Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
With the title of East of Eden, one would think this was a straight retelling of the Cain and Abel story in Genesis; it is so much more.
This is a story of family, honor, love, pain, success, failure and free will. The Cain and Abel parallel runs through 2 sets of brothers and even the 2 woman involved with each set. In Charles and Adam then Cal and Aron, there is the perception of good and bad. With Cathy and Abra, it seems a little more black and white. However, the ideal of free will changing a path is always there. The characters always have a choice.
The novel highlights 2 generations of the Trask family with the relationships between the father's & sons, brothers, and the woman who impacts each generation of men. There is also the contrast of the poorer but more content Hamilton family which also plays a part in both generations.
This book has everything from drama to a small mystery to romance. It is a definite must read in a lifetime. Personally, I have to reread it every few years because, in addition to everything else, I find it to be a story of redemption and hope.
Timshel.
This is a story of family, honor, love, pain, success, failure and free will. The Cain and Abel parallel runs through 2 sets of brothers and even the 2 woman involved with each set. In Charles and Adam then Cal and Aron, there is the perception of good and bad. With Cathy and Abra, it seems a little more black and white. However, the ideal of free will changing a path is always there. The characters always have a choice.
The novel highlights 2 generations of the Trask family with the relationships between the father's & sons, brothers, and the woman who impacts each generation of men. There is also the contrast of the poorer but more content Hamilton family which also plays a part in both generations.
This book has everything from drama to a small mystery to romance. It is a definite must read in a lifetime. Personally, I have to reread it every few years because, in addition to everything else, I find it to be a story of redemption and hope.
Timshel.
April 9, 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This is a story about the endurance of the human soul, about choosing to be who you would like to be rather than believing you were cut with a mold that can’t be broken. But also it’s a story about forgiveness, the freedom of choice and the long road one must walk between one’s beginning and one’s end, and all the causes and effects in-between.
Steinbeck’s masterpiece, for to call it anything less is impossible, has left me with a sense of loss. When I came to the end of this epic tale of family and humanity, I felt abandoned simply because I ran out of words to read. I wanted to carry on in his characters’ lives, spying on their darkness, watching them evolve and bloom and outrun the forces haunting them. No book has made me feel quite so much sadness and excitement at once. Perhaps because I’m a writer, I relished the painterliness of Steinbeck’s prose. I turned every single one of its six-hundred and one pages at a furious pace, and yet I indulged and languished and roamed the landscape he had painted for me, and me alone.
The story is so personal, a reader might feel it is written for her. It is a story we must hear, a story we know, a story with which we can connect, as we do with all the ones passed down from civilization to civilization. We commune with great stories, religious accounts, epic tales, because we see ourselves most readily in them, and as Lee (one of "Eden’s" finest characters) says, that’s why we keep telling, and retelling, them from one generation to the next. Steinbeck draws on the "Old Testament," turning over the story of Cain and Abel and making it his, for us anew. And because we see ourselves in it—our good and evil—we devour his retelling as though it were medicine to save our soul, the cure for all our ails. But perhaps I exaggerate, indulging in the power of the writer a little too much. Or maybe I do feel my soul a little shaken by my experience, swept up in the writer’s magic. Either way, I am satisfied to credit Steinbeck for my joy at venturing into his Eden.
Steinbeck’s masterpiece, for to call it anything less is impossible, has left me with a sense of loss. When I came to the end of this epic tale of family and humanity, I felt abandoned simply because I ran out of words to read. I wanted to carry on in his characters’ lives, spying on their darkness, watching them evolve and bloom and outrun the forces haunting them. No book has made me feel quite so much sadness and excitement at once. Perhaps because I’m a writer, I relished the painterliness of Steinbeck’s prose. I turned every single one of its six-hundred and one pages at a furious pace, and yet I indulged and languished and roamed the landscape he had painted for me, and me alone.
The story is so personal, a reader might feel it is written for her. It is a story we must hear, a story we know, a story with which we can connect, as we do with all the ones passed down from civilization to civilization. We commune with great stories, religious accounts, epic tales, because we see ourselves most readily in them, and as Lee (one of "Eden’s" finest characters) says, that’s why we keep telling, and retelling, them from one generation to the next. Steinbeck draws on the "Old Testament," turning over the story of Cain and Abel and making it his, for us anew. And because we see ourselves in it—our good and evil—we devour his retelling as though it were medicine to save our soul, the cure for all our ails. But perhaps I exaggerate, indulging in the power of the writer a little too much. Or maybe I do feel my soul a little shaken by my experience, swept up in the writer’s magic. Either way, I am satisfied to credit Steinbeck for my joy at venturing into his Eden.
