Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamilton's - whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence.
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[The Salinas Valley is in Northern California]***
(Penguin Modern Classics, 7 September 2000, first published 1952, 612 pages, ebook, #popsugarreadingchallenge 2019, a book that has inspired a common phrase or idiom, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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Well, I absolutely loathed Of Mice and Men so I'm not sure why I expected East of Eden to be anything different. Consider myself educated in the fact Steinbeck is not for me no matter how many accolades people throw at him. This book is 600+ pages of patronising sermonic waffle. Steinbeck clearly wanted to be a great writer who wrote the great American novel. Bully for him! The characters are never fully formed and never come to life, they are symbolic and little more than ink outlines. The book focuses on the moral dilemmas of various characters but I didn't give a stuff about any of them because the characters had the complexity of a brown paper bag. The only two female characters are ridiculous, one evil with no redeeming qualities at all and the other so exaggerated she becomes a cartoon. The men can be summed up in one superlative such as a greatest, kindest or maybe dumbest would be more accurate. There is also a character called Chinaman who adds a new level of absurdity to the nonsense that is East of Eden. The dialogue is so bad it should be some sort of crime, so stilted, long-winded and rambling it hurt my head to read at times. WTF? Why do people love this book so much? Is it some kind of mass hysteria? Did somebody slip a pill in the water? I haven't read something this pretentious in a while. Steinbeck got a Nobel Prize for this piece of crap. I feel quite nauseous now.