In my opinion, this one goes right up there with Don DeLillo's Underworld and James Joyce's Ulysses -- big, fat, heavyweights of novels whose last pages you read over and over because you can't believe the story is actually done and just sit there staring at the back cover for fifteen minutes letting your brain work over what just happened to you and the characters and how, good lord, you're actually out of breath.
My friend Danny mentioned that I take a look at the photos of Dorothea Lange, a photographer during the Great Depression whose pictures best illustrate, as far as I can tell, what The Grapes of Wrath is all about:
"[These here folks] wanta eat an' get drunk and work. An' that's it -- they wanta jus' fling their goddamn muscles aroun' an' get tired. Christ! What am I talkin' about?" - Casy the preacher
4 comments:
Love Dorothea Lange! Even though black and white photography doesn't really lend itself to glow time...
breath-taking is definitely the way to describe it... and how haunting is the last page?
it might honestly be my favorite work of american literature... now you must read east of eden! not as amazing, but still great. :)
Not to cast too much of a shadow on the already black and white, but I couldn't help thinking with those Lange pictures, "What if that's what's going to end up happening again in the U.S. over the next few years?"
How's it feel in Northern France? Maybe Filthadelphia's just put a film of dirt on my optimism. So I don't get caught off guard, I'll continue preparing for the apocalypse.
funny you should say that... i just saw "2012" (dubbed over in French, of course) and i learned that the only way we can survive the apocaplyse is by having a lot of money and paying for our way onto giant submarines built in secret by the chinese government. i took it's advice with a grain of salt, however, and that's why i'm making yogurt.
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