Book Review: "Of Mice and Men"

About the Author:
John Steinbeck

The following words from Steinbeck's Journal shape his long career.
From his journal entry….. "In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other"


About the Book:

Of Mice and Men is in one sense an anachronistic text, insisting on its artistry, not its historicity. Never a true social chronicler, Steinbeck deliberately de-historicizes each novel of the late 1930's. It is not about the resistance of California's landed elite to the economic threat the newcomers posed, nor it is about the refugees from the Dust Bowl states who camped besides roads, in overcrowded Homervilles, in filthy camps, scratching out a new beginning.

It’s a tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss.


Quotes I liked:

Despite George's impatience and annoyance with Lennie they have an amazing friendship, they always talked how they were different from other guys:

"Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place....With us it ain't like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us….But not us! An' why? Because...because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why."

"Carl's right, Candy. That dog ain't no good to himself. I wisht somebody'd shoot me if I got old an' a cripple." "You seen what they done to my dog tonight? They says he wasn't no good to himself nor nobody else. When they can me here I wisht somebody'd shoot me. But they won't do nothing like that. I won't have no place to go, an' I can't get no more jobs."

I loved the way Steinbeck described the landscape…you can almost see the picture drew itself in front of you….leaf by leaf….sunray by sunray…and soft forest sound….and all the colors coming to life.

"The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees--willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and the sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them"

"Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray, sculptured stones."

"At about ten o'clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows, and in and out of the beam flies shot like rushing stars."

"Although there was evening brightness showing through the windows of the bunk house, inside it was dusk."

"Already the sun had left the valley to go climbing up the slopes of the Gabilan mountains, and the hilltops were rosy in the sun."