I just finished pic.
What did you guys think of it?
I liked how it really went into the struggles and confusion of most characters inner thoughts, without really moralizing or sentimentalizing.
It really struck me how little agency any of the characters really seemed to have, everyone felt so stuck, and it really came across in the prose and form to me.
Most of all, I thought it was a book about communication/miscommunication and the distances held/lost between everyone b.c of the ineffectiveness of communication/language. There seemed to be some hope at certain points, but at other points there was nothing but trickery, fake accents, lost or late letters sent, lies told, and so on. I've been reading a lot of stuff on referents and language, and it really reminded me of that stuff.
I liked the book. Steinbeck's prose is good, if not a bit purple. I found the characters to be very well done, especially Lee and Caleb and Abra.
>without really moralizing
Uh, what? I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, just Steinbeck's style, but the entire book moralizes nonstop. What do you think "thou mayest" was about?
>I thought it was a book about communication/miscommunication
Does it happen in the book? Plenty. Is it a major enough theme to broadly say it's "about communication?" I'd say definitely not. More than anything else all the letter fuck-ups amd stuff seemed to be ways of moving the plot along. The fact that you were reading about language-centric stuff just made you pay more attention to it, probably.
>>7801057
thou mayest was irony, b/c probably the entire rest of the book was characters either trapped in their own personality, in their own culture, in their gender, in their economic situation and so on (all produced through language) that there was no place left for 'thou mayest this/that"
>>7801144
What about Cal? It's been a while since I've read but I remember him as an amazing character. I mean, the last words in the book are target towards him. I don't think I would say it's irony
>>7801192
after/during WWI it is hard to imagine a linear narrative, of a few family lines, somehow leading us to a truth about the entire human condition, supposedly timshel, spoken by a recent stroke victim who was a coward and a flake his entire life. The optimism that we might be good/bad as we choose seems undercut by the rest of the book. and the character Cal doesn't exist after his father tells him timshel, so he never does choose between being good or bad.
>>7800791
the ending was short and cool, right? I was all like, "dayum son I know 'xactly what he mean right ther." Steinbeck's best imo. Steinbeck has some great novels so that's saying a lot.
