The Grapes of Wrath

“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, a Pulitzer Prize award winner, the book that laid not a brick but a whole foundation for the author to receive the Nobel prize in literature, doesn’t need any additional acclaim. Not from a random reader like me, anyway. And still, I want to share the absolute admiration and awe I haven’t felt for a very long time while reading a book.“Up ahead they’s a thousand’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one.”Back in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the population of the United States was over one hundred and twenty million. The Joads, though, were among those two hundred fifty thousand farmers who, after the banks had thrown them out from their land and homes, set out to California, where, they were told, they could start over. They could have lived a different life, there probably were, if not thousands, but a few other choices they could have made, but the only one they lived was full of hardships and sorrow.“The Grapes of Wrath” – or any book really – isn’t a story about everyone. It isn’t about the fate of every single American family who lived in the States almost a century ago. It isn’t about every farmer of Oklahoma or other agricultural state, who, driven by the wish to feed their families during the years when the harvest was poor and by the lack of financial literacy, lost their farm. It also isn’t about every single Californian farmer who was luckier and still had rich harvests and got an extra bonus of cheap labour force flooding the country.Yet, “The Grapes of Wrath” is a story of thousands – tens or hundreds – of people. And as such, it deserves to be told. From the perspective of these people, their hardships, the sufferings they had to go through. Without sugarcoating or diminishing the bitterness of what they experienced solely for the sake of not offending anyone.Every story deserves to be told, even if it angers someone.The truth is that those who go through something like the Joads do in “The Grapes of Wrath” seldom get a chance to tell their story. Others have to do it. But for that, those luckier ones have to have compassion for the less fortunate and a desire to understand how it felt what they’d never experienced. It is absolutely impossible to do with the attitude ‘If it didn’t happen to me, it didn’t happen at all.’The immense power of this book hit me hard. I travelled with the Joads in their old jalopy of a truck they bought, having spent a painful chunk of the little money they managed to scrape selling all their life. I felt their fears and their pain. I was terrified every time they encountered hate, aggression, and indifference on their way to California – to the land where, they believed, they’ll have a chance to become people again. Not ‘Okies’; not the useless customers who fill up the tank for a few dollars – not enough to make the gas station’s owner rich – and use the water, drinking it right from the hose and using it to wash the road dust and dirt, which seem to have grown into their skin. Not the annoying clients who walk into a roadside diner and – unlike truck drivers, the worthy customers! – can’t even buy a couple of candies for their equally filthy and miserable kids.Together with the Joads, I slept on the ground in the makeshift tent – tarpaulin spread over a rope – and I dreamt about the green and lush lands of California. Countless times, I lost hope and felt it blossoming anew upon meeting kind people who didn’t look at me like I’m not a human being.For me, from fictional characters the Joads have transformed into real people.Ma Joad, the core of the family, its heart and the engine that never stops. Her inner strength is immense, but it isn’t enough not to let everyone under her care give up. And every time someone does give up, a part of her soul dies. She is fierce and patient, kind and unrelenting. A woman, a wife, a mother – the rock.Pa Joad. A man who was driven out of his land. The land that, for him, was his life. And still, he goes on. Is it because of his wife Ma Joad? Or because the responsibility for his family outweighs his grief?Tom Joad. Someone who did the wrong thing but didn’t turn wrong.Rose of Sharon. A mother-to-be, robbed of the most beautiful time in life of every woman. Instead of thinking about the baby names, forced to spend this magic time dragging through the desert under the tarpaulin, not knowing where she’ll have to give birth to the miracle she is carrying under her heart.Granma and Grampa. Both so familiar and real that my heart aches to write about them.“Ever’thing we do – seems to me is aimed right at going’ on. Seems that way to me. Even gettin’ hungry – even bein’ sick; some die, but the rest is tougher. Jus’ try to live the day, jus’ the day.” And this is the ultimate – can’t call it wisdom – the bottom line so to speak of what we can learn about life. Moving forward, go on no matter what – is everything we can do, the only thing we have some control over. Also, we can try to remain human. And not following anything blindly, be it an instinct or a prejudice ingrained in us by our upbringing, is the most important trait of a human being.“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck doesn’t follow any ‘standards’ modern authors struggle with every day during our writing journey. It doesn’t grab you from the very first sentence. It settles into the story gradually. There are chapters throughout the book seemingly unconnected to the main plot – but they are integral to the story. It is extremely detailed, making you feel like you are a participant rather than a reader. And it all, following some inexplicable rules, which probably are the essence of creativity, weaves into one perfect whole.

In this novel about Oklahoma farmers forced by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression to seek a new life for themselves as migrant laborers in California, John Steinbeck may well have written the Great American Novel. "The Grapes of Wrath" is the story of the Joad family, but it's also the story of a people on the move, a nation in crisis, and humanity in its extremes of greed and goodness.The first quarter of the novel tells of young Tom Joad's homecoming after several years in prison for killing a man in a drunken brawl. Contact with his family has been minimal over the years, and he looks forward to seeing his parents, grandparents, and siblings again - but the house is empty, obviously abandoned, like so many others in this land where a combination of drought and poor agricultural techniques has resulted in failure and foreclosure on countless family farms. Fortunately, Tom learns from a neighbor that his family has gone over to his uncle's place, and he arrives there just in time to join them on their way to California, where they've been told there's plenty of work in the state's lush Central Valley.The second quarter of the novel is the story of the Joads' arduous journey west on Route 66, a trip distinguished by breakdowns, death, and intimations by those who have been there that California may be something less than the paradise they've been led to imagine. The final half of the novel follows the Joads after they arrive in California, only to discover that it's possible to starve even in a land of plenty as too many would-be workers are forced to compete for available jobs by accepting wages barely sufficient to buy enough food from one day to the next. The novel ends with one of the most stunning and affecting scenes you'll ever read, and although nothing at all is resolved, the story feels complete.The structure of the novel underscores Steinbeck's creation of the Joads as the human face of a social crisis. Long chapters that advance the plot alternate with short chapters in which the Joads are never mentioned, in which Steinbeck's richly poetic prose establish the physical and moral setting of his work: the conditions leading to the Dust Bowl, the loss of a way of life, the journey to a new beginning, and the disillusionment and growing anger of the migrants - all on a massive scale. These short, poignant chapters are as beautiful, captivating, and necessary as the story chapters, as they provide context and grant a kind of holy universality to the Joads' experiences.Steinbeck's writing is raw, earthy, and viscerally powerful. This is realism at its finest: full of small, telling details, and at times casually vulgar, not for shock value but because life itself is casually vulgar. I was about 13 the first time I read this novel, and the blunt honesty of the writing was a bit much for my somewhat sheltered mind; I remember feeling uncomfortable when an old man reached into his pants and "contentedly scratched under the testicles," as that wasn't a word I was used to seeing in print, at least outside of biology texts. I loved the background chapters but found the Joad chapters distasteful for the first hundred pages or so, when I finally allowed the vivid immediacy of Steinbeck's style to make the characters real for me. As an adult, I have no such difficulties and am able to appreciate the masterful style and rich characterizations immediately. This is a mature novel, about people too crassly human to elicit our pity, but too warmly human not to elicit our compassion.I must admit that as a native Californian, I feel a special connection with this novel. For most of my life I lived just a few blocks away from the old Route 66 (although farther west than the point where the Joads left it to go north). Several of my husband's children live in the Central Valley, around places Steinbeck mentions by name. However, Steinbeck's skill is such that even if you've never been there, you'll close this novel feeling as though you had. This is a novel every American should read - indeed, everyone interested in what it means to be human in trying times. These days more than ever we need this book, we need this reminder of the values of proud self-sufficiency and fierce decency, for it is when we stop pulling, and pulling together, that we lose our way.

One of the best books I’ve ever listened to. The reader’s voice makes you feel you’re right there, as he includes accents. It’s a good story, and with repeated readings, an excellent way for undereducated people to learn about economics, business, politics, farming, and American society. Plus there is a lot of wisdom into human nature, and it’s all just woven into the story of very simple farmers migrating to California during the dust bowl years.Although it was written in 1939, nothing has changed, so it’s just as relevant today as it was then.I can’t recommend this book, especially the audiobook, enough.

A experiência de leitura nessa edição é demais, começando pela introdução maravilhosa do Robert Demmot, um estudioso da obra de Steinbeck, que também é responsável pelas notas.O prefácio traz a contextualização e os desdobramentos do impacto da obra na história norte-americana, além de uma análise do autor, de suas obras e muitas dicas sobre filmes, documentários, músicas (há uma canção do Bon Dylan para um dos personagens) e até de uma paródia da revista Mad.Robert Demmot também é responsável pelas notas de rodapé, que são bem importantes nessa obra, pois há bastante gíria e o autor utiliza a forma coloquial da fala da região em sua escrita.

Non delude. Non fatevi spoilerare il finale, è davvero un capolavoro. Consiglio di leggere anche la prefazione, perché racconta sull'autore e la sua epoca.

La portada es realmente hermosa. La calidad del libro y del papel en general buena. Steinbeck escribe con un inglés muy franco y sus palabras te sumergen en un mundo tan real que vas a olvidar que estás leyendo. Un clásico sobre el periodo de la Gran Depresión en los Estados Unidos (30’).

Mon fils a adoré ce livre