At one level this book contains the story of a hard working farmer (i.e. peasant) in old agrarian China who together with his wife survives famines and floods and manages to raise a family, expand his land holdings, and in the end become a rich man. Many of the hardships faced by the characters in this story are caused by widespread poverty and flukes of nature. But some hardships are the result of traditional social customs which western readers will find cringeworthy—oppression of women, foot-binding, infanticide, selling of daughters as slaves, concubinage, opium use, civil unrest, and armed conflict including lawless bandits.

At another level the story coveys the significance of land as a source of wealth, and how wealth inevitably leads to corruption of morals and facilitates access to sensual pleasures and symbols of social status. The ultimate downfall of family status and wealth is foreshadowed early in the book by the demise of another wealthy family and the fact that near the end of the book our newly wealthy farmer moves into to former living quarters of that once rich family. Then this farmer's family begins to develop the same habits and internal conflicts that brought down the previous rich family.

This book is first of a trilogy that includes Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). The chronology of this story is not explicitly stated in this book. It seems to fit into an era of 1890s to 1930s.


The following short review is from the PageADay Book Lover's Calendar for January 30, 2018:

Set in China in the 1920s during the reign of the last emperor, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck is the story of Wang Lung, a farmer and peasant who marries one of the slaves of a wealthy house. O-Lan is the ideal wife for Wang—she works hard, and she bears his children. But when Wang begins to accumulate wealth, he is corrupted by prosperity, and he eventually makes a choice that will break O-Lan’s heart. This intricately woven rags-to-riches tale is a modern classic.
n  THE GOOD EARTH, nby Pearl S. Buck (193I; Washington Square, 2004)

The following are some quotations from the book.

Early in the book Wang Lung and his wife work together for long hours:

They worked on, moving together—together—producing the fruit of this earth.

The following quote is an explanation of Wang Lung's friend Ching as to why he participated with a group trying to rob his house. Ironically, Wang Lung himself participates in thievery from a rich man's house at a later time in the story.

Hunger makes thief of any man.

This following excerpt is from a heart breaking scene in the book. Wang Lung asks his wife to give him the pearls she's wearing so he can give them to his new concubine.

Then slowly she thrust her wet wrinkled hand into her bosom and she drew forth the small package and she gave it to him and watched him as he unwrapped it; and the pearls lay in his hand and they caught softly and fully the light of the sun, and he laughed. But O-lan returned to the beating of his clothes and when tears dropped slowly and heavily from her eyes she did not put up her hand to wipe them away; only she beat the more steadily with her wooden stick upon the clothes spread over the stone.

The following is from the end of the book when Wang Lung exclaims how important it is that the land never be sold. The reader knows that the sons will sell the land as soon as he dies.

Out of the land we came and into it we must go—and if you will hold your land you can live—no one can rob you of land. . . . If you sell the land, it is the end.

I couldn't put this book down. It was very informative about pre-revolutionary Chinese culture. But even more than that, it was an interesting emotional journey. In the beginning, Wang Lung's character seems so simple and kinda static, albeit respectable. But as the novel progresses, his character becomes more and more complex, more and more human. It was hard for me to really define my opinion of him when it was all over. It wasn't as simple as just hating him because there was also a part of him that was good, even in the end. That's what makes him human. I think that feeling is the result of the peek Buck gives us into Wang Lung's mind during difficult decisions.

I think we all wanted to get more of O-lan. Obviously we all sympathize with her and, despite her unlikeability to pretty much everyone in the novel, she is extremely likeable and respectable to us as modern western readers. But I think the fact that we DON'T get to be more involved with her has meaning in itself. She was considered insignificant despite the fact that all of her contributions are arguably the most significant. As readers we were only allowed to see the surface of O-lan's character, just as everyone in her society saw--it's all they cared to see and really, it's all they believed there was. I think it's very clever writing on Buck's part.

When the earth suffers, women suffer-- when women suffer the earth suffers. I think this is what Buck captured so beautifully in her book. She is a brilliant feminist writer!

Through her character O-lan, Buck makes the argument that all of man's (in the story Wang-lung)increase and prosperity comes because of his reliance on the "good earth", which refers not only to his land but also to his good woman. Without his woman he would have had none of the prosperity he enjoys! The tragedy is that he doesn't appreciate what he has and the woman suffers. My heart just ached for O-lan and she reminded me that so many woman in the world live similar lives. So many women bring forth fruit, raise it and cultivate it, in silence. They are trampled on, destroyed and unappreciated.
Life would cease to exist without the earth, just as life would cease to exist without women.

تعرفتُ عليها من خلال أحد مقاطع
Ted Talks
حيث ذُكر اسم الرواية على لسان المتحدثة.

رواية لا أظنّها تُنسى؛ واقعيّة ويكمن جمالها في واقعيّتها!
ستترك بك أثر لا محالة.

Pearl S. Buck – Prémio Nobel da Literatura, 1938
"por suas ricas e verdadeiras descrições épicas da vida dos camponeses na China e por seus trabalhos biográficos."


Pearl S. Buck nasceu em 1892, em Hillsboro, EUA, filha de dois missionários cristãos. Aos três meses viaja para a China, e por lá vive durante cerca de 40 anos. Pearl cresceu junto com os chineses, que lhe chamavam “foreign devil”.
Em 1931 publica A Boa Terra, uma parábola moral que se baseia no seu conhecimento da cultura chinesa. Em 1932 ganha o prémio Pulitzer, e em 1938 é laureada com o mais alto prémio, O Nobel da Literatura.
Pearl S. Buck dedicou a vida a causas humanitárias, defendeu a liberdade de expressão, e lutou em nome dos direitos das mulheres. Morreu em 1973.

O tema dominante neste romance é a força/fertilidade da Terra e o relacionamento do homem com a mesma. Wang Lung é um camponês, pobre, mas que tem uma relação íntima com a terra porque esta produz a sua colheita, fruto do seu trabalho. O contraste é dado pela casa Hwang que está em decadência porque nada produz. A riqueza é vista como destruidora de valores tradicionais. À medida que Wang vai enriquecendo a sua família torna-se mais decadente e semelhante à Casa Hwang.
A história de vida de Wang é um estudo sobre como os valores tradicionais se perdem sob a influência da riqueza.
Como pano de fundo temos, de forma bastante discreta, as convulsões sociais chinesas.
Pearl S. Buck também explora, com uma visão neutra, a opressão da mulher na cultura chinesa. O-lan é uma personagem memorável, ela representa a dignidade e coragem de uma esposa marginalizada.

A narrativa de Buck é poderosa. Mostra-nos a dor, o sofrimento, a ambição, a agonia, o orgulho e as outras emoções de Wang Lung e O-lan.

Um livro que foi uma agradável surpresa.

"They cannot take the land from me. The labor of my body and the fruits of the fields I have put into that which cannot be taken away. If I had the silver, they would have taken it. If I had bought with the silver to store it, they would have taken it all. I have the land still, and it is mine."

"The Good Earth" tells of the importance of the land to Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer with a small farm. The book opens on his wedding day to O-Lan, a humble and resourceful woman who had been a slave. O-Lan works side by side with her husband on the land, and they have five living children. Wang Lung puts his profits into buying more land, but they almost starve without any savings during a famine.

Eventually Wang Lung becomes a wealthy man, but his sons do not have his traditional values. Wang Lung no longer appreciates the plain, hardworking O-Lan, and he becomes obsessed with another's beauty. While his wealth had given him security and social position, a more decadent lifestyle has not brought happiness to his family.

As Wang Lung grows older, he still retains his love of the land and the early simple home that was made of the earth. He feels like he is part of the cycle of nature where the land nourishes man, and man eventually returns to the earth.

Published in 1931, "The Good Earth" portrays the culture of a traditional Chinese family in the early 1900s before the Revolution. The role of women is an important aspect of the book. "The Good Earth" is a well-written book that still retains its power over ninety years later.

I felt so sorry for his poor wife.

I've heard of this book for years & am glad I finally got around to listening to it. Not bad, although not quite what I was expecting. To start, it's told in the fashion of a fable, even though it's set around 1900 in China. The narrative was simplified to exclude many details, the most glaring of which is there seems to be no taxation or government oversight of any sort. That detracted from the attempts at realism.

I really liked & empathized with the love of & importance of the land. Being born on a farm, fleeing it as soon as I could, yet eventually returning & treating it in a more loving fashion than most, I live this central premise. Everything else comes & goes, but my land is the foundation of my life. Not necessarily more important than family, but a permanent part of it. It doesn't have to be the same patch, just some that is mine to live with & care for.

I didn't find Wang Lung's characterization entirely believable, but generally so. He was too much of a push over in many instances. A man who grew as much as he did has more spine, IMO. I liked him, though. I know he was an ass at times, but generally he was one hell of a good man. (See the comments below, #4-6, for my opinion on his treatment of O-lan.)

I didn't care much for a couple of things toward the end. I thought they detracted from the novel. Specifically,  the nephew returning as a soldier & his last fling with the little girl. Neither added anything to the overall plot, just distracted from the message of 'rags-riches-rags' in a few generations OR his family being the same as the previous occupants of the house. Still, they weren't awful. They just dragged out the novel a bit more.

Overall, it's a darn good book in many ways. While the customs were a bit different, it showed that people are people all over. Race has nothing to do with it & I suppose that was part of its purpose given the general opinions when it was written.

This is a beautifully written story which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. From rags to riches, simple man to greedy who overlooked the most important things; most notably his faithful and dutiful wife Olan. She was my favourite character.
My first read by Pearl Buck, but definitely not my last.

"Ah sì, ho sentito parlare di una rivoluzione, ma sono sempre stato troppo occupato in vita mia per farci caso. C'era sempre la terra".
Queste parole di Wang Lung possono riassumere il romanzo. Il legame strettissimo, materno, con la terra da quando si nasce fino alla morte rappresenta il filo conduttore delle vicende dell'esistenza del contadino Wang Lung e della sua famiglia. La storia prende il via dal matrimonio di Wang Lung con la schiava O Lan e trascorre poi narrando, con scrittura piana e scorrevole, le alterne vicende della famiglia. Il sottofondo storico è indefinito, a parte questo riferimento alla rivoluzione che fa pensare all'ambientazione ai primi del Novecento. Il finale è amaro, a sottolineare una cesura tra la vecchia generazione ed il mondo moderno. In complesso un buon romanzo, che si fa leggere d'un soffio. Unica nota dolente è la traduzione, pessima, e l'impaginazione, con ripetuti errori, salti di lettere e sillabe finali di parole in intere pagine, troppo trascurata.

Part of my Fall 2017 Best Of Chinese Literature project; more here, and a cool list of books here.

"In China," the story about Pearl Buck goes, "she is admired but not read; in America, she is read but not admired." And here we are wondering: should we read her? Should we admire her?

The Chinese part of the story goes like this: Pearl Buck, the daughter of missionaries, spent most of her first 40 years in China. She wrote this book about Chinese peasants during the last stages of pre-Communist China, the 1920s. Under Mao the story was seen as embarrassing and backward, and Buck died in exile. Now her reputation is changing: people like Nanjing University's Liu Haiping point out, "She was the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals." So the admiration, in China, is new but real.

The US part goes like this: If you wanted an English book about China, for most of the 20th century this was about as authentic as you could get. It won the Pulitzer in 1931; she won the Nobel a little later. Oprah read it with her book club. Buck's even given credit for warming the US up to China, just in time for World War II. But now the world is closer together and we have access to more books about China and Buck isn't our only source anymore. Fewer people are reading her. She's out of style, seen as sentimental and naive.

Which, I mean, it totally is. It's very hard to read about a starving infant and not feel manipulated. That's not exactly Buck's fault - it's the starving infant's fault, because they seriously did that in real life sometimes, starve, and you rather wish they wouldn't. In the meantime, it's not a subtle story. And Buck has this weird thing where she keeps saying old-timey stuff like "It is not meet" and "tarry" and "I would lief," like she's, I don't know, translating a Norse epic.

And also there isn't exactly a plot per se, unless you consider a person's life a plot, which of course it isn't or we wouldn't need books. It's about this ambitious peasant guy, Wang Lung; it starts on his wedding day (to a slave he's never met) and goes right through the rest of his life with her. (She is O-lan, your favorite character by a country mile.) There are vicissitudes. He's rich, he's poor. He makes some good decisions and some bad ones. They're all complicated and real-feeling. He does this super cold thing at one point: he's got this uncle who's a scrounger and a thief, and he's like how can I protect myself from this schmuck, so here's what he does: he gets his uncle and his aunt addicted to opium, just so they'll be out of his hair. It works and they spend literally the rest of their lives lying on their beds stoned. Holy shit, right? That is cold! You don't see a move like that coming, and it's really interesting.

So look, now that we have all these books in translation by native Chinese authors, Pearl Buck has some competition. This isn't my favorite of the novels I've read this fall. (The Vagrants is.) But it does cover a period that I hadn't read about in the other books, partly because of that Mao-era hush, and I blazed through it with pleasure. I would lief read the next two in the trilogy.

Man, that sounds awful, doesn't it? That word sucks.

از آن وقت به بعد، دیگر دو پسربچه ونگ لانگ فقط "بزرگ‌تر" و "کوچک‌تر" نامیده نشدند. استاد پیر به آنها اسم مکتبی داد. این پیرمرد پس از پرسیدن شغل پدرشان دو اسم به آن دو پسر داد: برای بزرگ‌تر نانگ‌ان و برای کوچک‌تر نانگ‌ون. کلمه اول هر اسم، معنی‌اش این است:
که کسی که دارایی‌اش از خاک است.

میگن "خاک‌خوب" شاهکار پرل باک، نویسنده آمریکایی و جلد اول از یک مجموعه سه جلدیه.
همون‌طور که پشت کتاب نوشته شده " در این کتاب عرف و عادات و بارهای دهقانان چینی را که با فقر و گرسنگی و جنگ‌های داخلی بیشتر از انقلاب درگیرند، با دقتی واقع‌بینانه توصیف شده است."
اگر به رمان کلاسیکِ اجتماعی علاقه مندید، حتما توصیه میکنم این کتاب رو بخونید.

به نظرم کتاب خیلی کاملی بود، هم از لحاظ داستان و هم از لحاظ اجتماعی و روان‌شناختی!
در واقع شما در قالب داستان دارید به بررسی نقش "تلاش و کوشش" و "مال و ثروت" تو نوع زندگی و اخلاق انسان‌ها و حتی تاثیر این آدم‌ها تو جامعه می‌پردازید و همه این مفاهیم در دل داستانی بسی دل‌نشینه. توصیفات و فضاسازی‌ها ملموس و قابل و درکه، و همین باعث خوش‌خوان‌تر شدن داستان میشه.

من به خوبی با "ونگ لانگ" ، شخصیت اصلی داستان، ارتباط برقرار کرده بودم و البته شخصیت‌ش رو دوست داشتم، آدم سخت‌کوشی که در تلاش بود تا زندگی بهتری بدست بیاره و یا آدمی که حتی اگه بد میشد از بد بودنش بدش میومد! تناقضات شخصیتی ونگ‌لانگ با اونچه که نشون میداد یا مجبور بود بهش پایبند باشه برام جالب بود.

به نظر من این کتاب خیلی واقعیه! نویسنده تونسته بود تفکرات نقش اول داستان‌ش رو به خوبی به منِ خواننده القا کنه، مثلا وقتی از گرسنگی و قحطی حرف میزنه، من می‌تونستم کاملا وضع اسفبارشون رو درک کنم.

نکته جالب دیگه‌ای که تو این کتاب بود، عقاید و آداب و رسوم جالب و بعضا خرافاتی‌شون بود که به‌جا و به‌اندازه در حاشیه داستان بهشون پرداخته بود.

پنج_شش صفحه اول ترجمه برام کمی نامفهوم بود، البته این مشکلیه که تقریبا با همه رمان‌های کلاسیک ترجمه شده داره. اما بعدش اونقدر داستان جذابه که مشکلات ترجمه‌ای به چشم نمیاد و در کل ترجمه روانی داره.

به نظر من کتاب مثل شخصیت اصلی‌شه! یه جوان پر شور و هیجان، که کم‌کم در انتهای داستان با پیر شدن "ونگ لانگ" کتاب هم ریتم آرومی میگیره تا درست همون‌جایی که باید تموم شه.

بخواهم جمع بندی کنم، پیشنهاد میکنم حتما بخونید داستان قشنگی داره که واقعا به خوانندش درس‌ زندگی میده!

فکر میکنم کتاب اونقدر کامل بود که نیازی نیست برم دنبال جلدهای بعدی‌ش. ترجیح میدم همین‌جایی که این کتاب تموم شد، داستان تو ذهن من تموم شه.

ونگ لانگ با صدای لرزان و بریده بریده گفت:" وقتی خانواده‌ای شروع به فروختن زمین کند، آخر عمرش است. ما از زمین بیرون آمده‌ایم و باید به زمین برگردیم. اگر زمینتان را نگه دارید میتوانید زنده بمانید. هیچ کس نمی‌تواند زمین را از شما بدزدد.

پ.ن: کتاب رو به پیشنهاد غرفه‌دار نشر علمی فرهنگی، نمایشگاه کتاب ۱۳۹۸ خریدم، نمیدونم اون آقا کی بود و کجاست ولی دمت گرم اخوی!