First, there is the feeling of failure, the guilt, the look at what we have lost, and then the departure—a departure to another life, a better experience, and the promise of an El Dorado. We then return to the land that saw us being born: the endless journey, the first death, the hunger, and the cold. But we still believe in it because we saw the leaflets that promised a job with a good salary. Even if a small voice tells us it is unhealthy, all these people leave in the same direction. Everyone with their dreams in mind holds out. Then, the arrival, the descent into hell, hunger, the cold. No house, trim work, or salary does not allow you to eat your fill. Dead, still dead. The cruel vision of the people of the new country who do not accept us but need us for the job. The unacceptable reality and the impossible return. So our mother, who has always taken everything without flinching, will become the family's citadel, motivating some and cuddling others. But nothing helps. Misery is on our doorstep: disillusionment, still death, acceptance, and anger.
That's a profoundly moving but realistic tale. Sublime prose on the 1929 crisis in the United States insidiously reminds me of the plight of our modern world. One thing has not changed: banks still have power! A novel to read or reread is excellent. To be prescribed for all intolerant people on Earth.

Blood, frogs, lice, flies, pestilence, boils, storms, locusts, darkness, and death. These were the plagues the Lord clamped onto Egypt (Exodus, 7-10). And these plagues triggered the migration of the people of Israel into the wilderness. After spending forty years in the desert, they finally reached the “land of milk and honey”. More plights and perils were awaiting them there.

Some three thousand years later, on another continent across the ocean, a people of farmers went through a similar ordeal once again. And this is how John Steinbeck elevated the story of the impoverished sharecroppers from the Dust Bowl region during the Great Depression to the level of an epic voyage, comparable to the Exodus or the Odyssey. Like the Israelites of yore, these Oklahomans were forced, by drought and economic hardship, to leave their land and travel down the Road 66 to a new “promised land”, a new Canaan named California.

The Grapes of Wrath is a re-interpretation of the Bible in yet another way. A few characters are, indeed, sometimes very explicitly, Christlike figures. Compare Casy’s “You don’ know what you’re a-doin’.” (Penguin Modern Classics paperback, p. 386) with Luke 23,34. Compare Tom’s “I’ll be there” (p. 419) with Matthew 18,20. Even the title is a quote from the Apocalypse of John 14,19. And the whole novel is the story of a people looking for redemption and a new land, which they may or may not find on this Earth…

Further still, one could argue that Steinbeck is also retelling some of the canonical works of 19th-century literature. In a sense, The Grapes of Wrath is the American version of Les Misérables: Tom Joad is the Jean Valjean of the New World, and the corporate farmers of 1930s California are just as awful as the police and army of 1830s Paris. In brief, Steinbeck’s novel is the paragon of the “Great American Novel”; a multi-layered narrative that lends itself, like the Bible, to a typological reading on different levels.

At any rate, despite its epic or mythical dimension, Steinbeck’s writing is anything but lofty. On the contrary, it conveys people’s mindset and daily struggles, their constant concern for simple material things: the state of disrepair of their car and how they manage to fix a flat tire, the need to put bread on the table and the recipe they use to make fried dough, the toilet flush and lack of loo roll. The narrator describes these things with meticulous precision – a technique typical of survival literature, from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to McCarthy’s The Road. More could be said about the characterisation and the deft and consistent use of dialect and turns of phrases of the people of Oklahoma – this also harks back to Mark Twain and William Faulkner’s novels.

The Grapes of Wrath is also, among many other things, a compelling political manifesto. The novel’s structure oscillates between classic narrative chapters (the Joads’ story) and discursive, slightly outraged lectures whereby Steinbeck examines the causes and effects of the Southern migration (from a Marxist point of view). Namely, the rising mechanisation and automation of agricultural labour and the constant push for higher corporate profits and lower individual wages.

In short, the terrifying “pillars of fire” of ancient Israel are now replaced by the dehumanising “invisible hand” of modern capitalism: a vast network of socio-economic forces that engirdles the whole of Western civilisation. In the end, forced migrations, people trying to flee wars, persecution, deprivation and starvation, unsanitary refugee camps, combined exploitation and hatred of incoming migrants, viewed as subhuman in their new “land of milk and honey” – all this is as real as ever today, in many parts of the world. All of which makes Steinbeck’s novel as essential as ever.

The 1940 film adaptation is, for the most part, faithful to Steinbeck’s plot and dramatic tone, except for the final section – notably, the bleak and slightly disturbing motif of the Caritas Romana at the end of the novel is absent from the film. Nonetheless, it is one of John Ford’s finest movies. Steinbeck’s novel also influenced many other works of fiction, from Stephen King’s The Stand to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

اسم پرآوازه ی کتاب کافیه تا هرکسی برای خوندنش وسوسه بشه...حقیقت اینه که شاید کتاب بیش از حد طولانی و گاهی خسته کننده به نظر بیاد ولی چیزی که اشتاین بک ازش شجاعانه صحبت کرده برهه مهمی از تاریخ آمریکا رو روایت می کنه که هم طی خوندن و هم در پایان نه تنها پشیمون نیستید بلکه از تجربه ای که با این کتاب داشتید خوشحال هم خواهید بود.

داستان کتاب سفر خانواده جاد - به عنوان سمبلی از هر خانواده کارگر آمریکا- رو از اوکلاهما به سمت کالیفرنیا روایت می کنه. سفری که همه کارگران از روی اجبار در نتیجه ی ورود ماشین و صنعتی شدن عملیات کشاورزی و نهایتا بیکاری کارگران در پیش گرفتند.ولی واقعیت اینجاست که برخلاف تصور عموم حتی کالیفرنیا هم نه تنها بهشت نیست که جهنم بدتری برای اونهاست.

میشه گفت اشتاین بک رو همه جوانب و مشکلات این سفر ریز شده و دید خیلی خوبی از اون زمان به خواننده میده. این که چطور در میانه بحران بیکاری کارگران، نداری و فقر، گرسنگی و بیماری و مرگ و تلاش برای بقا، هر قشری سعی داشته صرفنظر از "انسانیت" به نوعی از این اوضاع سودی به دست بیاره

جایزه بهترین شخصیت داستان هم تقدیم می شود به "مادر قصه" ...که وقتی دید مردان نه دیگه اعتماد به نفسی براشون مونده و نه عقل و منطقی خودش دست به کار شد و هر بار با درایت، کشتی خاندان جاد رو به سمت درست هدایت کرد. امکان نداره این کتاب رو بخونید و عاشق ترکیب زنانگی- مردانگی موجود در این شخصیت نشید

بد نیست در جریان باشیم که

این کتاب زیاد به مذاق سرمایه دارن و زمین داران آمریکا خوش نیامد و برای مدتی توی آمریکا ممنوع شد ولی بدلیل حقیقت گویی و هم دردی با قشر پائین جامعه جای خودش را باز کرد و خواننده های زیادی داشت.نارضایتی سرمایه داران از حقیقت گویی اشتاین بک آنها را واداشت تا حرفهایی بر خلاف انچه کتاب گفته بود تحویل کشاورزان که اغلب هم بی سواد بودند،بدهند. آنها کتاب را ضد کلیسا معرفی کردند و همین طور به دروغ گفتند که تصویری که این کتاب از کشاورزان به نمایش گذاشته تصویر مردمی وحشی است. کشاورزان هم از همه جا بی خبر به کتابخانه ها رفتند و این کتاب را آتش زدند.

انجمن کشاورزان متحد کالیفرنیا این رمان را دروغ و پروپاگاندای کمونیستی خواندند. این در حالی بود که این کتاب مدت کوتاهی توسط ژوزف استالین نیز در اتحاد جماهیر شوروی تحریم شده بود زیرا حزب کمونیست حاکم از این تفکر که حتی بی‌نواترین آمریکایی هم می‌تواند صاحب یک ماشین باشد خوشحال نبود. اشتاین‌بک چندین بار تهدید به مرگ شد و اف‌ بی‌آی او را تحت نظر قرار داد.



وقتی که کار نوشتن کتاب به پایان رسید اشتاین بک نوشت: آن کتاب بزرگی که امیدش را داشتم از آب درنیامد. تنها یک کتاب معمولی است. البته همین کتاب معمولی برنده جایزه پولیتزر ادبیات سال 1940 شد.


عنوان این کتاب از «سرود نبرد جمهوری» گرفته شده است: چشمان من شکوه آمدن خدا را دیده اند/او تاکستانی که خوشه‌های خشم در آن انبار شده اند را پایمال می کند. این سرود توسط جولیا وارد هاو یکی از طرفداران براندازی اصول بردگی در سال 1861 نوشته شده است.

The Grapes of Wrath is a story about the pursuit of power by a few selected individuals and its domino effects on the society and the lives of thousands of people. While the story itself is set on the times of the Great Depression, back in the 1930s and 1940s, we can still trace parallels with the contemporary world we’re living in more than 60 years later. Sadly, still to this day, we can see in the news that there are people working for less than the minimal wage and under slave labor conditions.

To tell us this story, John Steinbeck presents to us the life of the Joads: a big united, poor family who lives in Oklahoma under a tenancy system until their lives start to derail - because of the drought, tightness of money, agricultural changes (now a tractor can put ten families out of work…) -, which leads them to a hopeful journey to California in search of jobs, dignity, happiness and means to fulfill their simple dreams: Ma Joad would love to have her “little white house”; all Grandpa wanted was to have grapes soaking his beard; and Rose of Sharon fantasized about having ice in her house.

Slow paced and packed with long descriptions, I imagined it would take me up to three weeks to get through the book by my reading standards; it took me nine days instead. It was impossible to not start caring about the family right away or to stop desiring that they would have a deserved happy ending where they would finally find some relief. As the pages turned though, I realized that the Joads represented the lives of thousands and that their fates would likely be consistent to the sore reality of what happened to the majority of the migrants on the same road as them. In order to help us to realize the bigger picture that he wanted to portray, Steinbeck used smaller chapters, that felt almost like interludes, showing us the similar situation that unidentified people were enduring.

A big highlight for me was that the author succeeded in making his characters realistic, and it was plain to see that their behaviors were in line with their personalities in every one of their actions (i.e., Tom was painted since the beginning as being someone suspicious of other people’s intentions and always reacting, fighting back because of that - maybe because of the time he spent in McAlester prison for committing homicide). Having known and been around tenant farmers myself, it was clear to me how Steinbeck really captured their persona, temper and features while conceiving these characters. In doing some research about him and the writing of his book, I found out that he actually bought a car, drove to Oklahoma and followed the migrants’ path along Route 66 to California. Before completing The Grapes of Wrath, he wrote some reports on the subject and was working on an unfinished novel called The Oklahomans.

One of the striking traces I recognized in the Joads - and mainly everyone they met in their journey, but best represented in the book by the Wilson and the Wainwright families - was that they were truly willing to share whatever they had even under those trying times. This compassionate way of thinking and their mentality of doing good in order to receive good things ironically turned out to be working against them in more than one occasion.

Throughout their ride to California, they’ve encountered many individuals who had been there, looked for jobs, (some even actually worked) but instead decided to go back home because they saw that it wasn’t as dreamlike as the handbills made it out to be. So the Joads were warned about it more than once but still decided to make it, convincing themselves that it’d turn out different for them because they would do everything accordingly, they would work properly and be honest. Their simplistic logic blindsided them into not realizing there were bigger interests in the game. Also because of that, it was near impossible for them to understand why the big shots (through the big companies) with millions and so much land could still be so greedy, still wanting to turn a higher profit, in detriment of their (and thousands of) family’s most basic needs.

In some ways - the fate of a family representing the social conditions of that time, having to bear to that situation apparently because of a few selected individuals in quest for (more) power (isn’t that what it all always comes down to?) and the inevitable cause vs consequences analysis -, this novel is analogous to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where we understand the effects that the French invasion had in Russia through the lives of (mainly) the Rostóvs and the Bolkonskys.

For film buffs: I’ve only watched The Grapes of Wrath directed by John Ford, and I recommend it. Although there are some changes, it stays somewhat faithful to the story and the acting is on point all around, with Jane Darwell (Ma Joad) deservingly winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The major difference from the novel is that the film adaptation switched some events and it ends in a high note, leaving us hopeful and optimistic, under the impression that everything will turn out well. The controversial ending of the book also isn’t on the film.

Rating: putting aside all of the social, political and economic analysis - the book was actually banned in the USA and deemed as propaganda -, the story of the Joads is still very compelling and moving - even though Steinbeck was also accused of too much sentimentalism. It was heartbreaking to wander with them in their unfortunate journey that, sadly, left us with little hope to be expected for the family’s fate: 5 stars.

Intanto dico che è un romanzo straordinario, è già un classico e se ancora non lo si può definire tale per una distanza temporale troppo esigua di certo è destinato a diventarlo perché riunisce in sé i requisiti che del classico sono prerogativa: una storia universale, senza tempo, che ci parla attraverso frammenti di storie individuali.

La scrittura di Steinbeck è una scrittura potente con una capacità di librarsi sempre ad altezze da uccello rapace, dosando i diversi registri richiesti a seconda del momento narrativo delle vicende: perciò Steinbeck usa una sintassi elementare povera di vocaboli, priva di congiuntivi quando deve riprodurre i discorsi dei poveri emigranti; un linguaggio che diventa ricco di immagini quando descrive la natura o semplici banali oggetti del vivere quotidiano a cui Steinbeck dà vita, animandoli (un esempio su tutti in uno dei capitoli iniziali sono le pagine dedicate al trattore, quel mostro ruggente e metallico che va a sostituirsi a braccia umane fatte di sangue, muscoli e sudore dei contadini) e di nuovo la sua prosa si trasforma, diventa arringa precisa e tagliente se deve denunciare gli squilibri sociali di un’economia agricola in profonda trasformazione e contraddizione.

Questi sono gli elementi oggettivi, poi c’è la drammaticità della vicenda che attinge alla storia di un paese: una epopea da ciclo dei vinti americani, l’altra faccia dell’America, contraltare dell’America del Jazz, dei vari Fitzgerald Hemingway nel loro aspetto più lascivo e godereccio.

Non da ultimo un accenno ai personaggi sui quali, nella classifica personale, troneggia la madre Ma’ alla cui efficace autorevolezza il capofamiglia Pa’ si è arreso come un cagnetto con il cappottino.
Ma’ donna colonnella dalla dolcezza e fermezza granitica che tiene salde le redini della famiglia nonostante le avversità che si abbattono senza soluzione di continuità, e poi Tom, il figlio maggiore, che incarna l’uomo che fatica a dominare le sue impetuosità caratteriali quando si tratta di difendere un ideale di giustizia umana, Tom che sul finire del romanzo di trasforma in una entità quasi spirituale, nume che ci sarà sempre in tutti posti…dappertutto: dove ci sarà qualcuno che lotta per dare da mangiare a chi ha fame, dove ci sarà uno sbirro che picchia qualcuno, negli urli dei ribelli, nelle risate dei bambini quando hanno fame e sanno che la minestra è pronta… lui sarà lì, sempre

Riguardo la pagina finale…, chi lo legge o lo ha letto può comprendere, una scena così toccante, apparentemente irriverente, ma così pregna di solidarietà umana mi ha lasciato pietrificata dalla commozione.

This book was incredibly scary; especially because it was so realistic. John Steinbeck has a way of depicting society and people in a raw and honest way that leaves you with a hollow feeling inside, and yet you devour his books because they are so amazing.
In "The Grapes of Wrath" we meet Tom, who has just been released from prison on probation, as well as his family who's about to move to the West because banks and tractors have evicted them from their own home and land. It's USA in the middle of the Great Depression and times are changing. Everyone is moving from East to West in order to find work and survive these new and abhorrent circumstances.
In many ways, the writing of this book is very straight-forward, but at the same time it digs deeper when you read between the lines and look behind the characters' behaviour and dialogue. I was especially fond of how Steinbeck, at every other chapter, stops up to depict the conditions in America at that point in time; whether it be about a car seller and his greediness, the devastating conditions for the workers in the fruit fields or a turtle.
I was a big fan, and especially the ending left me speechless. Until now, "East of Eden" has been my favourite of Steinbeck's, but "The Grapes of Wrath" is a close runner-up.

Steinbeck's classic blew me away again with the power of its vision, the depth of its character, and the realism of its dialogs. I also rewatched the movie and found it to be relatively faithful to the book. A few things were dropped (the Wilsons, Noah's leaving, the pathos-laden ending with Rosasharon in the farmhouse) and a few things were swapped around (the government camp and the peach camp), but Henry Fonda did a perfect performance as the interesting Tom Joad whose character arc goes from somewhat hardened criminal to socially conscious drifter. I also loved Casy and found John Carradine stupendous in that role.

The narration of the book has three voices: the third party narration of the Joad family's trials and tribulations; a more sweeping, journalistic voice about the larger political and social context; and a closeup into the thoughts and actions of people implied on the fringes (most notably the roadside cafés which play a role twice in the primary narrative - younger's Tom's initial ride to the farm, older Tom's purchase of bread and candy). I feel that this technique was borrowed in principle at least from the Dos Passos USA Trilogy - the closeups reminded me of the Camera Eye sections and the sweeping passages of the Newsreel sections.

The book itself tells the story of the Joads and by extension of an entire generation of mid-western farmers in the US that were forced off their land after the Dust Bowl, a period of several years of famine, to seek their fortunes in a promised land out west in California. The harsh realities of life on the road, the prejudice of stationary observers towards the "Oakies", and the exploitation by farmers and farming associations of the labor surplus are painfully delineated. There is nonetheless some great humor (Ma's beating a man with a chicken as told by Tom, Ruthie and Winfield's discovery of the toilets, etc) in here and some great moments of humanity - primarily in Casy's speeches and in my all-time favorite one, "wherever there's a man, I'll be there too" by Tom.

The relationships in the book, particularly between Ma and Tom are beautifully drawn and yet the minor characters are also given time to change with the situations. Of course, not everyone makes it to the land of milk and honey, and the land itself does not welcome them with open arms but rather with rejection and disdain.


As for the historical context, it is hard for us to get exact numbers, but somewhere between 400,000 and 3.5M people were displaced from the Great Plains area that was affected by the drought and violent dust storms between 1931 and 1939 during which 75% of the topsoil was wiped out in the Oklahoma panhandle, western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and northern Texas. Not all of the displaced went to California, nonetheless, it is estimated that 1/8 of today's California population are descendants of survivors of the Dust Bowl. It is also hard to estimate the number of deaths, but most sources settle on a number of about 7000 primarily from malnutrition and disease (both hinted at in the book, of course).

Steinbeck depicts this vividly with sharply drawn images and an appeal to our emotions: we see that unfortunately, the Great Depression has also impacted California and there are no jobs there either. It is important to note his insight that it was not just farmers that were driven from the land: in the book at the first stop for the Joads, they meet a shopkeeper who left because he had no more customers. In fact, people from across the economic spectrum were impacted and forced to rethink their means of getting an income.

Also important to this book is the fact that it was not just climate change that pushed people off the land, it was also the ruthlessness of banks and speculators as well as technological change. This period represents a shift from manual sharecropping of smallish plots to the massive scale of industrialized agriculture. The heartlessness with which the guys in suits drive the Joads and their neighbors of their land is shocking, and yet realistic. The practice of printing handbills for wide distribution in order to drive down labor prices as well as the labeling any resistance to falling wages as "red" was a powerful theme in the book.

There is a feeling of inevitableness, but also injustice as few provisions were made by the government for these victims of change, and the gutting of legislation to protect small landholders from rapacious actions by the large financial interests during the Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover administrations left gaping holes in the safety net.

An absolute American masterpiece, there is no question in my mind of this novel deserving the 1940 Pulitzer Prize over other great books like Chandler's The Big Sleep and Tropic of Capricorn also being published in 1939. This one just has an eternal, lasting perfection to it. Grapes of Wrath was one of the primary sources quoted when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. His moving acceptance speech here.

My votable list of Pulitzer winners which I have read (only have the 40s, 50s, and 60s to finish!):

Man-made environmental catastrophe and its (in)human cost - a study in inequality and injustice!

Imagine having to leave your country because it is a wasteland created by a decade of dust storms? Imagine having nowhere to go, but still crossing the desert in hope of finding a future after your past was wiped out by human failure, greed and environmental carelessness? Imagine not being welcome when you arrive, with nothing but what your family vehicle can carry ...

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?”

Imagine nobody caring about those thousands of "us" who lost their identities with their farms and livelihoods. Immigrants are always also emigrants, and they carry the memory of being somebody, somewhere, in a distant past. To treat them as if they existed in a historical vacuum is as cruel as it is common, and it is the recurring topic of Steinbeck's heartbreaking writing.

Steinbeck is one of those authors that I love unconditionally, more and more with each reading experience. I once travelled from where I lived in Texas to visit Steinbeck country in California - looking for his traces in Monterey and Salinas, always accompanied by his complete works, from hilarious short novels to the heavy epic novels of good and evil. In the end, I discovered his characters in the faces I saw on the road, I smelled his descriptions of nature in the humid or dry, dusty air, I heard his dialogues in the everyday exchanges on markets and in hot small town streets.

I love them all, each one in my carefully kept Steinbeck collection. Asked by one of my children the other day which Steinbeck had influenced me most, I thought I was going to give an evasive, diplomatic answer, not making a statement for or against any specific story. Instead I heard myself say:

"The Grapes of Wrath!"

And the moment I said it I knew that I meant it. It may not exactly be my favourite Steinbeck, but definitely the one I feel uncomfortably, chillingly getting under my skin immediately. Just recalling the voices of the characters makes me shiver - as they suffer through the ordeal of fleeing from the Dust Bowl, that environmental catastrophe caused by greed and paid for by individual families, to a Californian paradise which doesn't welcome newcomers. The poverty, the suffering, the love and despair - it is tangible in each sentence, in each story line!

Family saga, social study, historical document, political standpoint, ethical statement on compassion and greed - it is all there, but invisible under the masterfully crafted story, which has its own quality, beyond the message on the essential needs and worries of poor, common people without protective networks.

I don't know how to close this review, as I am not done with this novel at all, despite having read it several times. But one quote shall stand as a warning to those who believe their wealth protects them against being humans, and feeling poor for behaving poorly:

“If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich.”

n  “And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze: and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”n

Honestly, I didn’t know too much about the migrant movement in California until I had started with Steinbeck’s works the previous year. Now, I was more than familiar with what had happened in India over the century under a similar context, so I thought, how much more could have gone wrong? Well, I am not comparing much, but of all the authors I have had encountered in the same genre, no one gets within a mile radius of what Steinbeck had achieved. In English. We have got Manik Bandopadhyay in here…

Despite having the flavour of the usual Steinbeck, I think for some reason than this one is more relatable for people from outside America as well… kind of reminds me of Dominique Lapierre’s The City of Joy which as far as I remember addresses the Fabricated Holocaust, The Bengal Famine of 1943 which managed to kill 2.1-3 million people out of starvation, and well, other chronic epidemics. And all those migrant farmers-turned-vagrants jammed up in the slums and on the streets of Calcutta(Kolkata). Also relatable is the upward trend in farmer suicides that India had noticed in 2014(that’s not the only year it took place, however only in that year as many as 5650 farmers and 6750 agricultural labourers wilfully breathed their last as per NCRB). And the ongoing protest since 9th August 2020… The funny thing is that in here most of the people don’t care shit about what happens to them until someone like Rihanna tweets about it, and then backlashes just for the sake of controversial publicity.

About the story, well the dusty, unseasoned depiction is perhaps the only thing that some may find a bit problematic (that’s what got it banned in the first place I guess), and besides it does get quite morbidly depressing several times and that is not lessened in any way by the alternate documentary-style chapters. The character arcs are significantly well executed, well, maybe except for Tom Joad Sr., though I liked the frequent moments where he quite self-consciously lampooned patriarchy. The tone of self-justification gets a bit frustrating after a time, though. But I can’t actually countback for it, seeing how much we all actually do that every day, every time.

However, I couldn’t help but not feel sorry for all of the characters. The thing is that some people are just born irresponsible. And some are just born self-occupied; and since it is a realist novel, there’s an ambiguous tone throughout the novel for most of the characters, you can’t just justify many of their actions on the other hand sometimes they do something that you can’t deny is beneficial. Speaking of which, do you remember the ‘rabbits’ from Of Mice and Men? Then you are bound to get apprehensive as soon as you hear Grampa ramble on and on about grapes and peaches…

I’m yet to read Steinbeck’s proclaimed magnum opus, but I can’t really imagine how East of Eden could get any more emotional, really man, this one is so gut-wrenchingly morose that after a bit of riding with the Joads I got as unemotional and stone-faced as they all got, though the author had made it perfectly clear that they, if anything, were luckier than the most. The crudest, and quite obviously the most vulnerable fragments of the story were shown through the eyes of Ma, though.

n   “Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where-wherever you look. When they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’-I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build-why I’ll be there. See?... ”n

Damn it, man. I nearly teared up at this particular moment.

This is a great book. Very well written and important.

I hated it.

One of the great American novels, this breakdown of a family torn apart by poverty and despair during the Great Depression.

Absorbing and maddening and depressing. Incredible that a book with so much anti-migrant sentiment against fellow Americans is timely in a way Steinbeck didn’t intend for 2017, I’m sure.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.