A little bit of literature

“A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees- willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water. In front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it.”

Vocabulary build-up

The noun bank, in this context, means “a steep natural incline; the slope of land adjoining a body of water, especially adjoining a river, lake, or channel; a large elevated area of a sea floor.”

The noun slope means “a stretch of ground forming a natural or artificial incline; an inclined line, surface, plane, position, or direction.”

Comments

This is the second John Steinbeck’s book we bring to you in the CACD English Newsletter. This Nobel Prize winner is in the Mount Rushmore of American literature, and his work has changed the way social-critic novels have been produced until recently. Steinbeck’s novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural labor, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. Steinbeck’s reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes he wrote in the 1930s; it is in these works that his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying mythopoeic and archetypal qualities in his characters are most effective. “Of Mice and Men” (1937) launched him into the national spotlight. While Steinbeck had previous critical success, such as “Tortilla Flat” (1935), the publishing of “Of Mice and Men” would catapult his reach across America. The sympathetic portrayal of two migrant laborers traversing the cruel, indifferent world of the Great Depression resonated with millions across the country, and still, to this day. While it is popularly known that Steinbeck based the novella (short novel) on his experiences working on farms on summer breaks as a teenager, it was also the result of on-location reporting. “Of Mice and Men” tells the story of how George and Lennie’s friendship is tested by the isolating and predatory reality of life for poor migrant workers in Depression-era America. George and Lennie are the protagonists, and their friendship is unique in the world of the novella: almost every other character notes that they have never seen such a close partnership between two migrant laborers before. George and Lennie’s biggest struggle is centered around surviving their oppressive, impoverished circumstances and becoming financially stable enough to own land together. This dream of one day purchasing a farm is complicated by Lennie’s inability to stay out of trouble on the job, and George’s inability to stay angry at Lennie long enough to leave and find work on his own.

* “Of Mice and Men” was turned into an award-winning movie in 1992, starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.