OU blog

Personal Blogs

Patrick Andrews

Jonathon Frantzen's "Freedom"

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Patrick Andrews, Tuesday, 5 Apr 2011, 10:17

I have recently finished this novel and it is interesting that he seems to be quite quotable in materials about language - he is featured in the E303 materials and I have used extracts from "The Corrections" in my face to face materials and some distance learning materials I wrote a few years ago.  I suspect this novel will also be used by materials writers.

In  particular, one of the main characters writes an autobiography featured near the beginning and later at the end of the book.  The title of this is "Mistakes were made" and this made me wonder why it was not "I made mistakes" or "The mistakes I made" in the first extract.  However, in the second extract, it becomes clear that it was not just the writer of the autobiography who made mistakes.

This is just one example of issues in the novel where the forms are significant for the meaning of the whole novel.

 

 

Permalink Add your comment
Share post