Tortilla Flat (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
by John Steinbeck
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Book Summary Information
Author: John SteinbeckEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1997-06-01
ISBN: 0140187405
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780140187403
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Tortilla Flat (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
Book Review: The good intentions of beautiful losers...
Summary: 5 Stars
The lyrics of an old Leonard Cohen song, "A Bird on a Wire," kept rolling around in my brain as I read this: "...Like a bird on a wire, like some drunk in a midnight choir, I've tried, in my way, to be free..." And it seems that I've read Steinbeck's books "out of order," this one being a spiritual and thematic antecedent to Cannery Row: (Centennial Edition), also celebrated in song, by none other than Bob Dylan, in "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,": "...with your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row..."
This novel is set during the Great Depression, in Monterrey, California. "Tortilla Flats" is a sort of `Bidonville', as the French say, outside the city proper, without electricity, whose inhabitants are paesanos, of mixed race, and it generally means they are not picky about their pedigree, or, at times, their couplings. If at all, most of the inhabitants are only marginally employed, "scoring" a quarter here, a stale loaf of bread there. They are at the very edge of economic life, with no reserves. One of their number, Danny, has "drawn to an inside straight," as it were: his grandfather died, and left him not one, but two houses, which grants almost "gentry status" in the Flats. But Danny is not "upwardly mobile." He stays true to his ways, lifestyle and his former friends who all eventually come to live with him: Pilon, Big Joe, Pablo, Jesus Maria, and Pirate. Their need for the next "fix," in those gentler times, taking the form of a gallon jug of wine, is the glue that binds them together (and occasionally separates them).
Steinbeck's prose is incisive. He renders fresh portraits of the natural world of the California coast, but his true strength is in these telling and non-judgmental portraits of America's "lumpenproletariat." They have their own society, with their own sense of honor, their actions based on good intentions and wild rationalizations. It is mainly a male society, with the women on the margins playing their all too predictable role. Each chapter is a separate vignette, told often with understated wry humor, which is one piece in that larger mosaic that conveys the totality of their lives. There is the local jail, for sure, because these are the proverbial 10% who consume 90% of the time of the police. There is the Church, marginal, but nominally revered by all, which plays a dominant role in Pirate's life, and yes, let's hear it for St. Francis of Assisi, the lover of Pirate's dogs. And where else could a vacuum cleaner, without a motor, be a status symbol?
What seems to divide me for some other reviewers is Steinbeck's authentic depiction of their lives. Some say this could not possibly be. No, it is, at least as I remember it through the hazy fog of time. In my youth, ah..., I lived with one or more of Danny's gang before our lives went their "bifurcated" ways. Steinbeck caught perfectly that constant need to cage the next drink, all so gentile, that look in their eyes that said: "I know it is a lie, you know it is a lie, you'll never be repaid, but how about that quarter anyhow." Steinbeck describes the life (and obvious loves, or rather couplings) of Teresina Cortez, mother of 8 at 30, who managed to feed her brood of "creepers and crawlers," as the author describes them, by gleaning. With care, after a harvest, and off of trucks, they could accumulate 400 pounds of beans, sufficient for a year, IF the harvest does not fail. Impossible? I'd highly recommend Agnes Varda's excellent movie The Gleaners and I.
"They" are still out there, right here in Albuquerque, on the old Route 66, still trying to get to California (or get back.) If that aforementioned bifurcation was suddenly conjoined, and despite what must have been a very unhealthy "lifestyle" over the past 40 years, I met one of those housemates, still scrounging for just one more buck, Steinbeck's novel should provide the empathy to deal with the situation. Absolutely 5-stars.
Summary of Tortilla Flat (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America?s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers?and to the many who revisit them again and again."
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