It’s this simplistic connection that many critics of the book found to be its deepest flaw. The Biblical links to the story of Cain and Abel are not hard to discern in either the Charles/Adam or the Caleb/Aron plots. Ambiguously, we never know whether Charles Trask, the roustabout and quick-to-anger son of Cyrus Trask (a heavy handed Civil War veteran who is essentially an embezzler and crook), or his kinder, gentler, more polished brother, Adam, impregnated Adam’s wife (Cathy, who wiggled her way into both men’s beds), the result of which is a set of twin boys, Caleb and Aron. Good and evil exist in this world, not only within the same family, but within the same person. The plot’s basic premise is not hard to extract despite the tale’s heft and volume. That alone is sufficient reason to consider this work as one of the author’s most ambitious. But I will say this: in creating Cathy Ames, the female antagonist of this morality tale set in the Salinas Valley, Steinbeck drew one of the most convincing tales of female sociopathy ever put to paper. I’m not sure about that given the beauty and story of Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and some of his other works. Steinbeck reportedly considered East to be his masterpiece. But that having been said, it’s well worth the read: my book club universally concurred.Įast of Eden by John Steinbeck (2002: Centennial Edition. My one criticism of the book is that, coming in at only 189 pages while covering nine children and their parents makes the story feel more like a series of vignettes than a novel. In the end, this is a well-written exploration of a little-known part of the Christian faith in a fictional rendering. Pyläinen renders each of the children deftly, with love, and without severe judgment for the parents or their chosen faith, though it does become confusing at times, with so many children, who she is writing about when she switches from one to the next. In We Sinners, the author chronicles a contemporary Finnish American family (also struggling with poverty in spite of their piousness) adhering to this strict form of Lutheranism and, despite the introduction of strict parenting, homosexuality, doubt, alcohol use, and other sinful conduct into this family of nine children. The “sins” prohibited by Laestandism include dancing, alcohol, and gambling: a direct result of Laestadius’s own father’s addiction to alcohol and the family’s resulting poverty. Pylväinen knows of what she writes, having been raised in a conservative Christian family adhering to the doctrines first pronounced by Lars Levi Laestadius in the mid-19th century when Lars, an indigenous Sami Lutheran pastor from Laplap (Arctic Norway, Sweden, and Finland), underwent a personal epiphany. Because I’d not read any of her work and I have an interest in Laestadianism (a branch of Lutheran fundamentalism associated with the Apostolic Lutherans in my neck of the world), I decided to make this slender novel my book club pick for the month of February. I saw that the author of this novel was selected by Finlandia National Foundation’s 2024 Lecturer of the Year.
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