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Title: Cannery Row
Author: John Steinbeck
Series: Cannery Row
Series Number: 1
Genre: Classic
Audience: Adult
My Review:
I picked this up from The Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Pacific Grove, CA, pretty close to the actual Cannery Row. In fact, I just realized exactly how close I was. Dang it. Missed opportunity because I did not go there. Anyway, as I read, I enjoyed reading Steinbeck’s descriptions of places that I had visited, however briefly, and marveling at the change from his time to mine.
I would describe the book as a collection of loosely-connected stories that eventually come together. It’s not a book to read for an exciting plot; it feels more like an exploration of a place and the characters who live there. The characters feel almost like caricatures but then they do something completely unexpected. And caricatures or not, we all know these people. They annoy you, they try, they fail, they break your heart. To quote the book, “Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘ Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.” People are just people, everywhere you go.
I really liked this and see myself re-reading it in the near future. It’s a slim volume but there’s a lot of life in these pages.
Synopsis from GoodReads:
Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, including longtime friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Dora, Mack and his boys, Lee Chong, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and poignant works. In her introduction, Susan Shillinglaw shows how the novel expresses, both in style and theme, much that is essentially Steinbeck: “scientific detachment, empathy toward the lonely and depressed…and, at the darkest level…the terror of isolation and nothingness.”
Similar Books:
If you liked Cannery Row, you might also like my reviews of
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
Reading Challenge:
Purchase:
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