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Loading... The Good Earth (Oprah's Book Club) (edition 2004)by Pearl S. Buck (Author)
Work InformationThe Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Right. So...I really liked this book quite a bit. Except that it really made me mad a lot of the time. I kept thinking, "Aw. Good. Now i can like the main charactor." And then he'd do something stupid again, and i'd be mad at him all over again. Totally stereotypical old Asian man. Gr. But. I really loved O-Lan. I'd love to read a whole book written from her point of view. This is the story of a poor farmer who married a slave girl. Buck was the daughter of missionaries in the late 1890s through the early 1900s, and so I don’t doubt she describes the average life of a poor man in China, and the role of women. Perhaps it is so striking to know that the book may accurately describe the treatment of women then. The farmer, a hard worker with immense love of the earth, becomes prosperous thanks to his wife’s stoic selfless sacrifices she makes to work the fields beside her husband up to the moments of giving birth. She was endlessly giving of herself. But the farmer only belatedly learned her value only after breaking her heart for years. I was hoping this was a story of love and sacrifice, but it became a story of what happens when a hardworking-successful man cares more about what others think than the one who saved him in the first place. Belongs to SeriesBelongs to Publisher SeriesI libri del pavone [Mondadori] (32-33) Modern Library (15) Is contained inContainsHas the adaptationIs abridged inHas as a student's study guideHas as a teacher's guideAwardsNotable Lists
Classic Literature.
Fiction.
HTML: This Pulitzer Prize-winning classic tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought force them to seek work in the city. The working people riot, breaking into the homes of the rich and forcing them to flee. When Wang Lung shows mercy to one noble and is rewarded, he begins to rise in the world, even as the House of Hwang falls. .No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Besides Iowa, why is it that we romanticize those days so much? For my money, there's a very profound appeal of a time when it seemed like life was so much simpler, when you worked with your hands to get what you needed. Especially in this day and age, where I'm sitting at a desk typing this into a computer, but the sentimental attachment to that time seems to have been around for quite a while, because when Pearl Buck won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, the Dust Bowl hadn't even happened yet.
The Good Earth takes place in China in the early 1900s, and tells the story of the rise and subsequent decline of Wang Lung. A peasant farmer, the book opens with his marriage to O-Lan, a former slave for the Hwang family (the wealthiest landowners in the town close to where Wang Lung lives). O-Lan is not beautiful or clever, but she's just as hard of a worker as Wang Lung himself, and together the two of them manage to run his farm well enough that they are able to buy some of the Hwang's lands. They have two sons, but just after their first daughter is born, a terrible famine strikes. When there is no longer anything to eat and the countryside is turning to cannibalism to survive, the family sells most of their possessions (but Wang Lung refuses to sell their land) and moves south to survive through cheap labor and begging in the city. When a peasant uprising happens, Wang Lung and O-Lan grab money and jewels and return north. Having learned a powerful lesson about having reserves, the family buys the rest of the Hwang land and farms diligently, to the point where Wang Lung is wealthy and can send his children to school instead of keeping them in the fields. Indeed, soon Wang Lung himself doesn't need to be in the fields, and that's when the problems start.
The book is not subtle about its equation of land and manual labor with virtue...the farther removed Wang Lung and his family get from the labor of their own hands on the earth they own, the farther they morally decline. Wang Lung becomes infatuated with a spoiled young prostitute and buys her for a concubine, putting aside his faithful wife. His school-educated sons marry petty women and have no interest in farming or running their father's holdings...like the once-wealthy and powerful Hwangs in the beginning, they just want to get rid of the land and seeking their fortunes elsewhere. It's actually pretty socialist in its depiction of money as evil and corrupting and the glorification of the proletariat lifestyle.
At the end of the day, I just didn't like it very much. The characters aren't people, they're symbols who are used to illustrate Buck's parable. And they're not even particularly compelling symbols: Wang Lung is never all that sympathetic, O-Lan is a doormat, the sketchy uncle and his wife are terrible and gross right from the start. If reading all that Joseph Campbell recently taught me anything, it's that symbols done right can be incredibly powerful (for instance, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, and I'm specifically referring here to the great film rather than the mediocre book, tells a similar story about a man who becomes what he once despised in a much more interesting and emotionally resonant way). Not so here for me. The writing is solid, but not anything special enough to drive interest in the lack of a good story and characters. This particular piece of classic literature (which is a genre I've been exploring over the past few years) doesn't do it for me. ( )