Friday, March 5, 2010

The Good Earth, Pearl Buck


Haven't posted in a while, busy with having a life, one could say. However, I shall grace you with my literary insights once more in order to distract myself from the battering of my poor little car from an onslaught of golf ball sized hail stones.


The Good Earth begins with this peasant dude, Wang Lung, living in a hut, getting ready to purchase himself a wife- in much the same fashion as you would purchase other family members- pigs, dogs, cows, waterbuffalo... He heads on down to the local self styled lord and is all, "Give me a wife, yo or I'll bust a cap in yo ass". And the local lord basically goes "Fuck you mother fucker fuckety fuckety fuckety ok here's a wife." But poor little Wang Lung can't have a pretty wife because he prefers his women STD free. So he gets himself this fugly chick who is sure to be clean and surely not hymen-ly-challenged because who else is going to touch her?

Then Wang Lung and his woman (who doesn't actually have a name for half the book) have babies and sow crops for the next three hundred pages. That's basically it. Oh sure, there are some things that happen in between like, they milk a cow or they eat some tofu, but pretty much they're fully obsessed with growing shit. There's also a famine, half the family dies blahblahblah but that all pales into comparison with the fact that "look, there's a crop, oh look, now it's growing". Wang Lung sure loves his crops. His sons? Yeah, crops don't hold the same fascination for them and they run off and spend their time visiting prositutes. Then Wang Lung buys himself another wife, a local prostitute, who then gets fat and refuses to bear him any children. Sigh. The trials of women, eh? He should have given them a good ol' fashioned beating. That would have learned them. Learned them good.


Now for the part where I write from the realms of reality, go:


This book is a thinking person's book (meaning unfortunately Edward the vampire doesn't make an appearance and there's no such thing as a "babysitter" let alone a "club" in peasant-land, China). The symbolism is there, but I'm too lazy to actually work out what the symbolism stands for, so maybe y'all should just read the book and tell me all about it. I'll give you a hint: water, land, crops- they're symbols for something. I'm going to say they're symbols of post modernist oppression in a post-Stalinist era. It's very well written, interesting; both simplistic and highly complex at the same time. There was apparently a touch of controversy upon it's publication in 1931 according to Wikipedia because Pearl S. Buck isn't actually Chinese and so what the hell would she know about Asians? Then there was some other controversy because Pearl S. Buck is a whitey and therefore sneaky and a liar. Or something. Whatever it was, my opinion is that the book is actually pretty darn accurate (from what I can gather, but how inaccurate can a person be when the entire book is basically: Mr and Mrs Peasant live in a hut and grow corn and eat corn") and seeing as she grew up in China (which in itself is interesting considering the period) yeah, I think she'd have an idea.


I would recommend this book and on my own personal scaling system, I would give it a "100,000 times better than Twilight" stamp of approval. "What does that even mean?" you ask? It means reading it didn't make me want to stab my eye with a fork, and despite the fact that the Wang Lung's wife spends the entire book without any sense of identity other than as free labour and as a baby-generating machine, it is probably less degrading to women and feminism on the whole than the entire Twilight enterprise.


The End.
The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, Washington Square Press, 1931

2 comments:

Completely independent third party reviewer said...

Dear Mrs Whittleby

This Pearl S Buck sure sounds sneaky, but it appears that she is a talented writer. Once again a great review on the sneakiness, hymens and edward. This book is sure to entertain me for hours on end.

Anonymous said...

Dear Mrs Whittleby,

I studied this book in year 11 literature, so can inform you vaguely of the symbolism. The land is, to Wang Lung, a pure, natural force, and symbolises all that is good in the world. The growing of the crops symbolises the growth of Wang Lung as a man. Wang Lung understands that the land it the source of all life and wealth, and with out it he is nothing. He sometimes forgets this through out the book, but never completely.
Wealth and a rise in social status remove him from the land and thus leave him open to the corruption that often comes with wealth and power. At various points in the book Wang Lung is seduced by this rich, glittering world, breaks his ties with the land and suffers for it. For example, when he becomes infatuated with the prostitute he eventually makes his concubine, he eventually returns to the land to relieve himself of his desires. This is symbolic of the eternal, healing powers of our connection to the earth.
At the end of the book Wang Lungs sons talk about selling the land for profit, and don't listens to Wang Lungs pleas to keep it. It is here that Wang Lung and the reader realise that Wang Lungs failure to raise his sons with respect for the land will lead to their demise.
I hope this explains it.