The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

This is the book I was reading for the Global Voices Challenge, but I only finished it last Saturday. This 360 page book took me more than a month to read. Need I say anything else about how little I am reading these days? I hardly even manage my one short story per day. I was reading Alice Munro’s Selected Stories, but this week I realized that book isn’t working for me in the mornings anymore. So I took up The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh as short stories I can deal with in the mornings.

I received The Good Earth from Natasha at Maw Book Blog as a prize in her Darfur blogging campaign last year. The setting of the book, turn-of-the-twentieth-century China, is somewhat outside my usual reading zone and I am not sure I would ever have bought the book otherwise. But having finished it, I am glad I read The Good Earth. It took me a while to get into the story, mostly because I had to get used to Buck’s writing style. Buck writes in a simple, straight-forward style, without judging the characters or the culture, which I found very appealing once I got used to it. I raced through the middle part, but then my reading time went down, so it took a while to get through the last third of the book. Probably because of this, I found the last part somewhat harder to get through.

The story follows Chinese farmer Wang Lung from his wedding day almost until his death some 45 years later. At the start of the book, Wang Lung is a poor farmer going to pick up his bride O-lan, whom he has never met before and who works as a slave in the house of the Hwang family. The Hwang family is the richest family in the town and as such they inhabit by far the largest house of the town, a house with a large gate and many courtyards.

We follow Wang Lung and O-lan through their initial years of poverty and their later years of prosperity, when Wang Lung becomes a successful farmer who is even able to buy land from the Hwang family, whose fortunes by that time have gone down, until Wang Lung’s final years when he is living in the same house where the Hwangs used to live and from where he once, long ago collected his bride. This interconnection between the fates of the two families is one of the recurring themes throughout the book.

Another theme, and one that made me reflect and that I am not sure how I feel about, is the way women were treated in China at the beginning of the twentieth century and particularly the way Wang Lung thought about his own wife O-lan, or rather didn’t think much about her until long after her death. It is only then, that Wang Lung begins to think about O-lan and about the place she had in his life. During her life, he doesn’t care for her, takes her for granted. O-lan’s only role is to bear her husband sons, work alongside him on the fields, to prepare his food and keep the house clean. I found the descriptions of O-lan giving birth to her children very poignant. Giving birth is just something to do ‘on the side’, an annoying interruption of everyday work. I felt sorry for O-lan, but also respect. In the end she was the most memorable character in the book for me.

I didn’t really know what to feel for Wang Lung, he is essentially not a bad guy trying to provide for his family. HE has to deal with his family, his workers and his relatives within the limits set by his culture. No matter how much he dislikes his uncle and his family because they are living off his wealth and threatening him, he cannot kick them out because one has to show respect to relatives of an older generation.

On the other hand, I found Wang Lung also annoying and dislikable especially in the way he treats his wife and also his sons. He doesn’t really know anything about them or show any interest in who the other members of his family actually are, their personalities, their likes and dislikes (the only exception being his mentally disabled eldest daughter, whom he calls ‘the little fool’ and about whom he obviously does care). If he finds out anything about the members of his family, their ideas or their wishes for their future, it is almost as if by accident. Despite being basically a decent guy, especially in the beginning of the novel, Wang Lung also has a very selfish streak in his character, for example when Wang Lung buys himself a concubine, who comes to live in the same house. The connection between Wang Lung growing prosperity and his straying from his culture’s values is obvious.

Despite my somewhat lukewarm response to the book (which does seem to change the more I think about the story), I know that The Good Earth is a book that will stay with me for some time, giving me lots to think about. I am sorry if this review comes across as slightly unstructured and unpolished. There are some things I mentioned that I would like to expand on, but I also feel I am not done thinking about the book yet.

You can find other reviews of The Good Earth here:

Laura at Musings
Heather at Age 30+ … A Lifetime of Books
Wendy at Caribousmom
Nat at In Spring it is the Dawn
Lesley at Lesley’s Book Nook
Lotus reads
Julie at 5-Squared
Jen at 5-Squared
Amanda at 5-Squared
Pam at Pam’s Perspective
Rebecca at Rebecca Reads

If you reviewed this book on your blog as well, leave a comment with the link to your review in the comments.

On a sidenote: I’m still going to post about my trip to Tbilisi, but I wanted to get this review out of the way first, because I have a huge backload of almost finished drafts that I do not want to add to. I’m still busy sorting through my 300 or so pictures and I haven’t found the one with my bookloot yet. You read that right: 300 pics, mostly of the seminar I attended and most of those are of flipcharts and presentations to help me write the report of the seminar. Bear with me…