East of Eden; by John Steinbeck.

John Steinbeck is not only one of the most famous writers, and generally also a very respected one, but more than anything he transcends often from good writer to a great one. This is one of the works that is evidence of his quality that is at once magical and great both.

East Of Eden rises above the mundane and the unusual, the common and the evil, the different characters that it describes, by the good and the superlative, the aspiring human spirit and the calm, comprehending one; the courage of one and the silent tragedy of another.

It is not just the mirroring of Adam and Charles with slightly skewed images in Aaron and Caleb, and the questionable source of the money fo Adam's father mirrored in the beyond question source of Cathy's - it is the whole lot of people.

Especially Samuel and his whole clan, on one hand, with Adam's chinese housekeeper and cook on the other with his elders who went through years of learning to ponder on a question that had nothing to do with their ancestral culture. And found the answer, too!

It is Olive, with her stoic encouragement of a pilot she thought was in trouble; her sister who spread delight and peace and joy like a delicate but definite perfume in hearts and lives and brought smiles of expectation to those that expected to meet her, and herself died silently of a heartbreak. Another one who married an inventor, who went on trying, at the expense of making money - in fact spending all he had for his experiments.

Samuel's horse who had a grand name because he had nothing else. His wife who cared for her large family with the very little that their land could provide, and did not worry, only worked and provided and organised. Samuel who knew that Adam's Chinese housekeeper was more literate and erudite than his pretense to the contrary for sake of conforming to the local social prejudice, in order to blend into the background.

So many characters unforgettable - and so many lessons implicit and otherwise.

Of course, one may complain Steinbeck went with the more socially acceptable norm, in depicting evil in the accepted form in prevalent cultural prejudicial terms of Christian and Islamic heritage, by personifying it as a female - while evil rages far more often and far more visibly out there in garb of male gender. Think nazis, think Stalin, think kkk, think pedophiles and other abusers.

But one cannot expect everything from everyone, and if Steinbeck did not rise above all of his upbringing limitations, he was only human.

Friday, September 26, 2008
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It is sometimes surprising how time changes perception with a widening and a lesser acceptance of morose, morbid love of grief that youth might tolerate under the assumption of such an attitude being the more grown up; one then suddenly realises that Divine is above all such attitudes, is about Bliss, and in fact love of morbidity or grief merely attaches one to heavy loads that keep one weighed down since that is precisely their function - and they keep one from Divine in fact.

An abridged or Readers' Digest version of the book keeps some beautiful prose bordering on poetry that Steinbeck is good with, but it also keeps one from the less appealing aspects of this book in particular, perhaps his writing in general. When re-reading it in the full version one is sickened with his obsession with sin, his entirely negative portrayals of women in general - those not related to him, that is; his portrayals of his mother and her sisters are free of this blemish - conforming with the semitic religions' identification of all that is negative with the female. This obsession with the semitic religious view - and by that I mean all the religions that originate with the old testament as their first book, that is to say chiefly three religions and otherwise a good deal larger number if one counts all branches as separate - keeps him in the fixed attitude of innocent being pigheaded idiots that are loved but do not love and are murdered, while those that love are the ones that get into murderous rages and survive with a permanent guilt weighing them down as if their being unwanted were not enough.

These obsessions of the author take away what beauty pervades the book on the whole and one is sickened by the end of it enough to wish one could hit him on the head with the book and say, get over this fixation, you have other heritage that can lead you to light, stop obsessing with the darkness. Divine is about Beauty and Light, not this sin-guilt load designed to keep you weighed down.