The Corrections
Ratings149
Average rating3.8
What's the point of a book like this? I think we have had enough of East coast nevrotic characters with questionable ethics and broken family. How many more times we need to hear the story of bad fathers, self involved fathers and a group of siblings with all the usual cast of characters (the straight arrow with inner deviations, the free spirit and on and on). Very poor use of my time, I must admit. Gets two stars instead of one because the author has a decent mastery of the language. If he could only use his writing talent to produce something that is not a reproduction of a Woody Allen movie...
Toch uiteindelijk geen 4*, te dik - er waren momenten dat ik niet het gevoel had dat ik nodig door zou moeten lezen.
Familiekroniek, bestaande uit eigenlijk min of meer allemaal niet zo likeable personages. Het boek schakelt heen en weer tussen de diverse familieleden.
Misschien wel het mooiste stuk is in het begin, waarin de steeds verder aftakelende Alfred en zijn vrouw Enid de focus hebben:
“Finally, as Alfred's naps deepened toward enchantment, she grew bolder.”
Ze komen weer terug in het laatste deel, en dat compenseerde een groot deel van het midden :-)
Ik had eerst best een hekel aan Enid en haar kerst-dwang, maar uiteindelijk blijkt ze toch ook maar gevangen te zitten in haar omstandigheden, en probeert er het beste van te maken.
She knew she was telling herself lies, but she didn't know which of the things in her head were the lies and which were the truth.
How can you distinguish the people when everybody pretends to be the same?
Stoner
The Corrections
The Corrections
I started this review once already, struggled with it, and have decided to start completely over. The problem was that I was trying overly hard to justify my feelings. The words jumbled out, page after page, full of whining and excuses. I wanted to somehow convey my strong dislike for Franzen's personality, my ambivalence toward much of this book, but my appreciation for its strong moments, and my certainty that it had cemented its status as the best book Franzen will ever write. I felt I had to somehow justify four stars for an author whose pretentious prickness has only catapulted his career. I had to explain that while an author's personality should in no way impact critique of their work, it does; Franzenisms saturates the pages of this novel. The more I tried to justify all my mixed feelings, the more I felt like a pretentious prick.
So, The Corrections. It's not a simple read. It's over inflated and lags in the middle. The characters are intentionally unlikable, but depending on the reader's preferences, some of these characters may be widely loved. Personally, my favorite character was a turd. (Really, I'm not kidding—an actual turd.) Franzen's intelligence is evident in nearly every page; the man can write. There's a crude Shakespearean quality to Franzen's tragic farce. Likely, The Corrections is the most insightful and sensitive work the author will ever create. Yes, it's meant to shock, but that doesn't keep it from shining light on human nature and family dynamics. It takes an old idea (a disastrous family reunion) and makes it interesting. Yet, there's a cloak of arrogance that envelopes it all, making the production feel a bit like a politically-minded hipster soap opera. All in all, it's not worth the hype, in my opinion, but if you read only one Franzen, this is the one.
So I offer a few kind words to a man who has few. Well done, Mr. Franzen. You've written a good novel. You're obviously very intelligent and extremely focused, and for these traits I commend you.
I read this a million years ago, when it was new, but my ambivalent experience with “Freedom” left me wanting to refresh my memory–am I not a Franzen fan, or just not a “Freedom” fan?
Upon re-reading, it became clear that my problem was “Freedom,” not Franzen (my, isn't this is an alliterative review). “The Corrections” was everything I wanted it to be–zany, painfully precise in its portraits of the characters (I swear I will stop with the alliteration), but compassionate towards all their inelegant fumblings.
Anyway, who doesn't love a good family drama (said the psychologist)?
I admired more than enjoyed this book. It's very well-written, but underneath the impressive style are a story and characters that I didn't like very much. I thought that it spent too much time in flashback, which gives it the feeling that the current storyline is constantly stalled; I was always waiting for it to get back to what's happening now.
I cam to page 71 of 568 when I realized that life indeed is too short to read bad books.
Yes, I find this a bad book.
“The novel won the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was nominated for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and was shortlisted for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In 2005, The Corrections was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels.
In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel “one of the three great books of my generation.”
In 2009, website The Millions polled 48 writers, critics, and editors, including Joshua Ferris, Sam Anderson, and Lorin Stein. The panel voted The Corrections the best novel of the first decade of the millennium “by a landslide”.”
Wikipedia: The Corrections
“Alfred Lambert, the patriarch of a seemingly normal family living in the fictional town of St. Jude, suffers from Parkinson's disease and dementia. Enid, his longsuffering wife, suffers from Alfred's controlling, rigid behavior and her own embarrassment at what she perceives as her family's shortcomings. Their children all live in the Northeast. Gary, the eldest Lambert son, is a successful banker whose personal and family life is controlled by his beloved wife, a gifted manipulator and reader of pop-psychology books. Chip, the middle child, is a former academic whose disastrous affair with a student loses him a tenure-track job and lands him in the employ of a Lithuanian crime boss. Denise, the youngest of the family, is successful in her career as a chef but loses her job just at the peak of her career after interlocking romances with her boss and her boss's wife.
The separate plot-lines converge on Christmas morning back in St. Jude, when each child is forced to make a decision about what kind of responsibility to assume in helping their mother deal with their father's accelerating physical and mental decline.”
A searing look at family values in America. Along the same lines as American Beauty, but much more masterful in its scope and depth.
“Here was a torture that the Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything. And the nights were getting cold now.”
& that whole thing between Denise and Don Armour.
“Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.”
The author is
excellent at copying a paint-by-numbers picture onto another piece of paper
and painting in each part the right color. None of the numbers show. But
when you look at the picture, you know somehow that it was taken from
somewhere, that it wasn't drawn from the heart.
Does that make any sense?