East of Eden

"Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk."

This is a hard book to review, mostly because I'm not really sure why this turned out to be such a compelling read. It's like a character study spanning a generation, where everyone's thoughts and motives are center stage. The main "meat" of the book surrounds Adam and his family, though several other characters come in and out of frame that play a large role in how Adam develops. The time period spans from 1862 to the outbreak of World War I, and for your time spent you really start to develop an understanding and an interest in this family who settles in Salinas Valley, California.

If we're being honest here, I really thought this was going to be a DNF book for me. If it wasn't for literally everybody around me telling me how good this book is and me not wanting to deal with defending myself for the rest of my life, I probably would have put it down within the first third or so. I found this book to really drag in the beginning, which is what prevents me from giving it a full five stars. It pulled me in hard once things start to come together and you find out how all the pieces you were introduced to in the beginning fit, and I found the rest to be a very satisfying (if long) read.

I also wasn't fully satisfied with Kate/Cathy and her resolution. We can see her slow descent into paranoia and suspicion, but her deciding to suddenly kill herself (I say suddenly, when it's clear she's been planning it a while) felt out of character from what she was set up as. Steinbeck made an attempt to set her up as a sympathetic, pitiful character in the end, but I still don't think it makes up for how she got there.

Can we also just talk a second about how awesome a character Lee was? The dude really carried the family on his shoulders, I swear.

So, all in all, I'm very glad I gave this book so many chances and stuck with it 'til the end. It's a satisfying book to have read. I'm glad I listened to my friends (for once).

I loved this book.
As anyone who's read [a:John Steinbeck|585|John Steinbeck|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1182118389p2/585.jpg]'s [b:East of Eden|8111671|East of Eden|John Steinbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1319643757l/8111671.SX50.jpg|2574991] will tell you, the first thing to do is to forget about the 1955 movie version of it. The movie is only of the fourth of four parts of the book and is a melodrama, though it's always fun to watch James Dean act.
It's exactly the book I wanted to read at this time; a book that takes me away from the events of this awful year (2020) but isn't escapist fluff. (I don't mean to sound like a snob. I have no problem with escapist fiction but I personally read so little that I try to find something that challenges me a little without adding to my stress level.)
For me the best surprise was the character Lee, who's left out of the movie though he's nearly the most important character in the story. He is the Chinese servant of the main characters and in the beginning he's an annoying stereotype, what you might expect of someone in a book written in 1950 that takes place in the early Twentieth Century.
When you first meet him, Lee says things like, "Allee time talkee. Me Chinee number one boy. You leddy go now?" That's annoying for many reasons, among them that the dialect is taking from Japanese stereotypes, not Chinese. It turns out that Lee only talked that way because it shielded him from the white people he worked for. He was born in America. As the novel progresses, he drops it completely and emerges like a wise, hip character from 2020 somehow transported back in time, and says things like:

All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed—selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful—we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic—and do you know of any other nations that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good".

A beautiful and at times heartbreaking story of good and evil and the shades in between, and how our choices ultimately make us who we are. I was getting tired of seeing posts of "Wow, I read East of Eden and was blown away!" on reddit and finally decided to take the plunge and dive headlong into the saga, and I'm a little ashamed to admit that I belong to the same category. This was a beautiful book and I don't want to read anything by Steinbeck for a long time - because I want to savor this age-old ripe wine and shine in the afterglow.

I love to fall asleep while reading a book, but this might be one of those rare books that made me apprehensive about the ordeal while at the same time getting me excited for what comes next (the other one would be "House of Leaves"). I used to dread reading it at night because I knew somewhere down the line, there would be a chapter on Cathy, and I would get nightmares of her evil doings after that. It sounds silly when I say it out loud, but in my eyes, that speaks for the brilliance of this book. The length of the book allows it to explore each and every character to its core and oftentimes lead to conversations that would make me close my kindle and just think about what I had just read. The most illuminating pick of all those interesting conversations would be the one where the father-figure-cum-servant of the house discusses "Timshel" with one of the characters.

"Thou mayest"

I think if I ever get a tattoo (which might not be too distant a future), Timshel would surely feature prominently on my skin.

I really enjoyed this book, even if it's a bit reminiscent of the familial epics I've been growing a bit tired of.

A 3.5 might be a bit more honest, because even though Steinbeck's writing is a pleasure, I think this story was bit indulgent. A lot of words were spent on very early history that was only mildly relevant, tangents out of Steinbeck's life (the novel is semi-autobiographical), and even though he is quite affectionate in his description of Salinas it's occasionally a bit much.

That said, for a novel that's pretty clearly a re-telling of the beginning of Genesis (I mean, look at the title) it had a lot of really great scenes, action, drama, and even a few chapters that were just plain funny. Even though it hits some of the bullet points from the Bible it wasn't predictable and the overall message - which was beautifully underscored by the ending - was quite different than the usual take away from the story of Cain and Abel.

Lots of really good side characters as well. Samuel Hamilton and Lee particularly being a couple of guys I'd like to sit down and have a drink of ng-ka-py with.

My review of this book will be a little more personal than I normally write but I feel compelled to offer not just my objective opinion but more how the book made me feel. "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck was a deeply affecting novel. I rarely come across a book that I feel is "perfect" as it is. "East of Eden" is a masterpiece of English prose and tells an American story on a universal scale that testifies deeply to the human condition it all its strength and promise, its violence and frailty.

Steinbeck's use of symbolism and Biblical metaphor is clear but do not overpower the reader. And his characters are for the most part three-dimensional and human. I do not think that I have ever read a novel that I feel was so carefully and lovingly crafted by its author. I am tempted to give more description about its contents but I really want to simply encourage you to read the novel and allow yourself to be pulled into its compelling narrative. Unusually, I found myself marking pages with soaring, lyrical passages. Frequently, I put the book down to simply to think. Even more unusually, it is a book that I immediately wanted to read again. "East of Eden" is one book I can unequivocally say will stay with me for the rest of my life and I believe I should be rightly considered a milestone in not only American literature but literature as a whole.