Take a moment to consider a good book. I have selected a few quotes for you to read and perhaps be convinced of the qualty of this novel. It is an easy book to read, it captures the attention and soothes the spirit with its flowing narrative. In 1937 it was adapted for the big screen; however, it was not a day and age when you would just hire a Chinese actor to play the part of a Chinese man. Therefore, in this respect the adaptation is flawed. Like any other adaptation, it also lacks significant moments in the story and overlooks the brilliant ending that Pearl S. Buck had provided the novel with. If I had it my way, I would prefer a lengthier, more detailed and more professional version...That's just me. Perhaps it will jumpstart your curiosity!
"It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth."
"Thus spring wore on again and again, and vaguely and more vaguely as these years passed he felt it coming. But still one thing remained to him and it was his love for his land. He had gone away from it and he had set up his house in a town and he was rich. But his roots were in his land and although he forgot it for many months together, when spring came each year he must go out onto the land; and now, although he could no longer hold a plough or do anything but see another drive the plough through the earth, still he must needs go, and he went.
Sometimes he took a servant and his bed and he slept again in the old earthen house and in the old bed where he had begotten children and where O-lan had died. When he woke in the dawn he went out and with his trembling hands he reached and plucked a bit of budding willow and a spray of peach bloom and held them all day in his hand.
Thus he wandered one day in a late spring, near summer, and he went over his fields a little way and he came to the enclosed place upon a low hill where he had buried his dead. He stood trembling on his staff and he looked at the graves and he remembered them every one. They were more clear to him now than the sons who lived in his own house, more clear to him than anyone except his poor fool and except Pear Blossom. And his mind went back many years and he saw it all clearly, even his little second daughter of whom he had heard nothing for longer than he could remember, and he saw her a pretty maid as she had been in his house, her lips as thin and red as a shred of silk--and she was to him like these who lay here in the land. Then he mused and he thought suddenly, "Well, and I shall be the next."
"Spring passed and summer passed into harvest and in the hot autumn sun before winter comes Wang Lung sat where his father had sat against the wall. And he thought no more about anything now except his food and his drink and his land. But of his land he thought no more what harvest it would bring, or what seed would be planted, or of anything except of the land itself, and he stooped sometimes and gathered some of the earth up in his hand, and he sat thus and held it in his hand, and it seemed full of life between his fingers. And he was content, holding it thus, and he thought of it fitfully and of his good coffin that was there; and the kind earth waited without haste until he came to it."
"Out of the land we came and into it we must go--and if you will hold your land you can live--no one can rob you of land..."
There are novels with no literary merit that--despite the contempt of the critics--achieve sensational sales for a season, but ten years later nobody can remember their names. Then there are novels that--while highly intellectual and beautifully written--appeal to only a small circle of readers, but live on for generations.
The Good Earth falls into neither of these categories. Like the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, it enjoys the best of both worlds. It has not only been enormously successful, but it has become a lasting part of our literary heritage--a dual distinction shared by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
Like any good writer, though quite in her own way, Pearl Buck was riding two horses going in opposite directions at the same time, and she managed both of them with complete success. The novel she created whets the reader's interest in an alien people, while at the same time making him feel a kinship with that people. The result is that the story becomes vastly more important to us than we ever expect from a novel about
When she finished The Good Earth, Pearl Buck triumphantly completed the task she had set for herself: she created living characters who expressed themselves in actions believable in their surroundings. She was not only true to her art, but made the best possible use of her heritage. By making her readers feel their kinship with a foreign people, she illustrated the ancient but neglected truth that God made of one blood all the nations of the earth. That the people concerned were Orientals may best be regarded as a happy accident, for in the years following 1931 the Orient would become far more important to her countrymen than either she or any other American could possibly have imagined.( Edward Wagenknecht June 1992)
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