Title: The Good Earth
Author: Pearl S. Buck
Narrated by: Anthony Heald
Publisher: Blackstone
Audio
Length:
Approximately 10 hours and 37 minutes
Source: Purchased
from Amazon.com
What book has a character in it that you have a love /
hate relationship with?
Tonight, for my Back to the Classics Book Club at the
Kewaunee Public Library, we are going to discuss Pearl S. Buck. We all picked a Pearl S. Buck novel to read
and share. I was going to read Sons,
which is the second book in the House of Earth Trilogy. Then I realized it had been twenty or so
years since I read the first book in the Trilogy, The Good Earth, and I didn’t
remember much from it. Therefore, I read
The Good Earth instead. The Good Earth
is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel for 1932 and was the best-selling novel for
both 1931 and 1932 in the United States.
Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. Buck grew up in China as the child of
missionaries and wrote the novel while she lived in China using her firsthand
observations of village life. This novel
brought a story of rural China to many people in the United States for the
first time.
Wang Lung is a farmer in a rural village. The novel starts the day of his
marriage. He is going to marry a woman named
O-Lan who had been a slave at the House of Hwang. Wang Lung and O-Lan have a good partnership
with both working hard on the land.
Things are going well when a famine strikes. They work through the hardship to become a
wealthy family.
I liked the characters in this novel and the picture
it captures of a rural village of China at an indetermined time (there are
trains – late nineteenth or early twentieth century). I like how it goes through about forty years
of this family’s story. I also enjoyed
that the ending was a bit of a cliffhanger, so I do want to continue this trilogy
by reading Sons.
The love of the land was a constant theme through this
story. I also liked how it showed that once the person that did all of the hard
work has accumulated wealth, their descendants can find themselves destroying
the family through their vices. This was
the end of the House of Hwang, and Wang Lung’s sons seem to be going down that
same pathway.
The famine was brutal and devastating. It was terrible to realize this happened
several times during the farmers lifetime and they had no safety net to fall
back on.
The real hero
of this story was O-Lan, and I felt very conflicted about Wang Lung. He treats O-Lan terribly. When O-Lan gives birth and then immediately
goes out to the field to work. Wang Lung won’t even let her have a bit of time
to rest, which did not endear him to me.
O-Lan is always selflessly working for her family only to be replaced by
a concubine. O-Lan has two small pearls
that are her only special treasure. Wang
Lung takes them from her and makes them into earrings for his concubine. O-Lan dies of cancer and Wang Lung is sad at
the time but can’t help thinking about how unattractive he finds her. I just wanted to smack Wang Lung. He seemed to have problems with not being
able to control himself around the ladies.
The other part I had a problem with was when his son told him that he
liked a slave that they owned. Then the
70-year Wang Lung decides that the 16-year-old slave is pretty attractive and
takes her for his own concubine. He then
wonders why his son runs away. I would
run away too Wang Lung. Thinking about
it, Wang Lung is a good three-dimensional character with both good and bad
traits.
Anthony Heald was a good narrator of this
audiobook. I enjoyed listening to it and
found the story to be very engaging on my drives.
Took me back decades
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