Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there. Steinbeck revisited these characters and this milieu nine years later in his novel Sweet Thursday.
Also contained in:
[The Grapes of Wrath / The Moon is Down / Cannery Row / East of Eden / Of Mice and Men][1]
Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there. Steinbeck revisited these characters and this milieu nine years later in his novel Sweet Thursday.
Also contained in:
[The Grapes of Wrath / The Moon is Down / Cannery Row / East of Eden / Of Mice and Men][1]
When Steinbeck is at his best, he is one of my favorite authors. He has a way of layering in detailed descriptions and feelings that should seem complex but somehow come across very simple and direct. This book is almost like a collection of inter-related short stories, with each chapter a short scene of life in a time and place. About 3/4 of the chapters build upon one another to tell a kind of loose plot, but a quarter are unrelated and just set a tone or mood -- these stand-alone chapters are some of my favorites.
"...the things people admire in men, such as kindness, generosity, and honesty, are often seen as signs of failure in society, while traits like greed and self-interest are seen as signs of success."
Now I want to take the two hour drive down to Monterey and walk around Cannery Row.
Far from the doomed cross-country voyage of 'Grapes of Wrath' lies 'Cannery Row,' one of the sweetest books I've ever read. The characters are so human in their needs, desires, thoughts, and actions, and Steinbeck clearly loves them for all of their flaws. You'll fall in love with every character just like they all love each other in this romantic little seaside community. The magic of the storytelling lies in the perfect balance of playful humor and profound melancholy. It's the work of a master at the height of his craft.
I picked up this book expecting it to be a handful of short stories loosely centered around Cannery Row and in a way that's exactly what this book is, but it's more coordinated and interwoven than I expected. The scope of the work is tight (especially compared to an epic like East of Eden) but Steinbeck is capable of putting so much life into the characters and places with just a few lines of text that before I knew it I was wrapped up in the world.
1) ''Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.''
2) ''Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans know more about the Ford coil …
1) ''Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.''
2) ''Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans know more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered.''
3) ''One of Dora's girls comes home from a call on a patron too wealthy or to sick to visit the Bear Flag. Her makeup is a little sticky and her feet are tired. Lee Chong brings the garbage cans out and stands them on the curb. The old Chinaman comes out of the sea and flap-flaps across the street and up past the Palace. The cannery watchmen look out and blink at the morning light. The bouncer at the Bear Flag steps out on the porch in his shirt-sleeves and stretches and yawns and scratches his stomach. The snores of Mr. Malloy's tenants in the pipes have a deep tunnelly quality. It is the hour of the pearl---the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.''
4) ''Dora was splendid. Her hair freshly dyed orange was curled and piled on her head. She wore her wedding ring and a big diamond brooch on her breast. Her dress was white silk with a black bamboo pattern. In the bedrooms the reverse of ordinary procedure was in practice.''
5) ''The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.''
