The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

What a great read. Every page seems crafted by a masterful artist. His dialog is so flawless it is more entertaining to study his craftsmanship than actually following the conversations.

There are a number of uses of defamiliarization. For instance in the scenes where the Joads are working on the car. The descriptive detail of the mechanics of the reparations brings the small industry of keeping that car running alive. It feels like the reader is not merely watching, reading the operation, but actually taking part in the ongoing reparations of the car.

As much as those scenes make me feel close to the characters, I never really started to sympathize with them. They are not that likeable. They have a prejudice attitude to any sort of authority and all persons that seemingly have any sort of success.

The broken-down farmers that have been forced out of their jobs and out of their lands by rivalling neighbours are described as saints. While their former neighbours grow horns as they expand their industry and seek to hire people to work on their farms.

Never once is there any possibility that the fat, lazy, corrupt, greedy tyrants that have bought up all the land they can, have actually achieved their success by hard work. Always, it is the poor farmer - who lost his land - that was the hard worker. He didn't lose it because he started drinking or just was plain stupid or lazy. No, he toiled every field, cared for his family, and the more he worked, the less he earned and the bigger the risk of losing it all.

It seems rather narrow-minded to view a society like that. Sure there are probably honest farmers who lost their land, and sure there are landowners who try to cheat or steal their way into larger profits. However, in most cases, surely, success comes from hard work and failure springs not only from the others trying to foil one's efforts.

The camps in the novel are almost described as Utopias and I believe a utopian/dystopian reading of The Grapes of Wrath would make an interesting read. The difference between left and right-winged thinking would also harvest great fruits in the novel.

Paradise News by David Lodge

,a review

I find it always an easy, satisfying delight to read a novel by David Lodge. He writes in a well-paced satirical style, often about academics tackling problems with love, faith, colleagues, friends and relatives during turning-points in life. Paradise News is no exception. Bernard Walsh, the protagonist of the novel, is an agnostic theologian and former Catholic priest that is living a frugal, unromantic life few would envy. However, accompanied by his father on a trip to Hawaii to visit his father's estranged, dying sister, Bernard finds both problems and opportunities in the Arcadian travel location.
Although the novel is easily readable and entertaining, being a Professor of modern English literature, David Lodge plays around with the form and syntax of the novel, as well as the art of fiction. The epistolary passage in the middle of the novel and a few short episodic paragraphs of present tense work well. The variation adds to the richness and tempo of the novel. There is, however, a shift in narration that does not work quite as well.
Of the few storylines that unfold in Paradise News, one of them takes a serious taboo-laden turn towards the end of the novel. The highly amusing narration of the novel drops the humour at this point, and instead the burden of satirical observations is taken up by the characters and expressed through their dialog. The shift in narration is by no means a great disadvantage to readability or enjoyment. Perhaps it is only a noticeable blemish when contrasted with the perfectly timed and fitted shifts that are usually encountered in Lodge's fiction.

Overall, Paradise News by David Lodge is a great read I would warmly recommend anyone in search of a good novel. If you are in any way affiliated with the world of academia, I am sure that you will find many hours of hilarious delight in the fiction of David Lodge. If I was afforded only one recommendation of Lodge's novels to sample, it would not be Paradise News, but Changing Places. Yet, the tendency to feature the same locales and personalities in his novels enriches all of Lodge's works. Each new novel read makes you fall more in love with his fiction, and Paradise News is by no way a poor introduction to David Lodge's works.

That is it for a review of Paradise News. These blog posts are some much needed practice for me. I am dealing with the novels I review in school. Therefore, I plan to post a short more in depth criticism of the novel if time permits.

Johan