Helpful Score: 5
You know, I've never lived on a farm - in fact I think I'd hate it - but I'm finding I love novels about farming and communing with land. They're very...(shudders) grounding. I really wish that weren't a pun, but it's the best word I know to describe it, and I suppose it helps explain the metaphor of spiritually settling things being described as grounding. The point is, I feel very settled at the moment.
Buck writes in a very stylized, almost awkward English that helps set the mood. It works, of course, in the subconscious expectation (at least I have) to hear about life in China in a stilted language, but it also evokes an almost biblical feeling, especially in her heavy use of repetition of the same words for the same things, over and over, and the repetition of phrases close together in a limited vocabulary.
Anyway, I don't want to spoil anything for anybody, but you're going to get Wang Lung, the simple farmer made good, and you're gonna get him warts and all, and you're gonna like him and you're gonna like him more and you're going to want things for him and you're gonna be sorry when the book ends.
And you're not going to be surprised that the book is called The Good Earth.
Buck writes in a very stylized, almost awkward English that helps set the mood. It works, of course, in the subconscious expectation (at least I have) to hear about life in China in a stilted language, but it also evokes an almost biblical feeling, especially in her heavy use of repetition of the same words for the same things, over and over, and the repetition of phrases close together in a limited vocabulary.
Anyway, I don't want to spoil anything for anybody, but you're going to get Wang Lung, the simple farmer made good, and you're gonna get him warts and all, and you're gonna like him and you're gonna like him more and you're going to want things for him and you're gonna be sorry when the book ends.
And you're not going to be surprised that the book is called The Good Earth.
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