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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of my all time favorites, March 13, 1998
By A Customer
I love John Gardner's work. The only time I can remember being really angry at the death of a "famous" person was when Gardner cracked up his bike. I felt as though I had been betrayed. It isn't just his adult fiction; his books on writing are incredible, his biography of Chaucer is fascinating, his so-called children's books are friggin' wonderful. I've read _Freddy's Book_ six or seven times. It is both the most readable and most difficult book I've ever encountered. I've made three different book groups read and discuss it, which has been a challenge as it's been out of print for awhile. (On the other hand, the book groupies seemed to think it was worth the effort of scouring the 2nd hand bookstores). I still don't understand it all--parts yes. It's a much easier book to read than some of Gardner's other novels (_The Sunlight Dialogues_ comes to mind) but I believe it's his best. When I read Brooks Hansen's novel, _The Chess Garden_, I wondered if he was familiar with Freddy. Although the two books are very different, they are also very similar. I almost never give 10s, but this is a wonderful book. (Now someone is going to dig up a copy to read, and then write a review questioning my sanity/taste/intelligence. Which is why I never take anyone's ratings, including my own, *too* seriously.)
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The subversive child-monster in John Gardner's fiction, March 29, 2008
In the years after John Gardner published "On Moral Fiction," his notorious and often misunderstood book arguing for a realism in fiction that tests human ideas through lifelike characters and situations, he seemed to temper his arguments and even backtrack a bit. About "Freddy's Book," the follow-up novel to his controversial work, he admitted in an interview, "I guess in an unconscious way I was trying to say what my earlier argument left out." Indeed, at times the tale seems a partial renunciation; while fascinating and even profound, "Freddy's Book" is as much a hall of mirrors as a novel, blending in unlikely ways the grotesque and the pragmatic, the allegorical and the literal, the medieval and the modern. The first part of the novel begins when Jack Winesap, a "psycho-historian," visits the old-guard Scandinavian medievalist Sven Agaard, who scorns "trying to learn history from fairy tales" and prefers the "old fashioned ideal of history. Hard-won facts, incontrovertible proofs." Taking a page from Gardner's own essays on fiction, Agaard argues that history done properly "would make us better men" ("and women," he corrects himself). But Agaard's house and career are haunted by a "monster" locked away in a room--a son with an endocrinological condition who writes "vaguely historical" prose and turns his father's scholarship into fairy tales. The second half of the book is Freddy's tale itself, featuring the sixteenth-century Swedish King Gustav, Gustav's fictional cousin Lars-Goren Berquist, the nihilistic Bishop Brast, and the Devil. While Gustav fuels his rise by negotiating a Faustian bargain with Satan, Lars-Goren understands that the well-being of civilization depends on slaying the dragon, so to speak. At the end of the tale, however, emanations of a modern, non-supernatural evil (all the more powerful for being completely human) approach from the east. Freddy and his "book" are two tales that, taken together, comment on the nature of history and historiography, author and subject, writer and writing--yet the book's surprising lack of closure (the reader is left imagining what might have become of Winesap, Agaard, and Freddy) underscores that each half is only casually linked with the other. At the same time, Gardner seems almost to mock the dichotomy between his criticism and his own fiction; there is always a "monster" in Gardner's attic sneaking into his stories and novels with new-fangled flavors of "psychohistory," be it fabulism or caricature or metafiction. The book's contradictory, ambiguous impulses keep it from being among his best, but its subtle acknowledgments of the unavoidable paradox between fiction and realism serve as a valuable coda to Gardner's work.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On par with Grendel., March 12, 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: Freddy's Book (Mass Market Paperback)
I leave this for other readers of Gardner, especially those that have read Grendel. Don't stop. Freddy is as thought provoking, and funny. I have read others, October Light, etc. All are excellent. How did he do it? I mean think so clearly. And write so well. I think of Gardner as the American Camus. Browsing on his name in Amazon, I never realized he wrote so much. I note with some satisfaction that the book burners in my school district have tried to ban Grendel. And failed. His other books would really piss them off. Yet oddly, I find him to be a very moral writer. The reality of the existential nature of things can be truly frightening I guess. Maybe that's why I read authors like Gardner
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