Review:- East of Eden by John Steinbeck

This is the third Classics Circuit Tour I’ve participated in, and I’m ridiculously glad I discovered it. Every book I’ve read for a tour has not only been one that’s been sat on my shelves for far too long but has also been a book I’ve loved. This is exactly what happened with East of Eden.

Prior to this, the only Steinbeck I’d read was Of Mice and Men, which was unlike anything else I’d ever read in its’ depth of character and setting, not to mention the masterful build up of tension. It lulled me into a false sense of security and then knocked me for six; I had to go back and re-read the ending three times before I could fully take it in. Given that Of Mice and Men is so very short though, I was unsure about Steinbeck’s ability to immerse me in landscape and story over a longer period of time, but I shouldn’t have been.

A basic synopsis of East of Eden would be that it tells the story of the Hamilton’s and the Trask's, and their lives in the Salinas Valley. It is the tale of unlikely friendships and unnatural actions, and is pretty much a study of all the weird and wonderful things human beings do.

Steinbeck is a brilliant and beautiful writer – possibly the most beautiful writer I have ever read, and I know people take issue with him for not writing about happy stuff, and for writing about ‘abnormal’ people, but for me it’s the emotion and the struggle which makes his writing so raw and cleansing to read. After finishing this novel, I am desperate to read more Steinbeck, which is odd because when I was younger, I started The Grapes of Wrath several times but could never get past the first few pages, and I also started East of Eden twice before finally settling down to it. I feel like reading Steinbeck is something you really have to commit to and focus on, because once I did that, it suddenly got really good.

East of Eden is basically about life in small town America, and Steinbeck portrays the history of the country through his characters. War is present in East of Eden, but it is removed from the story by virtue of letters. Adam serves in the army and hates it. He doesn’t understand the point of killing, and so it’s ironic that he is then suckered in by Cathy Ames; murderess, adulteress, and at the very least, sociopath. At the heart of the story lie Samuel Hamilton and Adam Trask, but the reason for the story to be told at all, and the primary motivation for much of what many of the characters suffer and do, is Cathy – both her presence, and the fallout it creates.

Following the death of her parents in a thinly veiled arsonous house fire, Cathy becomes the mistress of a brothel owner, thinking she can make him do what she wants, but when he sees through her she finds herself badly beaten and in need of help. Injured, she drags herself to the doorstep of Charles and Adam Trask. Charles remains suspicious, but Adam takes pity on her and nurses her back to health, eventually marrying her. Adam and Cathy relocate to the Salinas Valley, where Cathy gives birth to twins, eventually named Caleb and Aron, before leaving them and their father for good. She goes on to commit many other heinous acts, without a single moment of redemption. She does provide the counterpoint for judgement of all the other characters in the novel, all of whom are flawed, but none to such a chronically soulless extreme as Cathy. The way that Adam and his sons never stop wanting her, while she barely thinks of them and has no qualms about how much she hurts them, was painful. Towards the end of the novel Adam is finally freed from her hold over him, and I nearly cheered.

For me, possibly the most important relationship in the novel, though, was the relationship between first Samuel Hamilton, and later Adam Trask and Lee. Lee is an educated Chinese man with a capacity for logic and the dream of some day owning a bookstore, in a period where most Americans apparently expected the opposite to be the case. He is the glue holding the Trask family together. When Adam fall apart after Cathy leaves, it is Lee who raises the boys, and Samuel Hamilton who knocks sense back into Adam and makes him behave like a father.

Interestingly, Samuel Hamilton was a real person; John Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather, and Steinbeck himself makes a (very) brief appearance in the novel. The inspiration for the novel apparently came from the book of Genesis, from the story of Cain and Abel. This is mentioned in the novel, and Adam is quite rightly dubious about the overtones suggested if he calls his children Cain and Abel, although this cleverly does rear its head throughout Caleb and Aron’s relationship, and have a brilliant bearing on the ending. It is noteworthy, though that their initials are still C and A. The religious template ties in with first Adam, and then Cal’s striving for forgiveness and acceptance, and also with the struggles in the relationship of the twins.

It’s not a book that makes you want to read it for its happiness, but one that absorbs you in the lives and troubles of its characters and leaves you hoping against hope that the good in the characters will win out. It shows the struggles of real, flawed people, and I think that’s what made the book so thoroughly enjoyable for me.

Thanks again to Rebecca at the Classics Circuit for hosting such brilliant events, and keeping classics on our TBR's! My companions today are Laura's Reviews and The Blue Bookcase, so if you haven't been following the tour so far, start now! :-)

Review: - A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I thought it was about time that I a) read this book that people have been raving about for ages, and b) read another book for the Back to the Classics Challenge. As this won the Pullitzer Prize, it fulfills that criteria, and I got all excited when the local library got it in for me. It's taken me a while to review it, as it took me a while to work out what I actually thought about it. That, and I'm just lazy...

It's a very odd book, and I've been having trouble writing a summary for it. Ostensibly, it reads like a series of short stories, in which each chapter is about a character from the previous chapter, but not necessarily the character who appears to be the 'main' or 'focal' character from that chapter. Starting out, this made it very odd reading for me, as it really throws you into the mix, and doesn't allow you to focus. This meant that I didn't really realise that the story was still developing in the way that stories always do, until about halfway through the novel. It was great; like the sneak night attack of the storyline.

This is the synopsis, from Goodreads:

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.

I've also been (vaguely) discussing this book as part of the Goodreads book club, which has been interesting. Egan's characters are very vivid, and her style is at times quite conversational. She takes strands which seem completely unrelated, and weaves them together, creating many somewhat explosive moments, where I'd find myself sitting back, staring at the page going 'hang on, what just happened?'. I love it when books do this to me!

Egan's characters range from the very young, to the very old; from those who are vividly alive, to those who are literally at death's door. Her settings range all over the world, and she depicts people from all kinds of lifestyles. Reading A Visit from the Goon Squad was in many ways, like getting a snapshot of the most vivid sections of society. Overall, it does really chart the lives of Bennie and Sasha, the characters it starts out with, from when they are very young, throughout their lives. It shows the rise and fall of Bennie, and the fall and rise of Sasha. The thing I enjoyed the most was that Egan gives each character a distinctive hook, from Sasha's kleptomania, and Bennie's inability to drink coffee without gold flakes in it (reflecting his obsession with his diminishing libido), to the voice she gives to younger characters, such as Rhea - currently there's an ongoing debate on Goodreads about whether using 'he goes/she goes' instead of 'he/she said' is annoying or authentic. Personally I'm in the authentic camp - I know I never used 'said' until very very recently, and in fact from time to time, I still slip back to 'goes' when telling stories. I also use 'like' far too much in sentences, but that's really a story for another day.

So, summary. I loved this book. It was so unique and well drawn, and stylistically different from pretty much everything I've ever read before. I would recommend that everybody give it a go, and stick with it when you think you'll hate it - especially the weird bit at the end when the entire book flips the other way around... it's worth it!

Rating: *****

The Classics Circuit - Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have to admit to total ignorance of what the Lost Generation actually was, until I started to do some research as background to reading Tender is the Night . I’ve read a fair amount of English literature over the years, but not so much American. Pretty much the only author I’d read from this generation is Eliot, because he’s also classed as English Literature. Following on from this tour, many of the Lost Generation will join the ever-expanding TBR list. People who have participated in, or been keeping up with the tour (or who are just more educated about American literature than I am, which is not hard. English literature, I’m great at. American, not so much...) will know all about it, so I won’t reiterate, but just say thanks to  Rebecca for giving me the chance to learn about it, as well as to finally read a book that’s been sat on the shelf for literally years!

The idea that stuck with me as I read the novel , was that many of the writers of this generation had left America, in pursuit of artistic freedom and new experiences. To me, the word ‘lost’ in particular implies something in transmission, waiting to be found, to define itself. The generation who fought in the war were often either physically lost, through death or injury, or else lost in the new structure of society. Tender is the Night  felt like it was lost, drifting, trying to find its way home... There is a lot of power in the fragmented style of the novel, and, for the first time in almost three years, I finished the book and immediately wanted to go back and read it again, as I know that there was a lot that I missed. It also immediately threw me back to an excruciating course on Modernism that I took at university - just to give you an idea, Ulysses and The Waste Land were required reading. I don’t know too much about American literature, and because of this Modernism, primarily a European movement, with its emphasis on finding new forms of expression, and discussion of the change and breakdown of society and social structures, was the thing that immediately leapt to mind when thinking about the post – war years. Despite being part of this specific American generation of writers, Tender is the Night fits well into the Modernist tradition, particularly for it’s’ denial of previously accepted absolute truths such as love and marriage, and emphasis on the temporary nature of everything, from money, to love, to sanity itself.

Previous to reading this, my only experience of Fitzgerald was of falling in love with The Great Gatsby while at college. When I first started Tender is the Night , I was worried that the Gatsby love was just a fling, brought on by my first experiences of a proper academic library, combined with my first forays into the world of literature proper, but after a while I realised that, no, I actually just love Fitzgerald’s style.

Tender is the Night was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel, and it reads as if it were a goodbye. It is, as many people have noted, basically an autobiography of the Fitzgerald marriage – Zelda Fitzgerald was hospitalised with schizophrenia, just as Nicole Diver is in the book, and Fitzgerald himself had problems with alcohol, as does Dick Diver.

It focuses on Dick Diver, a psychiatrist, and his wife Nicole, whom he first meets as a schizophrenia patient at a clinic in Zurich. Their relationship is the crux of the novel, and is expanded through the people that they surround themselves with. It shows very clearly, the almost bipolar extremities of the Divers’ relationship. In the beginning, Dick feels that he can protect Nicole; from the world, her past, herself. She needs holding together, and he is the one to do that. However, throughout the novel the dynamic of the relationship changes. Dick has affairs, most especially with Rosemary Hoyt, an actress, and Nicole, to some extent, allows this, but as the story progresses, and Nicole regains her sanity and strength, the dynamic changes, as she becomes the one to leave him. A lot happens during the course of the novel, but at the same time, not much: a duel, a murder, incest, affairs, marital breakdown, police brutality, and mental illness, are all part of its makeup, but still the story remains down to earth, rather than sensational, detached from reality, while all the time having a feeling of truth and relatibility about it.

I personally loved the way that the fragmented structure and style related to the cycles of sanity and insanity in the story. It begins in a coherent manner,  told through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, an actress, whom the Divers take into their ‘set’, and it is her impression of them that we’re first given. The second part of the novel jumps back in time to tell the story of Dick and Nicole, and Nicole’s breakdown becomes apparent in the breaking down of sentences and though patterns towards the end of the second part. As the book begins, Nicole is fragile, and unable to differentiate the real from the false , but as she manages to find her sanity, and break free from Dick, he descends increasingly into alcoholism and depression. One of the things that I really enjoyed, was that despite the central character being male, I really felt like the women won out in the end. Tender is the Night  seemed to me to be a book which showed the strength of women. One of my favourite passages was fairly early on in the book:

“Their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world – they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them” p45

At this point in history, where a woman’s role was fairly much still defined by men, especially if she was married, Fitzgerald is granting his women the privilege of existing within a male dominated world, but as individuals, rather than just as ‘wives’. The central story of the novel is Nicole’s regaining of her identity, and independence. At the end of the novel, Nicole is the strong, victorious one, and Dick, whose brilliance as a doctor is gone on and on about, throughout the story, fades into obscurity. The last lines of the novel are:

"in any case, he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another”p274

A few things I disliked, just to even it up, were how shallow most of the characters were, although I do appreciate that this is part of the society Fitzgerald is trying to represent. I also was annoyed by the fact that Nicole only left Dick in the end, because there was another man around who she knew loved her, and not because she had actually gained any real independence or ability to be her own person. That may just be the slightly ranty feminist in me coming out, though.

I often feel that many other bloggers think and process what they are reading much more than I do. Like, my brain got me through 3 years of university, and then just gave up and died. Reading Tender is the Night made me feel like it had come alive again. I actually immersed myself in it, I read slowly, trying to take in every single word (I’m usually a terrible skimmer!), I revelled in all the natural scenery; the sea, the mountains, the vivid imagery, and I loved every single second, from about page 40 onwards.

Having read Booksploring’s  review of Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me The Waltz, I think that this will have to be my next read!

The Man who Would be King and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling

In my last post, I wrote about the difficulty I was having wading through this book, short as it is. Well, I've finally finished it, and it's taken me a week. I am literally so relieved to be done! That being said, at no point did I feel like giving up on it. On paper, the collection is the kind of thing I should really love: the women and children are the heroes, and the men, mostly, are fairly useless. However, and for no reason I can work out, it just didn't grab my attention like a lot of the things I've been reading lately have. While reading it, I could see all of its' literary merit, and that it was very well written and structured. I think that maybe I just didn't relate to it too well. Having said that, the stories that I enjoyed the most (and actually got through without counting how many pages it was until the end!) were the ones featuring children as the central protagonists, and heroic characters. Most notably, 'Wee Willie Winkie', 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', and 'His Majesty the King'. They all showed the way that children unconsciously relate and respond to adults, and also, their resourcefulness, bravery, and the pain that they can go through as a result of adults not always understanding them. I think what I liked the most about these three stories was the authenticity of the children's voices. As opposed to the adult characters in other stories, they were very genuine and guileless, rather than contrived and manipulating, which is how many of the adults came across.
Oddly enough, I've not been put off wanting to read more Kipling. I'd still like to give 'The Jungle Books', and 'Kim' a go, but I think it will be a while before I attempt another one...

Rating: ***