Ignoring ‘rigidly formed strictures’, he interweaves his plot with autobiography, authorial intrusions and mini-essays to enthralling effect. In his introduction, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda writes of Steinbeck’s refusal to be restrained by genre. Rich in symbolic artistry and sweeping in scale, the narrative explores universal themes of love, identity and free will to reveal the primordial passions that govern us all, emotional patterns that are repeated, revised or reversed as one generation passes to the next. Blending family history and biblical allegory, he draws on the stories of the fall of Adam and Eve and the fatal rivalry of Cain and Abel to recount the intertwined fates of two families living in California’s idyllic Salinas Valley, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the close of the First World War. With his masterwork, Steinbeck aimed to tell ‘perhaps the greatest story of all – the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |