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Loading... The Grapes of Wrath (1939)by John Steinbeck
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I'm sure I can't say anything about his that hasn't already been said, so I'll stick to my personal impressions. Stephen King says that even the villains are heroes in their own lives and he writes them that way. They might not be likeable, but you know why they do what they do. Not so here. I am a bit surprised that Steinbeck made the capitalists completely unsympathetic. Completely. Unsympathetic. Evil, in fact. The Joads are heroic in their struggle to find work to make money to have food. They are not all likable, but I identified strongly with them, which is what Steinbeck meant for the reader to do. This is an unrelenting journey of hardship and more hardship. It's not a happy story in any sense of the word. I actually found myself starting to pray for them at one point, that's how strongly this story affected me. ;-) When Tom speaks his mind, I cheer. The only comic relief is Tom telling someone to suck it up or joking about weather predictions. There is a certain humor that comes out of people when they are at the end of their rope and it comes across here, intentional or not. The workers' plight is made abundantly clear and sympathetic. Steinbeck wrote from his research of meeting and staying amongst people like the Joad's in labor camps, so you can believe what you're reading. An interesting thing to me was the structure of the novel. For the most part it is told in 3rd person omniscient from the Joads' point of view. But that is interspersed with sections of a kind of overview of the situation, for example showing the used car salesmen's point of view as they put sand in transmissions so the car will seem okay for a while and sell. Steinbeck uses repetion to give these sections a poetic or lyric kind of feel. They are brilliant and give a kind of an impersonal, panorama wide angle view of things. I give it four stars because it gives all it has to make the reader feel for the workers, but most of the characters are not really developed, which would make it a better story. I will never forget this and I highly recommend it. These things still go on. For migrant workers (yes there still are migrant workers) and to all of us in one way or another. Please never forget that money (greed) is the root of all evil. The best book that I've ever read. A well told saga. Not the brightest times in California history. Not a book I would have picked up by myself, but as with all school books probably something I would have enjoyed more if I had? However, I have to admit reading it from a political ecology perspective was interesting: we do see a lot of the themes like land grabbing and capitalism forcing people to work for slave wages still today. I do think some editing of it would have been nice. Hey, I'm not gonna say a nobel prize winner can't write, Steinbeck obviously does and has a way with words that on occasion even made me laugh. But dude, COME ON, your characters do not have to repeat the same statement over and over and over again, you don't need to describe fivehundred different fields just because they have different crops growing on them. Just, come on. Book could have been 1/3 shorter and still have the same plot. The between chapters setting the tone were also kind of weird to me, especially the dialogue written without markers. The ending was also super-weird, but I guess it's meant to be open and let you imagine what happens next. I assume they all starve to death during the winter. Even so, it was a weird fucking place to end it in, if you ask me. Title still a bit of mystery. Not a single angry grape in entire book. Very confusing.
35 livres cultes à lire au moins une fois dans sa vie Quels sont les romans qu'il faut avoir lu absolument ? Un livre culte qui transcende, fait réfléchir, frissonner, rire ou pleurer… La littérature est indéniablement créatrice d’émotions. Si vous êtes adeptes des classiques, ces titres devraient vous plaire. De temps en temps, il n'y a vraiment rien de mieux que de se poser devant un bon bouquin, et d'oublier un instant le monde réel. Mais si vous êtes une grosse lectrice ou un gros lecteur, et que vous avez épuisé le stock de votre bibliothèque personnelle, laissez-vous tenter par ces quelques classiques de la littérature. Seventy years after The Grapes of Wrath was published, its themes – corporate greed, joblessness – are back with a vengeance. ... The peaks of one's adolescent reading can prove troughs in late middle age. Life moves on; not all books do. But 50 years later, The Grapes of Wrath seems as savage as ever, and richer for my greater awareness of what Steinbeck did with the Oklahoma dialect and with his characters. It is Steinbeck's best novel, i.e., his toughest and tenderest, his roughest written and most mellifluous, his most realistic and, in its ending, his most melodramatic, his angriest and most idyllic. It is "great" in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin was great—because it is inspired propaganda, half tract, half human-interest story, emotionalizing a great theme. Steinbeck has written a novel from the depths of his heart with a sincerity seldom equaled. It may be an exaggeration, but it is the exaggeration of an honest and splendid writer. Mr. Steinbeck's triumph is that he has created, out of a remarkable sympathy and understanding, characters whose full and complete actuality will withstand any scrutiny. Belongs to Publisher SeriesDelfinserien (162) dtv (10474) — 21 more Keltainen kirjasto (11) Keltainen pokkari (25) Lanterne (L 272) Nobelpreisträger Coron-Verlag (weiß) (1962 (USA)) Penguin Modern Classics (833) Tascabili Bompiani (496) Zephyr Books (28) Is contained inContainsHas the adaptationIs abridged inWas inspired byInspiredHas as a studyHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guideHas as a teacher's guide
"Traces the migration of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family to California and their subsequent hardships as migrant farm workers."--Amazon.com. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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The picture of Oklahoma we see on the opening page of the novel is filled with color, but even in the first paragraph the dark side of nature is seen as, "The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread anymore." Followed in the next paragraph by, "The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots." they seem to be waiting for better days. The corn and the flowers fare even worse.(p 1)
The view of capitalism portrayed is one that is dark and foreboding in the images presented to the reader. This presentation is not direct, but one can infer from the people and actions presented the worldview behind it. The first member of the Joad family we meet is young Tom Joad as he is released from a prison and approaches a truck with a windshield displaying the welcoming "No Riders" sign. This is the face of capitalism, ameliorated slightly by the trucker who takes a chance on losing his job to give Tom a ride. In Chapter 5 we see the "owners of the land", all of whom were "caught in something larger than themselves."(p 31) Namely, the mathematics of the capitalist system, a system that breeds monsters:
"The tractors came over the fields and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. . . Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines." (p 35)
So much for the world of idyllic poverty. The Joads were on the road west, for better or worse, toward California. What can we make of such a world that is turned upside down? Perhaps further thoughts on this reading will reveal some clues as to the meaning of such a stark beginning. (