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Loading... Their Eyes Were Watching Godby Zora Neale Hurston
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Classic novel of African American woman, and her life. ( )I put off reading this book because I didn't figure my profile fits the target audience but I was wrong. The author and I may differ skin color and gender; however, neither of us panders much to anybody. Hurston wrote with truth and many did not like hearing such a thing. Country White folk sound much like country Black folk but another author of the era, Richard Wright, thought Hurston was dumbing down Blacks. Use of phonetic spellings does make the book difficult to read and I could have used some easier to read narrative but I see why she wrote with such style. Hurston's love/hate relationship with Black men probably irritated Wright. Hurston shows good and bad exists regardless of skin or gender, like I said she does not pander. [Their Eyes Were Watching God] is an incredible book about a woman's struggle to find herself, and to also find love. Janie is the main character of the story and she's a young woman looking for love, She ends up marrying a man just to impress her dying grandmother.The relationship does not work, and she leaves him for another man she knew for a few days. Her new relationship is going great until the new man begins to show his true colors. He does not treat her too well, but he dies in the end. Last she meets another man.He really keeps her interest, and she is attracted to him. They get together , and it works out. I would recommend this to someone who has had relationship problems in the past. This book shows that it is possible for anyone to find love no matter how many mistakes you make along the way, It took me a little while to get into the rhythm of the book, but oh my goodness, when I did...the writing was absolutely stunning. I loved Janie's progression, how she learned about love and life. This was my third of fourth time reading this book. When I heard O was doing a movie version of it, I had to read it again to refresh. I was kind of surprised they left out the skin-tone issues...maybe 'cause Tea Cake's character in the movie wasn't dark-skinned like he was in the book. I don't think you can read this one too many times. Every time the experience is different...especially if you read it at different stages in your life like I have...young teen, older teen, married woman, etc. It's such a rich work of fiction. Please visit http://www.HomeGirl.typepad.com for more book reviews. 0.040 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 0060931418, Paperback)At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either: It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf." Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. --Alix Wilber (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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