John Steinbeck conceived East of Eden as a gift to his two young sons - Thomas and John. I am choosing to write this book to my sons, he wrote to his friend and editor, Pascal Covici, They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not written for them to read now but when they are grown and the pains and joys have tousled them a little. And if the book is addressed to them, it is for a good reason. I want them to know how it was, I want to tell them directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people.In the same letter Steinbeck also confined to Covici that in East of Eden he wanted to tell the greatest story of all: the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness, and to show how these doubles are inseparable - how neither can exist without the other and how out of their groupings creativeness is born.. Steinbeck though that this would be the most difficult book that he has ever attempted, and that he will have to squeeze the maximum out of his talent and ability - he viewed everything that he has written as being merely a preparation for it. He said that the book is The big one as far as I'm concerned. Always before I held something back for later. Nothing is held back here. He started working on the novel in 1948 and completed it in 1951; it was published in 1952, and became a bestseller. Three years later a loose adaptation would follow, now famous for starring James Dean in his first major screen role; 10 years later he would be awarded the Nobel Prize.East of Eden is an epic which clearly aims to be both intimate an majestic in its scope: it covers the history of a nation from 1862 to 1918 - for more than half a century, from Civil War to World War I - through telling the story of three generations of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons - the Hamilton family is named and based after the real-life family of Steinbeck's maternal grandfather, Samuel Hamilton. Steinbeck inserted himself into the story, both as a character and the narrator who tells it. He decided to set the story against the backdrop of the county that he grew up in; he returned to the city of Salinas in California and read the old numbers of Salinas Index-Journal for research. He wanted to describe the Salinas Valley for his two sons in detail, its sights, colors, sound and smell. He called the book a sort of autobiography of the Salinas Valley.Like The Grapes of Wrath, the novel is inspired by the Old Testament - Steinbeck reaches for the Biblical story of Cain and Abel from Genesis both for the main theme - the eternal struggle between good and evil - and the title (And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the east of Eden - Genesis 4:16). The Bible pours out from a Steinbeck novel once again - and to what effect?I have read The Grapes of Wrath and enjoyed it - and wrote a very long review where I tried to emphasize why it was - is - an important book. Grapes put Steinbeck in very real danger because of what he did: he exposed the viciousness and greed big business - particularly of California's wealthy growers and owners of immense fields, and their cruel exploitation of poor migrant workers, whose only choice was to either obey or perish. I think that Steinbeck's book was important historically - it drew attention to an important issue which was unknown to most people and grabbed their attention. It provoked a reaction - showed the brutality and harshness with which the workers were treated by their employers, and exposed them to the nation. Steinbeck received death threats and was a victim of a malicious smear campaign set in motion by the infuriated California growers, who aimed to turn him into a figure of hate. But he endured, and so did the book - perhaps even more relevant now than when it was first published.Steinbeck's approach to and treatment of a big and important subject - exploitation of the very poor by the very rich - worked in The Grapes of Wrath. Because of its importance readers were able to overlook the few literary flaws that it had (the saintliness of the Joad family which never, ever succumbs to temptation of doing something wrong - such as stealing) and it entered the canon of great American fiction. East of Eden did too, but I felt that the big and important subject - the struggle between good and evil - wasn't explored and presented as powerfully as the one in Grapes.Steinbeck's reminiscences about the Salinas Valley of his youth, its inhabitants and the lives they led, his descriptions of the valley's different regions and their unique characteristics, the fertility of the fields and the behavior of the river which runs through the valley are all the best aspects of the novel, as they show us a place as he remembered it and as it was many years ago, and the people he knew well - the Hamiltons. The Trasks are another matter, though. The Trask family serves as Steinbeck's way of conveying the Cain and Abel story, which is why the conflicts and interaction between the characters looks staged - because it is. Like in The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck wears his heart on his sleeve, but here even more so - the characters's names start with C, and Steinbeck isn't satisfied with drawing the story of Cain and Abel in one generation of the family - he does that in the second generation as well. So there's the relationship between Charles and Adam but also between Cal and Aaron, later complimented by an Abra (who's not a Pokemon) and the devilish character of Cathy Ames, who receives both C and A as her initials. All these characters struggle with their morality and decisions they make, but it's difficult to be drawn to their dilemmas as one realizes that they're just symbols used by Steinbeck for what turns out to be a rather longish sermon about god, evil and free will.The character of Cathy Ames has been said to be modeled after Steinbeck's second wife, Gwyn Conger. Gwyn asked for a divorce in 1948, just after Steinbeck returned from an emergency trip to see his fatally injured friend - he died hours before Steinbeck could reach him. Both the death and subsequent divorce put Steinbeck in deep depression. He famously modeled his most evil creation after Gwyn, who tried to stop him from going to Europe during the war as an American correspondent by accusing him of choosing war over her, his new bride, and then pretending to be pregnant.She wouldn't answer his letters and would pretend to have many other suitors while he was away. Not that Steinbeck was an angel - he met Gwyn when he was still married to his first wife, Carol, and had a secret affair with her. He eventually revealed Gwyn to Carol and actually put both women in one room to let them sort out which one will get him - surprisingly he ended up staying with Carol, but just for a short while. The couple split for good and Steinbeck married Gwyn, who gave him two boys - the same ones for whom he wanted to write this novel, Thomas and John. Steinbeck's divorce from Carol was bitter, complete with her revelations of infidelity. She used the custody of his sons to squeeze alimony out of him, and even filled a malicious suit for increase in financial support just four years before he died. Steinbeck hated Gwyn with a passion, and Cathy Ames's loathsome character is the reflection of his hatred - he feared that his wife's negative influence might be too large for his sons to overcome, which is directly reflected in the novel. Lee, Adam's Chinese servant is another interesting character - at the beginning he is introduced as a pure stereotype, a white man's version of a Chinese servant which would give Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's a run for his yellowface. But under the surface we learn that Lee is an educated man, who uses his preposterous pidgin to hide his true self from others. Although he is an American, born and raised, few see him as one and are unable to look beyond his appearance and treat him as a foreigner - just like the Japanese Americans were judged to be the enemies after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, taken from their homes and imprisoned, purely because of how they looked. Steinbeck's presentation of Lee is actually much more nuanced and understanding of his experience than the one of a typical person's from the period (just remember Tiffany's and the portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi), but even he cannot stop himself from giving Lee a sob story of his heroic parents and their inhuman efforts at his upbringing and making him incredibly intelligent and calm in all situations, always ready to serve with what ancient Chinese wisdom - kind of giving in to the stereotype of the Other of the time. A positive one, but still a stereotype.Biblical allusions aren't limited to the character's names and their actions. In several scenes Adam Trask, Samuel Hamilton and Lee actually discuss the relevant part of the Bible in great detail and ponder on whether the translations that they have been reading actually reflect the original Hebrew. Let me remind you that this is happening on a farmer's ranch in a California valley, and none of these characters has any higher formal education (not to mention a degree in Hebrew and Bible studies). Was this really necessary?I like Steinbeck a lot, but much preferred when he was sticking up for the proletariat in The Grapes of Wrath rather than trying to have his characters ponder over philosophical questions and trying to achieve wisdom. The Grapes of Wrath made an impact because it touched on real and important issues by making them the background of its fiction. Its biblical allegories were much more subtle and fun to pick out and analyze, while East of Eden is basically spelled out for the reader and doesn't offer any new surprises or insights - just goes on for more than six hundred pages. The Cause which was the blood of The Grapes of Wrath is absent in East of EdenGrapes is full of compassion for the weak and poor and anger directed at the rich who abuse them. I and most of other readers are willing to give Steinbeck's sentimentality a pass as he is shouting for those who couldn't be heard. But that's not the case with East of Eden, which was described by the theThe New York Review of Books as "bloated", "pretentious" and "uncertain" - and I find myself being more in agreement with these statements than not.
i been lovin' on this book REAL hard. don't know how else to put it, really. too many different directions for praise. i adore the characters in this story, even the chillingly evil ones. and i love the short little chapters that steinbeck just shoved in every once in a while in order to assert his musings on the state of america. or writers. or war. or life. here's probably my favorite chapter in the whole book--it's one of the few random times Steinbeck writes in second person:"You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be--more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world--the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless. Old men who didn't know whether they were going to stagger over the boundary of the century looked forward to it with distaste. For the world was changing, and the sweetness was gone, and the virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost--good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies any more, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word. There was a time when people kept their fly buttons fastened. And man's freedom was boiling off. And even childhood was no good any more--not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity?A man's mind vagued up a little, for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them. An elder man might truly recall through water the delicate doctor-testing of little girls, but such a man forgets, and wants to, the acid emotion eating at the spleen so that a boy had to put his face flat down in the young wild oats and drum his fists against the ground and sob 'Christ! Christ!' Such a man might say, and did, 'What's that damned kid lying out there in the grass for? He'll catch a cold.'Oh, strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!And some men eased themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.History was secreted in the glands of a million historians. We must get out of this banged-up century, some said, out of this cheating, murderous century of riot and secret death, of scrabbling for public lands and damn well getting them by any means at all. Think back, recall our little nation fringing the oceans, torn with complexities, too big for its britches. Just got going when the British took us on again. We beat them, but it didn't do us much good. What we had was a burned White House and ten thousand widows on the public pension list. Then the soldiers went to Mexico and it was a kind of painful picnic. Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home. The Mexican War did two good things though. We got a lot of western land, damn near doubled our size, and besides that it was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murder settled on us the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible. And then the arguments:Can you keep a slave?Well if you bought him in good faith, why not?Next they'll be saying a man can't have a horse. Who is it wants to take my property?And there we were, like a man scratching at his own face and bleeding into his own beard. Well that was over and we got slowly up off the bloody ground and started westward. There came boom and bust, bankruptcy, depression.Great public thieves came along and picked the pockets of everyone who had a pocket. To hell with that rotten century!Let's get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let's close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life. A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed on that stinking century. It's a fair thing ahead. There's no rot on this clean new hundred years. It's not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years--why, we'll crucify him head down over a privy.Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!"
What do You think about East Of Eden (2002)?
This is the kind of book that made me realize why I need Goodreads, and why I wanted to be active on the site again. Reading East of Eden, I had so many thoughts and so many feeeeeeelings and I had nowhere to put them, except scribbled pages in notebooks and texts to my friend who I borrowed it from and loving in it that way that I went around to everyone I knew, and told everyone who saw me reading it, that they really needed to pick it up because it's "just so good." I wasn't able to put it more eloquently than that, and truth be told, even if I'd been using GR more at the time, I maybe couldn't have, because sometimes there are just those books that rip out our tongues along with our hearts and just render us into stammering, sobbing piles of mush. I finished East of Eden while on an airplane, sobbing, and took a deep breath, and would've started again at page 1 if it hadn't been for the fact that I was borrowing the book from someone and needed to give it back to them.Will I be devouring every book Steinbeck has ever written with student-like dedication? You better bet I will. Is East of Eden "The Great American Novel"? I mean, I'm not gonna front like I've read all of the books that have been called that, and I haven't read Steinbeck's other claimed masterpiece, Grapes of Wrath, but from among the books I've read, I'd say fuck yeah it is.
—Taylor
I read The Grapes of Wrath about eight months ago, to be honest I was a little disappointed in it because I expected to like it more than I did on the basis of its reputation and because I love Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men which I read previous to that. For some reason The Grapes of Wrath just did not resonate with me, one of those inexplicable things that can not be explained I think. East of Eden is an entirely different matter, it clicked with me all over the place and already found a place in my short to be re-read list.Most of the synopses for this novel that I have seen tend to indicate that this is a story of two families the Trasks and the Hamiltons and how their lives are intertwined. I have probably been reading it wrong somehow because I feel that the book is all about the Trasks and the Hamiltons are supporting characters. Lee the Chinese manservant seems more crucial to the story than the Hamiltons. The story is inspired by the Biblical story of Cain and Abel from the Book of Genesis. The influence of "Cain and Abel" is quite explicit from the names of the central characters and actual mentions of the biblical bros within the novel. That said I am going to cheat and skip the synopsis entirely because the book does have quite a lot of plot in spite of being essentially character-centric, this makes synopsizing a real chore.The main characters really make the book for me, I am fascinated by them and their motivation. Cathy Ames has to be one of the most interesting antagonists in fiction. Here is a character who is evil simply by nature, the wealth and benefits she gets from her machinations are merely byproducts. She does what she does because that is how she rolls! Some people are just bad to the bone. This quote from the book: It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world. To me that makes her some kind of fascinating anomaly or mutant, she is also quite the scene stealer, every time she shows up in the book all the other characters immediately fade into the background for me (including the actual people in my vicinity at the time of reading). Cathy reminds me of Sharon Stone's character in the movie Basic Instinct. I wonder if she tries to redeem herself at the end though? If you have read the book and some thoughts on this please let me know.Another character who is not mentioned very much in discussions of this book is Lee, the "Chinaman", being of the oriental persuasion myself I can not help but identify with him, though our lives don't actually have anything in common. If I was an actor I would love to play him in a movie adaptation, certainly I wish I had half his wisdom, decency, sensitivity and perceptiveness. Although he is a manservant he is someone to aspire to be. Interestingly Lee, along with the similarly perceptive Sam Hamilton seem to be the only characters who has a perfect understanding of what is going on and of everybody else's motivations.Of the protagonists I really feel for Caleb's plight. We all feel unloved at one time or another and we all feel the urge to do morally questionable things or to strike out and damn the consequences, just for that brief moment of satisfaction. Caleb is a complex character with many facets to him, more than he himself is aware of. His "nice" idealistic brother Aron is a little bland to me and seems more like a plot device. The romantic interest Abra is probably too wise for her years, but I like the calming influence she tends to have on the other characters. Unsurprisingly she and Lee get on like a house on fire.The writing is heartfelt, eloquent yet unpretentious, at times it is lyrical without ever being inaccessible, these qualities should come as no surprise to regular readers of Steinberg. The dialogue always ring true and the characters have their own believably distinctive voices. There are also moments of levity that manage to raise a smile. The book does have it all (except killer robots).Reading East of Eden has been a moving experience for me and a thought provoking exploration of human heart, a book to be read again and again. No wonder it won the Nobel Prize.
—Apatt
“It was his first sharp experience with the rule that without money you cannot fight money.”This is a beautiful but brutal story of sibling rivalry, parent-child relationships, and the inherent good and evil in each one of us. The novel spans two parallel storylines: 1) the three generations of the Trask family - Cyrus Trask, his sons Adam and Charles, and Adam's sons Aron and Caleb, through their eventful, changing, sometimes violent lives, sweeping from a farm in Connecticut to Steinbeck's home in the Salinas Valley of California;2) the Hamiltons - Steinbeck's own maternal family - the telling is full of affection and great tenderness, especially the portrayal of Samuel, Steinbeck's grandfather.Critics of this novel will tell you that it's a heavy-handed, melodramatic, bloated example of literary self indulgence; and frankly these are valid complaints. And yet I enjoyed this novel - quite a bit actually. Steinbeck, for all his shortcomings, is an accomplished story-teller and I found myself consistently reading "just a few more pages" instead of putting the book down. What can I say? The novel's flaws are maddeningly apparent, and yet I genuinely looked forward to each opportunity to pick the book up again. Why I liked this book so much: the characters! John Steinbeck is the creator of some of the most memorable characters:Cathy/Kate - One of the most vile, evil women I have ever encountered in literature. And not because she is hateful, but because she is totally devoid of any scruples or feeling and only seeks her own gain. She is manipulative and cold and puts on the appropriate facade for whatever it is she is trying to accomplish. She also recognizes the intelligence in her adversary, and strongly dislikes those who see through her facade.Caleb - While some critics consider Cathy/Kate the most fascinating Steinbeck character, I find Cal far more complex. Cal thinks he is evil; he struggles with his desires and believes he has no good in him. He discovers he is the offspring of a despicable woman and finds confirmation in what he's always known by instinct: he's got bad blood. What I find most fascinating is the way he hurts his brother, Aron. Samuel - One of the jolliest, wisest, and most inventive characters you could ever hope to meet. He recognizes his strengths and weaknesses, and he has a thirst for knowledge that is enviable.Lee - The servant who is actually the cornerstone of the main character's family. A wise and learned man who can pretty much do anything he puts his mind to and keeps the family afloat when Adam dulls his senses to the world. I was extremely interested in the way that Steinbeck dealt with prejudice and how he chose to make Lee - the character that most of the other characters at first disregard - the most insightful character. All in all, East of Eden is a wonderful book that I recommend to anyone who loves learning about human nature. This book is for those who think, who care about who they are and who they want to be or ought to have been. “And people found happiness in the future according to their present lack.”“I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt - and there is the story of mankind.”“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? … Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”“It’s awful not to be loved. It’s the worst thing in the world…It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.”
—Desislava
