Well, it's finished. No, not the challenge, but my reading of The Grapes of Wrath - a Pultizer Prize-winning novel and acknowledged American classic. But I found it awfully hard-going at the start.I love author John Steinbeck, and Of Mice and Men is among my favourite novels, but I've always been a bit daunted by The Grapes of Wrath, as much for its sweeping look at the Great Depression as its not insignificant length. Suffice to say, I've renewed this book no fewer than five times since I withdrew it from the libary in mid-October...
But the book itself is a masterpiece. While it's relatively easy to portray events - if difficult to do it well - to create a mood is much harder, and to create one which so pervades the novel a barely believable triumph.
The Grapes of Wrath begins with despair and fear as the Joad family leaves the Oklahoma dustbowl and year after year of failed crop harvests in search of work in the promised land of California, and relates how they hang on to hope in spite of the hardship and sacrifice they encounter.
It's a 'hard' book in many ways. The suffering is huge, while the language is so evocative that the reader feels like the family, making progress so slowly that persistence and resilience are required in abundance. Every alternate chapter gives a short overview of the plight of families like the Joads and reinforces the magnitude of their plight in the 1930s.
And yet. Despite the fight for food, the lack of work, the absence of a home, the ill treatment by police and Californian residents, strikes, the gruelling nature of the pilgrimage west, illness and even death, The Grapes of Wrath is above all an inspirational story of hope and how family and human nature can overcome almost anything.
I could go on, but I'll limit myself to one more word: excellent.
So, rating time:
#91 The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (Penguin Group) - 9/10
Next up: The Five People You Meet in Heaven , by Mitch Albom (Little, Brown)
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