The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

 

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.