This book finds me in my making. It gives a color to it which isn't bright or striking, but pale, and subtle, and earthly. It has something of the universe in it. The concomitant pattern is so satisfactory to look at that it swells my heart and waters my eyes.

Steinbeck is The Man.

20 pages in i immediately noticed the sherwood anderson influence and shot off an email to my friend xxx, urging him to read it on the flight to nyc. his girlfriend of many years just left him and i figured cannery row might inspire. his response was... um... deranged? check it:


"brian - had a hell of a day. almost got shot down on San Julien this afternoon. Bullet smoke so close I could taste it. Almost got arrested breaking up a Guatemalan knife fight, too. got robbed $40, too. But I bought some crack. I'm smoking some right now here in the upstairs office at XXX -- can I do a paidout for this? I am very serious. I have the crack for you. Anyway, I'll save you some. I made a makeshift pipe out of a red Paper*Mate FLEXGRIP ultra med. pen. If it's your pen, I am sorry.

my favorite thing about crack is that it tastes like cheap grape soda. I'm jamming dark side of the moon too, so fuck you --I love you.

Steinbeck: my first mainmost man after Twain when I was "coming up". I got seriously into Steinbeck in my Wonder Years thru early 20s. Had to stop reading him just so I could save something of his for later in life. Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of Our Discontent, In Dubious Battle, Cannery Row, To a God Unknown, all FUCKING amazing. Uncle Sherwood is THEE branch above Steinbeck, Saroyan, Fante, Hemingway, Fitzgerald--they ALL cite him as being The Man.

Well, wish you were here smoking crack with me. I'm taking some to NYC, but I'll save you hit.

Love,
xxx"

i'm not gonna smoke crack. i promise.

East of Eden is to Cannery Row as The Godfather is to Slacker. This sketch book wrapped up as a novel was the perfect complement to John Steinbeck's multigenerational family epic and reminded me of a scrappy independent movie that takes place on a few blocks of a town off the beaten path. No one character or relationship stands out. It's the sense of place that pervades.

Set in the mid-1940s at roughly the same time the novel was published, Cannery Row defies a time stamp. I got the impression that many of the stories Steinbeck was telling had already vanished into the fog of history as California embarked on World War II, but no matter. By the time I finished the book, I wanted to wrap my belongings into a bindle and hitch a ride to Monterery.

Most of the sketches here involve "Doc", a marine biologist and bachelor who resides in Western Biological. He spends his days making trips up and down the Pacific Coast plucking animals from the tide pools while in the evening, is given to playing opera music on his phonograph, drinking beer and entertaining the occasional female guest.

From businessman to working girl, from Lee Chong's grocery to the Bear Flag Restaurant operated by Dora Flood as the best whorehouse in town, Doc is not only regarded as the most learned man in Monterey, but the most charitable. The local hobos would certainly agree. "The boys", whose elder statesman is a cunning fool named Mack, have taken up residence at an old warehouse they've dubbed the Palace Flophouse.

Clever enough to resist working for a living and cursed enough to foul up almost anything they touch, Mack and the boys get it in their heads to do something nice for Doc. They decide to throw him a party. Funds for the party will be raised by gathering up frogs and selling them to Doc. Peril, pain and pathos ensue.

Cannery Row might seem pretty thin at first blush. The story is more like the book for a stage musical, minus the song and dance numbers, and in fact, a maligned film version was released in 1982 starring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger, inserting a romantic comedy plot where none existed in Steinbeck's source material.

The quality I loved about the novel was how a sense of both community and individuality, happiness and regret, co-existed. Characters ended up in Monterey because an ocean simply stopped them from rolling any further. While they settled together and supported each other, everybody had something they'd abandoned and wanted to atone for. Someday. After one more short round of whiskey.

Steinbeck's wit and gentle way of leaving the reader wiser than when they'd picked up his book lives and breathes here. Anyone with an itch to hit the open road, sleep under the stars and live by your wits and the charity of your fellow man, particularly if you're land locked and yoked to a job, would get a lot of mileage out of this book. Highly recommended.

Cannery Row is my 5th novel by John Steinbeck and while I enjoyed the read it isn't a standout novel for me like East of Eden or Of Mice and Men and I think this is down to the way in which the book is written as it lacks a plot and reads more like a character study as we get a snapshot of the characters daily lives on Cannery Row.

I really liked the setting of the novel. Published in 1945 it is set during the Great Depression in Monterey California on a street lined with Sardine Canneries known as Cannery Row. We meet a host of interesting and entertaining characters who happen to live there and there is no definite plot to the novel, just every day life happenings for these entertaining characters and unlike some of Steinbeck’s other novels it is not a depressing read and the characters do bring a smile to your face and I really enjoyed hanging out with them.

Not one for my favourites shelf but an easy and enjoyable read and a book that I am glad to have picked up and crossed off my TBR list. I listened to this one on audio and enjoyed the experience.

This series of vignettes of characters in the poor working class section of Monterey during the Depression provides a timeless vision of human adaptability and grace. The benevolent omniscient viewpoint renders a sense of invitation to come appreciate a self-contained world largely untouched by the larger forces of capitalistic greed and technological progress.

The main characters include: Doc, who collects and sells marine organisms and lets many take advantage of his kindness, Mac who succeeds in avoiding responsibilities by living simply with a group of homeless men in an abandoned warehouse (“the Palace Flophouse”); Lee Chong, a Chinese grocer who allows sales on credit as a form of investment toward future good will and business; and Dora, kindly madam of a bordello who contributes generously in response to community disasters and personal misfortunes. Like the sea creatures that Doc collects, the residents of Cannery Row are all adapted in their own niches in a specific ecology. In the process of fulfilling individual missions, each plays a collaborative role as in an ecological community of species. The main plot element comprises the steps Mac takes to pull off a party of appreciation for Doc, which initially backfires hilariously.

The overall message of the book to me is that in the brutal ecology of the world, there is beauty and grace in the benign human creatures who thrive in the shadows in niches untouched by the top carnivores. I appreciately highly the alignment of Steinbeck’s marine biology interests and this loving focus on a small human community. The book makes for a nice contrast with epic scope and larger social commentary of "The Grapes of Wrath". Supposedly, after experience with being a war correspondent, Steinbeck sought refuge in writing about a lighter subject.

Steinbeck pays homage to god-like virtues of the residents of Cannery Row, with Doc ironically noting: “The things we admire most in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those the we detest, sharpness, greed, acquistitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

The lives of purse-seiners and frog-trappers in the Great Depression? Well, why not?

Το διάβασα μονορούφι μέσα σε μια μέρα. Δημιουργείται μια αίσθηση αγωνίας για το τι θα ακολουθήσει και για το τι έκβαση θα έχουν τα πράγματα κι αυτό σε κάνει να θέλεις να πας παρακάτω και παρακάτω. Ουσιαστικά δεν πρόκειται για ένα βιβλίο το οποίο έχει μια συγκεκριμένη πλοκή, εντούτοις οι χαρακτήρες και ο τρόπος που τους έχει πλάσει και τους παρουσιάζει ο Στάινμπεκ κεντρίζουν το ενδιαφέρον του αναγνώστη.

**Re-read for my library book club (May, 2018).

Each chapter of this book is a vignette, crisply described, often lyrical, sometimes comic, sometimes desperately sad. The inhabitants of Cannery Row are leading extraordinary lives and these are characters one won't quickly forget.

"'It has always seemed strange to me,' said Doc. 'The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.'"

Cannery Row is of frogs and men…

The frog pool was square — fifty feet wide and seventy feet long and four feet deep. Lush soft grass grew about its edge and a little ditch brought the water from the river to it and from it little ditches went out to the orchards. There were frogs there all right, thousands of them. Their voices beat the night, they boomed and barked and croaked and rattled. They sang to the stars, to the waning moon, to the waving grasses. They bellowed love songs and challenges.

Or to be more precise it is of friendship and love…

The boiler looked like an old-fashioned locomotive without wheels. It had a big door in the center of its nose and a low fire door. Gradually it became red and soft with rust and gradually the mallow weeds grew up around it and the flaking rust fed the weeds. Flowering myrtle crept up its sides and the wild anise perfumed the air about it. Then someone threw out a datura root and the thick fleshy tree grew up and the great white bells hung down over the boiler door and at night the flowers smelled of love and excitement, an incredibly sweet and moving odor.

In the age of steam, sages dwell not in barrels, like they used to in the time of antiquity, but in boilers…
The novel is strangely poetic… 
The poetry of streets and the poetry of ideals are capriciously and elaborately intertwined.

When it rains, and rains, and rains, I drink my morning coffee and think of sunny California. Of Steinbeck, of course! Not that the world is more perfect in his imagination than in my reality. Far from it. But it is dusty and dry, and that seems like a welcome change sometimes. His characters would of course drink their coffee, stare at the dust and hope for rain and mud. Such is the world!

As there are countless wonderful real reviews of this classic already, but I feel I have to add my enthusiasm about spending delicious hours rereading Cannery Row, laughing tears of amusement and sorrow, I will offer a little prayer quote, as honest as can be, the absolute antithesis to the equally powerful, yet hypocritical rhetoric of an Elmer Gantry.

“Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.”

As it is Saturday, and I am a lazy bum, this will have to do for a review of an all time favourite.

Amen. I rest my case.

Cannery Row paints a picture of a specific place and the people who inhabit it. It is a place familiar to Steinbeck. His prose is magnificent as you are swept into the atmosphere of the “stink” that is Cannery Row. He takes you amidst the rust and junk heaps, the whore house and flophouses, the sardine canneries and the grocery shops. You are immersed in its glory or disgrace. It’s not a pretty place and yet his characters will engross you in their outcast lives. Mack and the boys, Doc, Dora, Lee Chong, Henri, Hazel, Darling the dog, are some of the players who will seek to capture the spirit of the rougher side of Monterey, California whom I’m guessing Steinbeck knew personally.

A simple novel with no plot, you’ll be mesmerized by the descriptions of frog hunting, of the specimens kept in Doc’s laboratory, and the fishy scent of the atmosphere.

I am disappointed knowing that on a trip through Monterey down the coast about 10 years ago, I had an opportunity to take this nostalgia in for myself. I wasn’t a Steinbeck reader then and am ashamed to say that I wouldn’t have connected the place with the man at that time in my life. If I ever get another chance to visit, I will take it in with the knowledge of knowing these captivating characters that were created by a master.

n  "It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men — kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling — are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest — sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest — are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second."n

Cannery Row is a real place. What John Steinbeck describes as "a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream" is a street in the city of Monterey in California, the site of many canning factories, now defunct; formerly known as Ocean View Avenue, the city government officially renamed the street to Cannery Row to honor Steinbeck and his novel.

The aim of Cannery Row is not as much to provide a coherent story with beginning or end, but to capture the mood and time of a specific place and closely knit community - the eponymous street and areas surrounding it, and the people living there. The novel features a cast of colorful characters who live a modest but largely happy existence. The main crux of Cannery Row is very simple - a group of well intending jobless locals decide to throw a party in celebration of Doc, their friend who is well liked by everyone; despite their good intentions the effort does not exactly go as planned.

Where the novel succeeds is its sheer humanity of the many inhabitants of Cannery Row: Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer who sells his goods on credit to everyone but apparently manages to run a profitable business; Doc, the gentle and intelligent man who studies local sea creatures and is an endless well of wisdom and intelligence, beloved by everybody; Mac, the leader of the local derelict who could be president if he only wanted to - but doesn't. This isn't Steinbeck of the The Grapes of Wrath, which is possibly his greatest book - with all its epic symbolism and gritty realism of extreme poverty and consuming hunger and misery; Cannery Row is a much more relaxed novel in the tradition of another of his early works, Tortilla Flat, which also featured a cast of whimsical protagonist enjoying what life brought to them, despite being poor as a tribe of mice.

Cannery Row might seem a departure from realism into idealism for Steinbeck - the lives of its protagonists are idealized and romanticized, their poverty made enviable; despite not having much or indeed anything at all, they enjoy an existence more content than those who live in the more prestigious parts of town. Accordingly, at times characterization resorts to stereotyping: the unemployed men are benevolent, joyful swindlers, and the local madam runs her brothel with respect and care for her girls and has a heart of gold. The novel is told via a series of almost disconnected vignettes, many of which do not have much to do with the main "plot" but provide a broad and enveloping image of the Row and its inhabitants. Although most of the anecdotes and stories are usually heartwarming and endearing, several end in violence and even tragedy, which is a conscious choice of Steinbeck reminding both his characters and readers that they are not experiencing a fantasy, but real life.

But the beauty of the book is that it allows us to dream a fantasy in the real life; and even though the world us contains death and misery, it also contains joy, happiness and love. In the end, Cannery Row is not a utopia, but a novel of optimism, and manages to be one without being overly maudlin and artificial. With plenty of great, quotable writing, Cannery Row is a brief but surprisingly affecting book, recommended both to Steinbeck fans and newcomers.