Wow, I’m reading “East of Eden.” Does anyone else remember it being such an amazing, lovely character sketch as I’m getting from it? Granted, I’m one of those people in awe of lovely descriptive poetic prose who I suppose only has a rudimentary education. But I’d love to talk to others like me.
It seems so beautiful to me and the characters seem so well rounded. I can see why this is a classic…even though I find it an easy read.
Poor Abra.
L
“Oh, but the strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!”
A lot of great stuff in it, such as the above. I’d have to fault it for being heavy-handed with its symbolism, compared to “The Grapes of Wrath,” which managed to be an epic with much less showy effort (and which avoided going over the top until the very last page, when Rose of Sharon suckles the starving man.)
Besides the drawback of being written too obviously for a certain select readership in Sweden, what was good about “East of Eden” was how Steinbeck depicted the late 19th century in the same morose tone of many of the Naturalist writers of that same era. And, as always, he was able to make the landscape of the Central Coast come alive in the readers mind. The Chinese scholars poring over the Talmud was also an entertaining way of getting the final theme of “timshel” into the story.