The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Life’s so hard you don’t even notice the Communist Revolution.
There are some very realistic-seeming and disturbing descriptions of starvation in here. Overall it does the thing very well that historical fiction does, which is to describe a foreign place and time convincingly. That’s valuable, even if a book does nothing else. It expands the capacity of the heart.
It’s a picture of a man who has given himself to a god, and the god is very powerful but not very nice, and not manipulable. The rest of the culture is pretty sick of this god–I mean the land–and its capriciousness, but this guy is totally surrendered to it, even when he doesn’t think he is.
The first wife is incredibly strong. She’s admirable for that reason. A good role model.
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