Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
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Book Summary Author: Zora Neale Hurston Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2006-05-30 ISBN: 0061120065 Number of pages: 256 Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics |
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Book Reviews of the Their Eyes Were Watching God
Customer Review: Ah believes dis here book just ain't cuttin' it for literature
Summary: 1 Stars
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman in the 1930s whose entire life, from her childhood discovery of her color to her multiple relationships, divorces and trials, is chronicled through a narration given by Janie to her best friend Pheoby in the present. The book is set in Eatonville, Florida, an all-black community founded as a sanctuary from the racism of the Deep South.
The novel is, unfortunately, a dud. The dialogue and even some of the prose is written totally in dialect, spelled exactly as it would be spoken: "Ah" for "I", "tuh" for "to", "laks" for "likes," etc. While this may sound creative, as some kinder reviewers have suggested, the dialect renders the book almost insufferably incoherent, at least to someone who appreciates the usage of proper English. When you have to simultaneously decipher sentences such as "Ah laks tuh go tuh dat dere store wid mah chillun and buys me a drink uh two fo' mahself" and understand their meaning to the story, the novel practically requires you to reread a passage several times to grasp what it's trying to say. The dialect, while realistic to the setting/era, often spiels for pages at a time and is woefully unreadable. Spelling out dialect like this is an amateur mistake of which most beginning writers are warned, and which gives the average reader a migraine.
The characterization is also bland and one-dimensional. The novel follows this pattern for the first half: Janie marries a man whom she loves at first, then discovers to be a sexist pig. He insults/abuses her, and she leaves him. Everything is filled with a curiously dry straightforward logic. The little introspection that exists in the book is about Janie "waking" to her newfound feminist identity as a woman. Her character is clearly more of an expression of Hurston's thoughts on women than a fully fleshed person.
Hurston's prose is melodramatic and far too sappy to have survived on its own in literary history. Moonlight is "amber fluid"; a darkening night "puts on flesh"; Tea Cake, one of Janie's lovers, "melts her resistance" immediately following an argument and loves her while their "fumes and emanations" fill the room and they collapse in "sweet exhaustion". To think that some people would call Anne Rice baroque and yet have the audacity to term "Eyes" literature.
Some reviews have compared this book to Faulkner's work; while Faulkner, like Hurston, is sometimes incomprehensible at first reading, his writing is more original, deeper in meaning and populated with more realistic characters than Hurston's. He renders dialect with word choice, using phrases such as "I aim" to give it a Southern feel, and only occasionally alters a spelling. That some schools stress proper language usage and in the same breath refer to "Eyes" as an enduring classic seems simply shameful.