I know that brother on brother violence fueled by envy is as old as the bible, but I've only read a few books where it is as quick, pure, and gory as Ender's Game. In part three of the third chapter of East of Eden, I got the same feeling. A feeling so similar that I'm really curious if this was one of the books that informed OSC's approach to the Ender/Peter relationship. There is something about the manner in which the scene was handled in both books that makes me wonder if OSC likes Steinbeck as a writer.
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Irami...If you like "East of Eden", you really should read "Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters". These are the letters to his publisher that Steinbeck wrote each day as a warm-up before he began work on the text of the novel. He habitualy wrote these, in pencil, on the pages opposite the pages where he wrote the text, in a large bound journal book. It is a fascinating look at Steinbeck, both as a writer and as an individual.
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I have been in quite a series "reading slump" for the past couple of years--I simply don't read as many books as I use to, but every once in a while I force myself to pick a heavy, series book just to stay in the groove, and last month it was East of Eden, and I adored every page of it.
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*dreamy sigh* I love Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath is one of my most favorite books ever. I love EE too - I just find parts of it difficult to read. Cathy is so evil, and to watch that spread through a family is heartbreaking. Oh, and the man who lives with Adam and the twins (I forget his name) - the story of his birth! Beauty that comes in the midst of suffering is a wonderous thing to behold - I just find it unpalatable sometimes. But of course, if Steinbeck had been anyone else I suppose it wouldn't have affected me so.
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I'm impressed with Steinbeck's use of Cathy. He introduced her as a monster, from the beginning she was a monster born from human parents. She was a deviant, an aberration, who was fundamentally different.
The Cathy chapters are not about Cathy. They are about the people who have a responsibility to Cathy, teachers, parents, and would be suitors, people whose duty, joy, and purpose should be their involvement with her life, and how her corrupting influence is intravenous poison to those people, and how each individual's constitution reacts according to their rearing and understanding of the world. Cathy is kind of like the ring, and the real story is how everyone reacts to her.
She is a natural disaster whichs tests everyone's mettle. She is war personified, the beast which these people must confront. She is at once external because there is nothing these people did to cause her, and she is internal, because there is nothing that they can do to get rid of their responsibility to her.
Imagine that your kid is the one who orchestrated the Mai Lai massacre or the Columbine shootings, what do you do with the rest of your life?
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I'm at 174, and the bottom fell out about a hundred pages ago. I've been reading on faith and there is something wrong with that.
Something happened when Cathy moved in with Adam and Charles, energy of the hundred page exposition left, which was bad enough, but on top of this, I'm not curious about of the characters.
Adam has become mooneyed in a way that's not only unvirtuous, but a little bit boring, Cathy only works as a spoiler and Adam is already over-ripe, and if the rest of the book is just Adam being wronged, I don't know if I can summon the will to care.
The Hamiltons are the only story left. Olive isn't nearly as interesting as I believe that she is supposed to be, I imagine that Tom is going to be the one to watch, but I'm ready for Steinbeck to more him to the fore.
The beginning of the book was full of the characters thinking, caring and acting. Every one now has been feeling and opining, maybe it's just that the character's concerns don't hold sway with me anymore.
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The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay did the same thing to me. Up until Joe went to Antartica, that was just about the best book I'd read all year, then it just kind of stopped and became regular with an outline of its former greatness.
The development sections are a pain. It makes me think that books shouldn't have them.
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It turned out it was just a hundred page funk. It got good again halfway through chapter 17 has stayed good since.
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That was a book, and I can feel my mortality. I feel like I just read the entire expanse of a handfull of lives, and it left me wondering if everything I do and say and live and feel and understand is fit to fill 600 pages.
It's going to take me a few days to turn this over in my brain. There is a part of me that thinks that Cal was just another dude, but the way the book is structured, I'm having a hard time judging and making sense of it all. Well done, Mr. Steinbeck.
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I like Cannery Row and the sequel, but other than that Steinbeck is awfully wordy. Those two he condensed stuff down more I think because they are so much shorter.
Following the connection between the two patriach's influences, Trask's money and Hamilton's wisdom, is fascinating.
And I'm still putting the structure together in my head, from beginning to end, it's an impressively tight work. Themes are consistent, and Aron's make-believe world is really well-executed. I'm impressed, and this is going to stick with me for a while, for all of the right reasons. It's really, really deep.
The Journal is wonderful. I haven't read anything of its kind. It's like watching a DVD commentary for a book. Steinbeck put so much thought into the structure and the form of the novel so that he could make it sound casual and ride on the strength of the structure.
He started with a rough idea of the characters, the themes, and the ending. Then he wrote the book backwards all with an eye to revealing the dignity and beauty of the finale. He introduced the themes and repeated them with shadings and subtleties and differences because no two characters are alike, and the themes manifest in different ways based on the orientation of the characters. It's wonderful.
These letters are glorious because they show Steinbeck's powerful mind and his playful humor. They also show one of the problems with being an autodidact, although Steinbeck was impressively self-taught by the great writers and admits that he stole every technique and story he could find and for good reason, he writes, roughly when talking about Cathy, "I don't think that anyone has ever put this paper, but what is fascinating and rife with implications is that from the perspective of a monster, everyone else is a monster, also."
Steinbeck writes this with an honest wonder and energy without knowing that Aristotle and Isocrates spilled a quart full of ink on this very phenomenon.
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As an aside, this really has me thinking about the influence of cultural narratives. Will Kymlicka does a herculian job of introducing the understanding that cultural traditions and narratives are the vehicles by which a person's decisions present themselves to the person. These cultural traditions and narratives inform ones sense of propriety, along with everyday experience. And the bigger and the deeper the narrative, the richer the sense of dignity.
I'm of the opinion that American cultural narratives and traditions are all to be brought into harmony with the white protestant man's sense of propriety. Since this sense of propriety includes the same attitudes which presided over all manners of atrocities, it puts ethnic minorities and women in a tough spot, along with gays and left-handers, because the entire host of decisions that are brought before our mind do not jive with our everyday experience or sense of propriety. There is a disharmony. Along with that, an indignity and alienation. I think that American blacks are autodidacts in western morality. And with all autodidacts, there is going to be a sloppiness and spottiness and confusion, but I think it will end well, or at least appropriately.
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In all fairness, Irami, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any code of morality which did not preside over awful acts of atrocity.
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I fully agree. The problem could be in the codifying. Was it Audubon who stuffed birds in order to paint them to be life-like, instead of painting them in the wild? Things codify are often pinned down and killed. I don't know if that holds to all things in all manners, but it seems to be a real danger to dignity and propriety.
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