Wednesday reading
I never do that Wednesday reading meme that goes around ... except this Wednesday I actually thought of it in time, and I'm reading something fairly interesting, so!
I'm reading John Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters and, concurrently, East of Eden. I didn't actually set out to read East of Eden; I'd gotten Journal of a Novel from the library, because, hey, interesting process book -- it's the journal Steinbeck kept while he was writing the novel -- and I checked out EoE at the same time because I've never read it and figured it might be a good idea to have it handy so I could read passages as they were mentioned. Except now I'm 500 pages into EoE (which is only about halfway through, because this book is the size of at least two normal books) and I can't stop reading, help. I love a strong sense of place and this book is pretty much all sense of place; he set out to write the definitive Salinas Valley novel, so the land is as much a character as the people in the book. And his prose is absolutely gorgeous -- simple and clear and graceful.
I've occasionally complained about literary fiction often being pointlessly serious and depressing, and EoE contains the most fascinating (and almost certainly accidental) meta-commentary I've ever seen. The book follows two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, one of which is Steinbeck's family (very thinly fictionalized) and the other is, I presume, wholly fictional. And his style changes as he moves back and forth between them in a way that's very interesting to me. The Hamiltons (his mother's family) are complicated and loving, often funny and sometimes tragic in the pointless way that real life can be. And then we go back to the Trasks for a couple chapters of DEPRESSING BIBLICAL METAPHORS MURDER ANGST AND WOMEN ARE EVIL BY THE WAY. To at least some extent I know (from reading Journal of a Novel) that he's doing it on purpose -- contrasting the happier family against the less happy family -- but it's really interesting to me how much more nuanced and compelling and funny the Hamiltons are, especially when he's drawing on actual events and personality conflicts that he remembers from childhood or from his family's recollections. And the Trasks are comparatively very flat and gloomy and tragic on an operatic scale. The Hamiltons often make you stop and smile. The Trasks don't. They are SERIOUS LITERARY CHARACTERS, BY GOLLY, while the Hamiltons are just regular folks kind of hanging out in this novel. Consequently the Hamiltons are a lot more interesting.
This entry is also posted at http://sholio.dreamwidth.org/940772.html with
comments.
I'm reading John Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters and, concurrently, East of Eden. I didn't actually set out to read East of Eden; I'd gotten Journal of a Novel from the library, because, hey, interesting process book -- it's the journal Steinbeck kept while he was writing the novel -- and I checked out EoE at the same time because I've never read it and figured it might be a good idea to have it handy so I could read passages as they were mentioned. Except now I'm 500 pages into EoE (which is only about halfway through, because this book is the size of at least two normal books) and I can't stop reading, help. I love a strong sense of place and this book is pretty much all sense of place; he set out to write the definitive Salinas Valley novel, so the land is as much a character as the people in the book. And his prose is absolutely gorgeous -- simple and clear and graceful.
I've occasionally complained about literary fiction often being pointlessly serious and depressing, and EoE contains the most fascinating (and almost certainly accidental) meta-commentary I've ever seen. The book follows two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, one of which is Steinbeck's family (very thinly fictionalized) and the other is, I presume, wholly fictional. And his style changes as he moves back and forth between them in a way that's very interesting to me. The Hamiltons (his mother's family) are complicated and loving, often funny and sometimes tragic in the pointless way that real life can be. And then we go back to the Trasks for a couple chapters of DEPRESSING BIBLICAL METAPHORS MURDER ANGST AND WOMEN ARE EVIL BY THE WAY. To at least some extent I know (from reading Journal of a Novel) that he's doing it on purpose -- contrasting the happier family against the less happy family -- but it's really interesting to me how much more nuanced and compelling and funny the Hamiltons are, especially when he's drawing on actual events and personality conflicts that he remembers from childhood or from his family's recollections. And the Trasks are comparatively very flat and gloomy and tragic on an operatic scale. The Hamiltons often make you stop and smile. The Trasks don't. They are SERIOUS LITERARY CHARACTERS, BY GOLLY, while the Hamiltons are just regular folks kind of hanging out in this novel. Consequently the Hamiltons are a lot more interesting.
This entry is also posted at http://sholio.dreamwidth.org/940772.html with
comments.