book. But, I understand this kind of writing isn't churned out annually like that other crap you see people reading at the beach. This book hit the right note with me. I laughed, I cried, I hugged my kids, I spanked my wife, c'est la vie. I recommend it to all Updike fans.

New words: styptic, cupric, toque, dhoti, ailanthus, plangent

“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”

The Lamberts are experiencing corrections. Not economic ones like the rest of the country, although money does underline everything they worry about. The whole family, in a myriad of ways, is each on the verge of their very own unique self-destruction.

“THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle let down, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.”

There may be big events that finally shove us forward, backwards or sideways, but in the aftermath most of us can find, with some self-evaluation, that the crash in our lives was preceded by a series of miniature inadvisable decisions. Sometimes we have to crash to correct.

Alfred is the father, a Kansan, who believed in hard work and honest labor. He has always been moody, self-contained, in many ways... unknowable. At the age of 75 he has come down with Parkinson’s and is quickly becoming a burden, impossible to bear, for his wife Enid and his kids. He has trouble controlling his bowels and this manifests itself in an almost comic, if it weren’t so tragic, series of delusions of talking turds pursuing him relentlessly through the corridors of his own mind. He was an amateur chemist and made an important discovery that for unknowable reasons (it will be revealed later in the book) refuses to fight for his rights to be richly rewarded. It drives his oldest son Gary nuts.

”Gary didn’t know which version of Alfred made him angrier: the spiteful old tyrant who’d made a brilliant discovery in the basement and cheated himself out of a fortune, or the clueless basement amateur who’d unwittingly replicated the work of real chemists, spent scarce family money to file and maintain a vaguely worded patent, and was now being tossed a scrap from the table…. Both versions incensed him.

I admit there are several moments when I too felt the urge to strangle Alfred. He is from a generation and geography where a man makes decisions, and never feels the need to explain himself. He doesn’t care how angry or upset you are. Tears nor threats will move him to give you the reasons that led him to his decisions.

Gary is an investment banker in Philadelphia. He has a beautiful wife named Caroline and three sons. He is fighting with his wife more regularly than normal, and she insists that he is clinically depressed. He believes, and is not just paranoid about this issue, that his wife is manipulating events behind his back, subtly turning his sons against him. She denies everything, concedes nothing. He finds her in pain from her back and realizes as angry as he is….

”That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for ecstasy--that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and red-cheeked and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on; that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for her--only deepened his feeling of betrayal.”

He has a haughty disdain for nearly everyone. He talks down to his mother. He is furious and almost unhinged with his father. He is dismissive of his siblings. His lust for his wife is inspired as much by his desire to try and control her as it is about physical contact. Her fights with him heightens all kinds of feelings of desire. He is almost snobbishly gleeful in his fidelity to her, but as he revels in his superiority there are also other issues knocking around in his head.

”It occurred to Gary, as the young estate planner leaned into him to let a raft of sweltering humanity leave the elevator, as she pressed her hennaed head against his ribs more intimately than seemed strictly necessary, that another reason he’d remained faithful to Caroline through twenty years of marriage was his steadily growing aversion to physical contact with other human beings. Certainly he was in love with fidelity; certainly he got an erotic kick out of adhering to principle; but somewhere between his brain and his balls a wire was also perhaps coming loose, because when he mentally undressed and violated this little redhaired girl his main thought was how stuffy and undisinfected he would find the site of his infidelity--a coliform-bacterial supply closet, a Courtyard Marriott with dried semen on the walls and bedspreads…. each site over warm and underventilated and suggestive of genital warts and chlamydia in its own unpleasant way--and what a struggle it would be to breath, how smothering her flesh, how squalid and foredoomed his efforts not to condescend…”

So really he is faithful because it is unhygienic to cheat.

Chip is the middle child, a teacher at a college when we first meet him. He involves himself with a student who pursued him relentless not so much out of sexual attractiveness, but that she needed his help on a paper for another class. Classic barter system; that unfortunately for Chip, is discovered. After he is fired he writes a breast obsessed first draft of a screenplay called The Academy Purple. It is really horrible. He loses yet another girlfriend, Julia who's boss decides that she needs to upgrade boyfriends. Julia has a husband from Lithuanian who needs someone with Chip’s skills. (???) With zero prospects in NY Chip decides to fly to Lithuania to help defraud American investors; greed can always be exploited.

After cratering over the loss of his young college lover that left him snuffling his furniture for any residual essence of her nether regions, Chip is getting over lost girlfriends quicker helped by fantasy detours about a bartender he just met.

”If he couldn’t get Julia back, he wanted in the worst way to have sex with the bartender. Who looked about thirty-nine herself. He wanted to fill his hands with her smoky hair. He imagined that she lived in a rehabbed tenement on East Fifth, he imagined that she drank a beer at bedtime and slept in faded sleeveless tops and gym shorts, that her posture was weary, her navel unassumingly pierced, her pussy like a seasoned baseball glove, her toenails painted the plainest basic red. He wanted to feel her legs across his back, he wanted to hear the story of her forty-odd years.”

Things don’t go well for Chip in Lithuania, but he was so damn close.

”He didn’t understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines.”

Denise is the youngest sibling, a successful chef who finds herself the main negotiator between her parents and her brothers. She has a history of being attracted to older men which probably has something to do with her uneasy relationship with her father. After her marriage to a colleague, twice her age, falls to pieces she is done with men and decides to try her luck with women.

With mixed results.

She gets an opportunity of a lifetime when she meets a young entrepreneur, a member of the recently wealthy who decides he wants to open a restaurant. He wants Denise to be his chef and he wants her in his bed. She resists, barely, intent on not letting sex destroy this opportunity for her. Kudos for trying to break a bad pattern. Good thinking...but sleeping with his wife nullifies all that careful arms length tango she carried out so well with the husband.

”Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking the pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.”

The problem with Denise is she has a hard time resisting people who find her attractive. She enjoys the fact that older men really appreciate her shapely body. The sexual attraction that males and females have for her compels her forward in a relationship long past the time when any of it is still pleasurable for her. She loses everything for something she really didn’t want in the first place.

I haven’t even gotten to the mother Enid. She is at that point in her life where she is ready to go do things and finds her husband ”moldering and devaluing” before her very eyes. He is an albatross around her neck; and yet, she still loves him. She desperately clings to the idea of the whole Lambert family coming together one more time in St. Jude for Christmas.

If you are someone who likes to read books where you like the characters you might struggle with this book. I find that a lot of people who say they don’t like this book abandon it before completion.

It is natural to want someone in a story that you can root for.

As Jonathan Franzen unpacks these characters he exposes those things that are generally hidden beneath our clothes like a nasty wart near a nipple or cellulite on our butt cheeks. The type of flaws we would prefer to be seen in half-light, not the glaring brightness of daylight. I started out not liking any of these characters, their flaws were dominating their inherently good qualities, but as Franzen so deftly unspools more revelations I became more and more sympathetic.

What we have to remember is that none of us knows someone’s whole history. We get pieces and sometimes those are the best pieces, and sometimes we only see someone at their worst moment. We never have the whole story that might make sense out of the senseless. We have a tendency to ignore our own flaws and castigate those same flaws in others. You might be starting to understand where I’m going with all this. These characters are human, maybe too human, but that could be because Jonathan Franzen may have wrote one of the most honest books you’ll ever read.

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The best way I can sum up The Corrections is that there was a really good novella inside a big bloated 650 page bang average novel. That is to say, I much enjoyed the time spent with Enid & Alfred's youngest - 32-year-old daughter, Denise, who gets a whole section to herself in the second half of the novel, of her time as head chef in a fancy Philadelphia restaurant after being paid handsomely by the wealthy owner - whose wife Denise eventually has a sexual relationship with - to wine and dine around Europe for inspiration before heading back and working her ass off to turn it in to a thriving success. I felt very little for Enid & Alfred's story - despite his battle with dementia; although, I didn't despise them like I did their eldest son, Gary, and his pest of wife, Caroline. As for their three kids, I barely even knew they were there. The middle son, Chip, was OK to be honest, and I found his early teaching career, where he gets involved with a student, more interesting than later on when he gets caught up in a Lithuanian business venture that I found ridiculously stupid. So, whilst at no point was I ever bored to the extent of quitting - helped quite early on when Denise comes into the picture working at her Dad's company - again, she was the only main character I took to heart and actually cared about - I'm certainly not one of the readers who agree with all the critical praise hyping this novel up as a masterpiece. I was also not a fan of the last very short chapter - or tailpiece/epilogue - that I felt didn't need to be there. I think we all knew what was going to happen to Alfred in the end, but this to me just felt rushed and ultimately pointless. I will at least Praise Franzen for giving it a right old go in regards to writing something hugely ambitious when it comes to the all American family, but this was a Christmas gathering - even though we are not there very long - where I much rather would have slipped out the back door and gone to the nearest bar.

A friend once told me that Jonathan Franzen has been quoted as saying he deliberately rips off influential late-century American authors such as Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth, but tries to make the prose less difficult, more easily consumed.*

Leaving aside for a moment the irony of that statement in light of his outrage over the Oprah thing, that is stupid. Those authors are not great because their writing is accessible when the complexity is removed.

It was when one of the main characters in The Corrections was talking to a hallucinated turd that I thought, I should just put this down and take a stab at Against the Day, or re-read Gravity's Rainbow where a (literal) shit scene can actually be hilarious and fascinating.

In addition to weak-pynchonian characters (human and fecal), this novel suffers from a lack of strict editing (too many peripheral characters, too many inconsequential sub-sub-subplots), from unsympathetic characters (I don't really know what the point is if everyone is horrible and always has and always will hate or be spiteful to everyone around them), from an inconsistent, sudden ending (last chapter: no one will ever change. epilogue: everyone changed and is now charitable of heart!), from an irritatingly-rendered main theme (we all try to CORRECT ourselves and one another but we are ultimately unable), and from its own determined effort to be Epic (even a glowing review I found of this book said Franzen might as well have called it "American (Something)"; he compares one of the settings to the rest of the country in the first paragraph, for god's sake).

The "misery of aging" theme was effective, and I appreciated the exploration of a marriage that was bad for no more complicated a reason than that the husband and wife weren't right for one another. Otherwise I had no use for Franzen and his truckloads of loathing.


* I wrote this review in 2007 and no longer recall being given this quote. It's been rightly pointed out since that I shouldn't have used it without a citation (and should have been skeptical about its authenticity). But this book still sucks.

I’ve been meaning to read The Corrections for years, however its description as a “family saga” was not very enticing. But it really is a fantastic novel: an entertaining and insightful depiction of individual struggles within modern families, laying bare the failures, misunderstandings, mistakes and regrets. The novel is all these things: incisive, poignant, funny, honest and devastating.

What stands apart in the novel is the writing. The writing is damn good. It’s the real deal. It’s not just about prose style and word choice: there is an intelligence in the structure, a creativity in each minute choice, a level of expertise that binds the whole thing together, which together signify a talent that can’t be faked. While reading and encountering certain devices, I was reminded variously of Pynchon, Bellow, Gaddis, even David Foster Wallace.

At times Franzen tries a little too hard to create some zany scenarios to spice up what is essentially a plotless novel (e.g.: some scenes "At Sea"; Chip’s adventures in Lithuania), and there are also times when Franzen says perhaps a little too much. But the writing and the novel’s emotional intelligence were enough for me to overlook these issues. All in all, this is about as realised and complete as is possible for a contemporary novel of this size.

Προσπάθησα να το πρωτοδιαβάσω-δυο φορές νομίζω- όταν εκδόθηκε στα ελληνικά το 2002. Δεν το προχώρησα πάνω από το 1/4 του ογκωδέστατου βιβλίου. Το έβρισκα βαρετό. Ήμουν πολύ νέος-φευ !
Fast forward 15 χρόνια μετά και στην ηλικία των τέκνων της οικογένειας Λάμπερτ δοκίμασα να το ξαναδιαβάσω και βλέπω τα πάντα : η οικογένεια, η δουλειά, το σεξ, τα χρήματα, η επιτυχία, η αποτυχία, οι συγγενείς, οι φίλοι, τα γηρατειά, η αρρώστια, οι ενοχές. Εξακολουθώ να το θεωρώ σε μεγάλα κομμάτια του βαρετό-μακροσκελείς αναλύσεις για μια νέα πειραματική θεραπεία, όλη σχεδόν η υποπλοκή στη Λιθουανία μοιάζει αχρείαστη, αν και με κινηματογραφικό κρεσέντο- αλλά μοιάζει τόσο συγκλονιστικό σε άλλα κομμάτια του : ένας ηλικιωμένος άνθρωπος που βυθίζεται στην αρρώστια και αναζητά την λύτρωση στον θάνατο, μια κόρη που ανακαλύπτει την αυτοθυσία του αυστηρού πατέρα της, ένας σύζυγος σε ταξίδι για δουλειές να δοκιμάζεται η ηθική του και να εμφανίζονται τα πρώτα δείγματα κατάθλιψης, η εικόνα ενός παιδιού να αποκοιμιέται τιμωρημένο σε ένα τραπέζι, ένας άντρας να κρύβεται από την οικογένεια του σε ένα σκοτεινό θάλαμο, ένας άλλος να κρύβεται στο εργαστήριο του, μια νεαρή σύζυγος να χρησιμοποιεί το συζυγικό σεξ ως όπλο για την αγορά μετοχών (!), μια άλλη νεαρή σύζυγος να χρησιμοποιεί τα παιδιά της σε ένα αδήλωτο συζυγικό πόλεμο. Όλοι οι ήρωες κρύβονται πίσω από τις δουλειές τους, μια εικόνα ευτυχίας ψεύτικης, μια εικόνας που η μητέρα των παιδιών πλασάρει στις φίλες της ως δήθεν επιτυχημένα τέκνα (πόσο ελληνικό αυτό).
Το κακό είναι ότι ο συγγραφέας προσπαθε�� να πει τα πάντα : ο καπιταλισμός, οι κακές πολυεθνικές εταιρίες,ο φεμινισμός, το Χόλιγουντ, η εξάρτηση από τα ναρκωτικά, η θανατική ποινή, οι διαφορές στις κοινωνικές τάξεις, η υπερθέρμανση του πλανήτη. Θα ήταν ίσως πολύ καλύτερο βιβλίο, αν ήταν λίγο πιο σφιχτό, αλλά και πάλι έτσι διστάζω να του κόψω ένα αστέρι : ίσως όχι ένα "ατόφιο" 5αρι, αλλά πολύ κοντά (Edit : τελικά του βάζω 4) και σίγουρα δικαιολογεί τον ντόρο περί "μεγάλου" βιβλίου. Από τα σύγχρονα κλασσικά βιβλία, πολύ θα ήθελα να το δω στον κινηματογράφο ή στην τηλεόραση, κρίμα που ο τηλεοπτικός πιλότος του HBO ναυάγησε πριν λίγα χρόνια.

While reading The Corrections I really understood the meaning of ‘schadenfreude’ because I despised almost every character in this book so much that the more miserable their lives got, the more enjoyment I took from it. And when a shotgun was introduced late in the novel, I read the rest of it with my fingers crossed while muttering "Please please please please please please..." in the hope that at least one of those pitiful shits would end up taking a load of buckshot to the face.

The Lambert’s are a Midwestern family, and while the grown children have all moved to Philadelphia and New York, the parents have remained in St. Jude. The father, Alfred, was a workaholic middle manager for a railroad and he's the kind of joyless repressed bastard that considered all pleasures frivolous and taking a coffee break as a massive character flaw. Now retired, he’s suffering from Parkinson's and dementia. He deserves it.

Enid is the mother. (Seriously, Franzen? Enid? I’ve lived in the Midwest all my life and have never met an Enid. I know you were making a point on how square the old school Midwesterners are, but that‘s pushing it.) She’s a delusional nagging harpy from hell who aims her passive aggressive attacks at whichever family member has recently burst the bubble of whatever fantasy she is currently clinging to. Through most of the book, Enid has her heart set on one last family Christmas at the house in St. Jude, and the evil bitch will stop at nothing to get it.

Gary is the oldest and a successful investment adviser in Philly, but he married a woman who wants all ties severed with his family and has a special way of getting his sons to join her in her efforts. Torn between trying to placate his wife and his mother while letting their denials of reality make him crazy and trying to be 'the responsible one', Gary is running himself ragged to avoid admitting that he’s depressed. Someone should pimp slap him so hard that his fillings fly out of his teeth.

Chip, the middle son, is a waste of skin with a special talent for self-destruction. He torched his academic career as a professor just as he was about to get tenure by having an affair with a student and then becoming obsessed with her. He’s now a mooch in New York working on a screenplay so horrible that it'd make a Michael Bay movie look good by comparison. He’s also the kind of douche bag who thinks that getting rivets put in his ears and wearing leather pants is cool even though he’s over thirty.

Denise is the one character that I actually had some sympathy for. A daddy’s girl who adopted Alfred’s work ethic, she’s a successful chef of an upscale restaurant, but she’s also got a messy personal life, including trying to figure out her sexuality. At least she’s the one member of this dysfunctional hellspawned family that knows she has issues and tries not to deceive herself any more than most people do.

The weird thing is that even though I loathed the Lamberts and almost every supporting character, too, that I actually enjoyed this book. I usually can’t stand stories where all the characters’ problems are self-inflicted emotional wounds due to a basic refusal to admit and face reality. However, I have to admit that I found this compelling reading. Maybe I was into it for all the wrong reasons. Namely, that I hated the Lamberts so much that their continued suffering brought sweet tears of joy to my eyes. That’s probably not what Franzen intended, but he had to create some incredibly vivid characters and do justice to their pathetic lives to make me hate them so very, very much.

The Corrections, Franzen, Jonathan

The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen's third novel.

It 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.

Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy.

With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul.

Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious.

Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality.

Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز ششم ماه مارس سال 2021میلادی

عنوان: اصلاحات؛ نویسنده: جاناتان فرنزن؛ مترجم پیمان خاکسار؛ تهران، نشر چشمه، چاپ نخست تا چاپ پنجم سال 1400؛ در 744ص؛ شابک9786220107538؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 211م

رمان «اصلاحات» سومین کتاب «جاناتان فرنزن» نویسنده ی «ایالات متحده آمریکا» است؛ داستان درباره ی مشکلات زوجی غربی، و سه فرزند بزرگسال آنهاست؛ کتاب «اصلاحات» حکایت انسان است، حکایتی در دل ژرفتترین، و پیچیده‌ ترین وضعیت‌هایی‌ که تا کنون انسانها در آن قرار داشته اند، و این لابد شاخصه‌ها‌ی دوران مدرن، و پست‌مدرن، یعنی از هم‌ گسیختگی ارزش‌ها، وارونگی راستیها، معناها، و جسم و روان انسان است، که نویسنده و نگارگر واژه ها با کوشش موشکافانه‌ ای برای خوانشگرانشان بازگو کرده اند؛ «جاناتان فرنزن» از آخرین مومنان به راستی و زیبایی در دوران ما هستند، ایشان علیه همه‌ ی چیزهایی که اصالت، زیبایی، و واقعیت وجودی اکنون و بگذشته را، از انسان سلب کرده‌ اند، برآشوبیده اند؛ خوانش این کتاب «اصلاحات» نیز همانند دو اثر پیشین «جاناتان فرنزن»، ضربه‌ های مهلکی به وجدان همگان می‌زند، و همه‌ ی فریب‌هایی را که خورده‌ ایم، یا دیگرانی را که فریب داده‌ایم، و یا فریبهایی را که به خوردمان داده‌اند، در قالب داستانی خانوادگی بازگشایی می‌کنند، این روزها با درگذشت چندین تن از خاندانی که این فراموشکار نیز عضو کوچکی از آنها هستم، دلکم بسیار شکسته و ذهنم مشوش، و حالم خوش نیست؛ مدام اشکم سرازیر است؛ مرا ببخشایید که نمیتوانم به زیبایی بگذشته ها داستانها را با واژه های دل انگیز بگشایم؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 13/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Featured in my Top 5 Jonathan Franzen Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKJrZ...

Brutally honest about the bad (and the good) that lies at the core of most families, The Corrections is an hilariously cynical account of contemporary life, prejudice and 'messed-upness' that's shaped by a beautifully acid, mercilessly wondrous style.

I love Franzens writing. This book kind of made my attention and focus wane a bit at times. Incredibly gifted author.

توی دوتا کتابی که از فرنزن خوندم (آزادی و اصلاحات) روند داستان اینجوریه :
زمان حال
یه گذشته‌ی خیلی طولانی برای تک تک کاراکترها که بفهمیم چرا تو زمان حال اینجورین
و در نهایت یه آینده‌ی جمع و جور.
توی این کتاب بخش حال و گذشته‌ی خیلی مفصلش برای من خیلی جذاب بود. ولی آینده های هر دوتا کتاب یکم شتاب‌زده بود.
کلا اگر به تحلیل شخصیت آدم‌ها با جزییات علاقه دارید، و اینکه مثلا این کاراکتر چجور بچگی‌ای داشته که شده این ، از فرنزن خوشتون میاد.
فرنزن راجع به مسائل مختلف اطلاع داره و قشنگیش اینه که این اطلاعات رو خیلی فروتنانه و ظریف به خورد خواننده می‌ده :)).

Гигантска книга. И тялом и духом. Петстотин страници дребен шрифт, малко пряка реч. Трудно се чете на моменти, но много завладяващо. Спираш, връщаш се и пак продължаваш. Точно както в човешките взаимоотношения, които така добре са разнищени. Мисля, че са засегнати почти всички или поне основните. И никъде нито беше лесно, нито особено щастливо. Сложната борба на желанията, на стремежа да бъдеш разбран и когато не си, както е в повечето случаи, да избягаш, да се спасиш. Но къде и как? Красиви хора с грозни взаимоотношения, отчуждение, бягство, стремеж да си прав, да си обичан, да си разбран, да успееш, да спечелиш, да се наложиш или да си наложиш, да простиш, да обичаш, да те обичат, да не те тормозят, да те оставят на мира. Една дълга, трудна и тъжна битка. И малко надежда, но силна. Различни герои, различни съдби, които така добре са описани и така ясно пасват на съвременното общество. Авторът те оставя с усещането, че седиш близо до героите - там някъде в стаята. Слушаш ги и ги гледаш. И ти става тъжно там, където откриеше себе си или просто срещнеш страховете си, извадени да дишат тежко над повърхността.

Джонатан Франзен е страшен. И наистина плаши.
Хареса ми.

И страхотен финал:

n  "Цял живот беше имала чувството, че не е ПРАВА, и сега имаше възможност да му покаже, че НЕ Е ПРАВ ТОЙ. Макар че омекваше и не беше толкова строга и стриктна в други отношения, Инид си оставаше бдителна в дома "Дийпмайер". Хокаше Алфред, че не е прав да плюе сладолед по току-що изпраните и изгладени панталони. Не е прав да не разпознава Джо Пърсън, след като Джо е бил толкова мил да намине. Не е прав да не иска да погледне снимките на Арон, Кейлъб и Джоуна. Не е прав да не се радва, че Алисън е родила два малко слабички, но иначе съвсем здрави момиченца. Не е прав да не се радва, да проявява благодарност или поне малко прояснение, след като жена му и дъщеря му са си направили труда да го вземат у дома за Деня на благодарността. Не е прав да заяви след вечерята, когато го върнаха в дома "Дийпмайер": "По-добре изобщо да не излизам оттук, отколкото да се налага да се връщам". Щом съзнанието му можеше да се проясни дотолкова, че да произнесе подобно съждение, не е прав да не бъде с разсъдъка си през останалото време. Не е прав да се опитва да се обеси с чаршафите си. Не е прав да се хвърля по прозорците. Не е прав да се мъчи да разкъса вените си с вилица. Но макар, че не беше прав за толкова много неща, с изключение на четирите дни в Ню Йорк, двете Коледи във Филаделфия и трите седмици възстановяване след операция на бедрената става, Инид продължаваше да го посещава всеки ден. Трябваше да му каже, докато все още имаше време, колко не е бил прав той и колко е била права тя. Колко не е бил прав да не я обича по-силно, колко не е бил прав да не я цени и да не правят секс при всяка възможност, колко не е бил прав да не се доверява на финансовия ѝ нюх, колко не е бил прав да прекарва дните си в работа и да не обръща внимание на децата, колко не е бил прав, че е толкова черноглед, колко не е бил прав, че е толкова мрачен, колко не е бил прав, че е избягал от живота, колко не е бил прав, че вместо да приеме, винаги отказваше: трябваше да му го каже, повтаряше го всеки ден. Дори и той да не я слушаше, тя пак трябваше да му го каже.
През втората си година в дома "Дийпмайер" той престана да се храни. Чип се откъсна от родителските си задължения, новата си работа като учител в частно училище и осмото си преправяне на сценария и дойде до Чикаго да се сбогува. Но Алфред изкара повече, отколкото очакваха. Беше лъв до края. Почти нямаше пулс, когато долетяха Денис и Гари, а живя цяла седмица след това. Лежеше свит на леглото и едва дишаше. Не помръдваше, не отговаряше, само веднъж, когато Инид понечи да му пъхне стружка лед в устата, извърна категорично глава. До края не го напусна силата му да отказва. Всичките ѝ усилия да го поправи, бяха отишли напразно. Той си беше все така упорит като в деня, в който го беше видяла за пръв път. И въпреки това, когато Алфред издъхна и тя притисна устни към челото му, и излезе с Денис и Гари в топлата пролетна нощ, Инид имаше чувството, че вече нищо не може да погуби надеждите ѝ, абсолютно нищо. Беше на седемдест и пет и възнамеряваше да промени живота си."n