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.