John Steinbeck

The biblical account of Cain and Abel is echoed in the history of two generations of the Trask family in California.

East of Eden

Please try not to need me. That's the worst bait of all to a lonely man.

This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed – because ‘Thou Mayest’

Nothing they may do interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. 

You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.

I’m going to make a garden so good, so beautiful, that it will be a proper place for her to live and a fitting place for her light to shine on

傑恩

“A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”

You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

When a child first catches adults out when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedion i to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's wons never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

“Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have.”

“They had grown so apart that there was little mutual reference and no questions.” 

“And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.”

“Charles felt for his brother the affection one has for helpless things, for blind puppies and new babies.”

“It was the sweetness of his tongue and the tenderness of his soul. And just as there was a cleanness about his body, so there was a cleanness in his thinking.”

“Samuel’s hands were so good and gentle that neighbors from twenty miles away would call on him to help with a birth. And he was equally good with mare, cow, or woman.”

Steinbeck astutely exposed the recurrent human tendency to selectively forget.

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule — a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting — only the deeply personal and familiar

'One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now--why, you can't find all the cards.'

[Adam] contributed to the quiet he wished for by offering no violence, no contention, and to do this he had to retire into secretness, since there is some violence in everyone. He covered his life with veil of vagueness, while behind his quiet eyes a rich full life went on. This did not protect him from assault but it allowed him an immunity.

Pramit Pal

"Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it let's him do a thing his cleverness forbids."

Shrewdness is a limitation on the mind. Shrewdness tells you what you must not do because it would not be shrewd.

Mazzy

"Well, a man's mind can't stay in time the way his body does."

I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar -- he is financially fortunate.

nearly all men are afraid, and they don't even know what causes their fear

The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.

Katerina

Remarkable book. I am fascinated by this author's style of writing. Just enough conversations, just enough narration. Not too much to get bored, not too little to feel as if there isn't enough of it. The story - so touching. The characters - made out of flaws, just as any person is. I learned so much from this book, got attached to the characters as if they were created by my imagination not the author's, as if they were mine and only mine. By the end, I was clinging to this book, holding on to it as if it was my baby. I was especially fascinated by the story of Cain and Abel, the way the author managed to doom Cal and Aron to the same destiny and yet create them with their own flaws and their own charms. Absolutely amazing. I wish I could read this book for the first time all over again.

One of the best books I’ve ever read. The characters feel very real and the story is attention grabbing.

Abigail Swallow

Chris Dailey

Steinbeck's magnum opus did not disappoint. Epic and biblical (literally and figuratively) the novel follows two families in California's Salinas valley from the mid-19th century through the Great War. Full of allegory and multiple tellings of Genesis chapter four, it focuses on good versus evil, light versus dark in almost all lenses possible: family, friends and foes; class, classism and capitalism; love and romance; and war and peace. Told through two familial veins, the Hamilton's and the Trasks, with the former being a veiled retelling of Steinbeck's own family, and the former being pure fictional and the focus of the good vs. evil. The novel is fluid and feels fresh despite being 70 years old at the time of reading. There are some items that are dated and some characters that feel too flat - specifically Kate, who is almost pure evil. This one has been on my list for a long time and it certainly deserved to be.

A. D. Knapp

Amelia C 

long book... but worth every page!!!another one of my favorites!

Molly M

wow oh my god . i am crying 

not sure why i thought i wouldn’t like this book but man was i wrong

Monicap

This book draws on the biblical story of Cain and Abel and the theme of Timshel - the choice between good and evil. I liked that all the characters portrayed this internal duality in some ways. I was a bit nervous about reading a classic (at nearly 700 pages to boot!), but I found it to be fully engaging and worth the read.  

Jacqui Spears

amelo

Luke Harkness

An outstanding novel about the hardships of life, parenting, growing up and about morals.

I could read John Steinbeck's writing all day, every day. He manages to sound poetic often and incredibly simple at other times which creates such a fun read.

Roman

Jenseits von Eden

Ich bin auf das Buch durch ein Interview mit Cornelia Funke gestoßen und hab es mit hohen Erwartungen gelesen, auch weil ich "Von Mäusen und Menschen" als Schullektüre im Englisch-Unterricht sehr begeistert gelesen hatte. In "Jenseits von Eden" erzählt John Steinbeck die  Geschichte zweier Familien im Kalifornien der Jahrhundertwende, deren Schicksale über mehrere Jahrzehnte ineinander verwoben sind. Die große Frage, der Steinbeck in den vielen Charakteren und verschiedenen Erzählsträngen nachgeht und die mit biblischen Anspielungen umrahmt ist, ist die nach dem Gut und Böse im Menschen. Mir hat dieses Überthema sehr gut gefallen und mir sind die Charaktere allein schon durch die Länge der Geschichte sehr ans Herz gewachsen! Gleichzeitig fand ich das Erzähltempo wirklich sehr langsam und das Buch zuweilen zäh zu lesen, was irgendwie zu der Geschichte passt, aber bei mir dazu geführt hat, dass ich das Buch immer wieder weggelegt und wirklich lange gebraucht habe bis ich es zu Ende gelesen habe, deshalb nur 4 Sterne, auch wenn die Geschichte sicherlich 5 verdient! 

Marlene Renkl

Tobias V. Langhoff

This book is beautiful. It’s masterfully written; I want to quote almost all non-dialogue passages, and also many dialogues. The story is universal and captivating, and you really get invested in the characters. It’s the story of a place, of two families, of a people. Like Stoner, this is the story of a life, although more than just the life of one man. I feel that I understand the American spirit and the American people better after having read this book.

The plot is a very obvious allegory to the story of Cain and Abel. It’s not that it’s thinly veiled; Steinbeck doesn’t try to hide it at all, which I enjoyed very much.

I’m not a very good literary analyst, but I found the depiction of good and evil interesting. Although one character seems inherently good (Samuel Hamilton, Steinbeck’s grandfather), and one is clearly inherently evil (Cathy Ames), the main theme of the book seems to be that humanity’s free will and the curse set upon us by Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel is that we must make our own choices and define our own morality and definition of sin. Other characters are a varying degree of morally gray, with the two main characters in each Trask generation in particular subverting the reader’s expectations. (view spoiler)[The brothers Adam and Charlie are mostly good and mostly evil, respectively, although not exclusively. At first, it seems Adam and Cathy’s twin sons follow the same mold, with Aron threading in Adam’s footsteps and Cal following in Charlie’s and Cathy’s – an inheritance made more interesting by the obfuscation of the twins’ actual parentage. However, Adam, who it is revealed has gotten his looks from his horrible mother, ends up as perhaps not the angel he seemed pre-destined to be, although not evil; and it is implied that Cal gets a deserved redemption. (hide spoiler)]

About halfway through the book, the story “reboots”. The first part is about the first generation of Hamiltons and Trasks, while the second part is about the second generation. Some might find the first part slow, and it was the second part of the novel that was adapted into the famous film by the same name (starring James Dean as Cal).

As I often do, I listened to this classic partly as an audiobook, and loved Richard Poe’s fantastic narration. Steinbeck’s dialogues are often intense rapports between two persons with little else to guide the reader than the odd “he said” (no flowery language to describe the utterance of a line), but Poe’s very subtle differences between each character’s voice were great.

A confusing aside: It’s not always easy to discern who the narrator is. Parts of the book are narrated by John Steinbeck himself, who is a character in the story, but in other parts he’s referred to in the third person.

I am in love with this book. The writing, the characters, the emotions.

joyce

- this might be my favourite book of all time
- lee and adam old man yaoi??(JOKING)

he definitely wrote this bc he got played by his girl

madhav murgai

esperanza 

Katie

❤️‍🩹🥺 i literally cried more than once, a very rare thing!

iamazoo

somehow this book manages to be equally gut-wrenching and exuberant - made me feel every emotion i’ve ever felt but all at maximum intensity. long but highly rewarding read.

East of Eden (Penguin Modern Classics)

Laura Mauler

All of the characters were so vivid and engaging, with the exception of Aron. He was completely flat to me, no depth or complexity at all, and this was especially glaring because of the impeccable job Steinbeck did with every single other character. So does one flaw ruin a book? No way! It's still a hell of a good book, and I'd recommend it to anyone. When the time comes, just gloss over the Aron stuff and focus on Cal.

Jayme Cochrane

How is this book so long yet so engrossing?

Lamia Hajani

It took me many years to finally open East of Eden and read it. I was a little scarred from Grapes of Wrath in high school - I didn't like that one when I was 16.

I'm so glad that I did read East of Eden. I felt it lifting me up, breaking my heart, making me happy, making me cry, making me wonder. All these emotions on every single page. I would recommend this book to every person I know, because I feel like I've learned so much from it. It's worth every single word/page.

If you're doubting whether or not to read this, take this as a sign: read it.

altlovesbooks

"Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk."

This is a hard book to review, mostly because I'm not really sure why this turned out to be such a compelling read. It's like a character study spanning a generation, where everyone's thoughts and motives are center stage. The main "meat" of the book surrounds Adam and his family, though several other characters come in and out of frame that play a large role in how Adam develops. The time period spans from 1862 to the outbreak of World War I, and for your time spent you really start to develop an understanding and an interest in this family who settles in Salinas Valley, California.

If we're being honest here, I really thought this was going to be a DNF book for me. If it wasn't for literally everybody around me telling me how good this book is and me not wanting to deal with defending myself for the rest of my life, I probably would have put it down within the first third or so. I found this book to really drag in the beginning, which is what prevents me from giving it a full five stars. It pulled me in hard once things start to come together and you find out how all the pieces you were introduced to in the beginning fit, and I found the rest to be a very satisfying (if long) read. 

I also wasn't fully satisfied with (view spoiler)[Kate/Cathy and her resolution. We can see her slow descent into paranoia and suspicion, but her deciding to suddenly kill herself (I say suddenly, when it's clear she's been planning it a while) felt out of character from what she was set up as. Steinbeck made an attempt to set her up as a sympathetic, pitiful character in the end, but I still don't think it makes up for how she got there. (hide spoiler)]

Can we also just talk a second about how awesome a character Lee was? The dude really carried the family on his shoulders, I swear.

So, all in all, I'm very glad I gave this book so many chances and stuck with it 'til the end. It's a satisfying book to have read. I'm glad I listened to my friends (for once).

alexandra

one of my all-time faves!! might change the rating to 5/5 but i’m docking a star atm since it was slow & a TREK to get through. however by the end, i love & appreciate all the tangents. it really wouldn’t be the same experience if it were shorter. the characters!! relationships!! existentialism!!!! i love.

East of Eden

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