Seize Your Copy Поправките Written And Illustrated By Jonathan Franzen Released As EText
Corrections, Franzen, Jonathan
The Corrections is anovel 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 midth century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium.
Franzen brings an oldtime 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, handsoff parenting, doityourself mental healthcare, and the antigravity 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 سالمیلادی
عنوان: اصلاحات نویسنده: جاناتان فرنزن مترجم پیمان خاکسار تهران نشر چشمه چاپ نخست تا چاپ پنجم سالدرص شابکموضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا سدهم
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 هجری خورشیدی ا, شربیانی 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. 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 dysfunctionalwhich 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, amp a younger sister who may be a serious workaholic.
These are fullyfleshed 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 inpiece Will Gary Sonchange 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 somepages 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 alongwell, aren't we all at least one of the Lamberts It hurts to realize that, as an older sibling, I am a Gary.
amp like him, some corrections could definitely be made, . . 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 welldeserved, he's remarkably downtoearth and "normal.
" All that said, surehe was doing a public reading and on his best behavior no doubt, but stilllet's focus on his fiction for a bit.
THE CORRECTIONS was quite an astounding bit of work, The multilayered storyline of a Midwestern family scattered across the country making their miserable way through a brand newst 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.
An Opportunity to Make A Few Corrections
I read “The Corrections” preGood Reads and originally rated it four.
I wanted to reread and review it, before starting “Freedom”,
I originally dropped it a star because I thought there was something unsatisfying about the whole Lithuanian adventure.
Perhaps, when I reread it, I wouldnt object to it as much and I could improve my rating.
Having just finished it, I could probably add a halfstar, but Im not ready to give it five.
Second time around, the Vilnius section didnt grate as much, partly because it was far shorter and more innocuous than I recalled.
However, the second reading helped me to work out what stopped it being a five star effort for me.
The First Draft
Franzens writing is easy to read,
Hes a skilful writer, he knows his chops,
His style is both fluent and fluid, You can dip in for a short session and suddenly find that youve readtopages pretty effortlessly,
He accumulates detail, but he points you confidently in a direction, even if you dont know what your destination will be.
He seems to have put his prattishness behind him now, so its possible to appreciate his writing without peering darkly through the lens of the Oprah spectacle.
Because he writes in a realist manner, I think that whether or not you will enjoy his novel depends on whether you relate to his subject matter and his characters.
“The Corrections” is primarily concerned with the dynamics of a family,
I have never been a fan of family sagas, so I was initially apprehensive,
Also, when I first read it, I was overexposed to film about dysfunctional families and the social problems they generate.
However, I dont see the Lamberts as dysfunctional so much as typical of the thermodynamics that can be present in three relatively ambitious and driven generations in thest century.
Id venture to say that theyre more normal than abnormal,
They don't commit any grievous social crimes, although they do a lot of emotional damage internally,
Punch Lines
Stylistically, the novel is written in the third person,
This allowed Franzen to drop the reader, like a fly on a wall, into a number of different homes and rooms in homes.
From this vantage point, were able to observe numerous family members, not only externally but internally as well.
The only negative thing I want to say about this is that, what Franzen dedicatedpages to, I think someone like Raymond Carver could have done inpages.
When Carver writes, we ascertain his meaning and intent by inference from the skeletal facts and action on the page.
Franzen leaves little to inference, Everything is spelt out. Meticulously and elegantly, to give him due credit,
He doesnt pull any punches, but equally he signals all of his punches along the way,
This is the one reservation I have about his style,
There is a sense in which he is a perceptive commentator and essayist, at the expense of being a truly great technical novelist.
Time and time again, I found that he layered detail and content on the page by telling us about it rather than creating the illusion that it was happening in front of our eyes and ears.
There is a lot of back story, and not enough front story,
Interior Design
There isnt a lot of action, at least externally,
The action is largely interior and individual,
Little is revealed through the interaction of the characters,
Most of it is revealed by way of contemplation or recollection,
The personal tensions that are the focus of the plot end up being in your head, rather than in your face.
While I found it all interesting, I didnt find it exciting,
I can therefore understand why a large proportion of general readers would find it either too intimidating to start or too boring to finish.
To this extent, you can understand why Franzen was concerned that, because of Oprahs endorsement, many people would buy the book, without reading or enjoying it.
They werent really the readers that Franzen had in mind when he wrote it,
Perhaps, he would have written a different book if he wanted them to read it,
Instead, he wrote for an audience of readers a lot more like himself in temperament,
This isnt meant to suggest that he was arrogant, only that he didnt want to disappoint an audience he wasnt trying to satisfy in the first place.
The Blue Chair
The patriarch of the Lambert family is Alfred, a retired railway engineer and parttime biotech inventor.
His wife, Enid, calls him Al, To his three children, hes obviously “Dad”,
Yet, Franzen constantly refers to him as Alfred, even though he doesnt come across as pretentious or affected in any way.
You get the impression that Alfreds oldfashioned rigidity starts with his name and works down,
Whereas, in the hands of Carver, Im pretty confident that he would have been an abbreviated Al or Fred or a contracted “Lambo” or a workderived nickname.
We soon learn that Alfred has a great blue chair that takes pride of place,
Its described as overstuffed and “vaguely gubernatorial”, but most importantly it “was the only major purchase Alfred had ever made without Enids approval”.
It has great metaphorical potential, although uncharacteristically it doesnt really get a mention after page nine, even though it features on the cover of some editions of the novel.
Still, it hints that, within the Lambert family, we have both a patriarch and a matriarch and occasionally the two dont see eye to eye.
Their differences might be great or small, but they are embodied in the Blue Chair,
A Metaphor Explored
One of the reasons I rate “The Corrections” so highly is that it is an extended exploration of the “correction” metaphor.
Yet, at the same time, the ultimate reason I have dropped it a half to a fullstar is that it never strays very far from a disciplined, even mechanical, revelation of its significance.
I feel hypocritical about this, because one role of a reviewer or critic is to detect these metaphors and elaborate on them.
In the case of Franzen, the role is much easier to perform, because he leaves verbal sign posts or easter eggs the whole way through the text.
Without using Powerpoint, he tells you what he is going to say, he says it, and he reminds you that he has said it.
Normally, we would treat this as consummate communication,
In the case of a novel, it leaves nothing to the imagination, it leaves no mystery, it leaves little to be detected by the reader on their own.
It would be like a crime novel where you knew everything about the crime from the beginning who, how, when, why, except where the criminal was hiding where.
The Corrections
So, what do “the corrections” mean
A correction implies that something is “wrong” or “broken” or isn't “working”, and therefore needs to be fixed or remedied or “corrected”.
Throughout the novel, there are references to physical objects that have been kept, even though they dont work anymore or need to be fixed.
They have been retained, when someone else, some other family, might have “thrown them away” or got a replacement the moment it was determined to be useless or obsolete.
Alfred would once have had the "will to fix" them, but now he is tired and things go unfixed or uncorrected.
This might suggest that there has been a recent breakdown in Alfred's authority, but I don't get the impression that he has had much authority within the family for a long time.
In the last chapter, there is also a reference to the need for a correction of a “bubble” in an overheated economy.
Investors have blindly expected conditions and values to improve perpetually, but every now and again there must be a correction, a reality check where once there was a dividend cheque.
However, when the economic correction arrives, it is "not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a yearlong 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.
"
Ultimately, the metaphor most overtly concerns the state of the characters' relationships,
Indeed, the novel as a whole is Franzen's State of Relations Address,
In their own way, there have been lifelong leakages of value in the family's internal relationships that need to be addressed.
Without being overtly dysfunctional, we can perpetuate relationships even though they are flawed or defective or unsatisfying.
Its much easier to abandon a relationship to sell down a nonperforming or troublesome stock when it doesnt involve a family member.
Its harder, if not impossible, to abandon or negate a parent/child or sibling to sibling relationship.
In a sexual relationship, you can get the thorn out of your foot,
In a family relationship, sometimes, you cant get rid of the thorn without losing your foot,
Spousal relationships hover in between the two, depending on whether there are children involved,
Either way, within a family, you can't usually just walk away,
You have to "correct" the relationship or learn to live with the thorn in your foot,
A Chip Separated from the Old Block
When were first introduced to the term “correction”, we meet the middle child, Chip, the "alternative sibling" who has dropped out of the world of "conventional expectations", a wouldbe postmodernist academic, script writer and leftwing libertine.
He might be the “intelligent son”, the "intellectual son", but Chip is still a "comic fool", the protagonist in a farce of his own creation.
Chip forensically analyses his parents relationship and decides that his life will “correct” all of their personal failings.
Where they are passive, conservative and straightlaced, he will be active, radical and openminded,
Franzen doesnt suggest that this choice is intrinsically wrong, only that Chip makes a bit of a mess of it.
To this extent, the novel sees Chip correct himself and his relationship with his parents and siblings, he becomes "a steady son, a trustworthy brother".
The Straight Option
The oldest child, Gary, is a fund manager, experienced in the ways of business and investment.
He appears to be the successful child, but the visage conceals an unhappiness and dissatisfaction with a more conventional life, so much so that he probably suffers from depression.
Gary is the least resolved of the siblings in the novel,
At the end, he remains unreconciled with his parents and siblings, even if he has achieved a compromise of sorts in the conflict with his wife and children.
The Bent Option
The youngest child and only daughter, Denise, is in many ways the most interesting character.
Some have reacted adversely to her as a shrill harpy,
In Enids eyes, she has failed, because she hasnt settled down, married the love of her life and had children.
Instead, she is a talented chef, uncertain about what she wants personally and sexually,
Denise remains open to different options, only she still hasnt found what shes looking for, largely because she doesnt know what shes looking for.
Nevertheless, within the family, she is a major factor in the resolution and correction of the problems.
Families First
Franzen most identifies with the children who are of a similar age, yet there is a sense in which he has the greatest sympathy for Alfred and Enid.
Both parents are children of an earlier generation that was given little choice in how it lived life and raised families.
The children, in contrast, have suffered from an excess of choice and the lack of a moral compass as they made their own choices.
Unfortunately, Alfred has the least opportunity to correct his own behavior, because he is suffering from Parkinsons Disease.
On the other hand, Enid, despite the failure of her dream to have one last perfect Christmas together, liberates herself and is able to correct and resurrect her own life at last, albeit alone.
She is reconciled with, at least, Chip and Denise, and there is a sense in which she will also make things happen with Gary and his family.
Families Last
The plot and its resolution dont ultimately suggest that there is any perfect family.
Families consist of individuals who all have their own needs and expectations and who all push and pull in their own directions.
The thing is that different people have different expectations, and expectations create responsibilities and obligations and burdens.
If everybody performs their designated role, does their bit, pulls their weight, plays their part, then compliance, reliability and success in turn give rise to a family culture of reliance, confidence and trust.
If things don't "work out", there is a risk of disappointment, a risk of opting out, noncompliance, problems, mistakes, failure and "wrongness" that lead to coercion, anxiety, ostracisation, resentment, blame, guilt and the need to "endure" each other.
There is no such thing as a perfect family,
There can only be good families,
A good family is not one that can avoid mistakes and failure, but one that can embrace apologies and forgiveness as a timely response to disappointed expectations.
This is the heart of “The Corrections”,
There are no car chases, nobody gets shot, nobody goes to prison or a correctional facility, nobody gets bankrupted, nobody O.
D. s, nobody gets pregnant, nobody even gets divorced,
Yet, somehow, Franzen manages to nailst century families and by doing so he nailsst century society, because, since the beginning of time, families have been at the heart of society.
You cannot have a healthy society without healthy families,
It might be obvious, but it needs to be stated, even if at times Franzen states it too obviously.
.