Cannery Row: (Centennial Edition) | John Steinbeck

Cannery Row: (Centennial Edition) | John Steinbeck | Genius Rising

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Cannery Row: (Cent...

	Cannery Row: (Centennial Edition) John Steinbeck Penguin (Non-Classics), 2002 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 223 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

This novel is set in a location I have never been. I've never been anywhere remotely like this location. The situations they run into are very different from my life, only on a few occasions have the same sort of things happened to me. In this way it can be nothing but the genius of John Steinbeck's writing, that helps even me relate to this story.

The story is very simple, because it is just a carriage for the complex characters to evolve and travel in. "Mack and his boys", a group of guys that would be considered crooks unless you got a closer look at them, have been helped more than once by a kindhearted man named Doc. To show their gratitude they decide to give him a good party. Their many enterprises and expeditions make up a lot of the story in this book.

But Steinbeck uses another writing technique on top of that, almost to get the reader feeling like they've lived in Cannery Row all their life. What he'll do is about every other chapter he'll have a really short chapter that will just give a quick glimpse of the life of somebody who hardly relates to the story. It sounds obscure and a little disorienting but it works perfectly for the idyllic and nostalgic feel that this book portrays.

Using a blend of one simple story and many little vignettes, John Steinbeck portrays life perfectly. Every character in this novel is their own human being, he doesn't slight them because they are only mentioned on a few pages, he gives the Chinese man who walks through Cannery Row every evening as much thought as Mack and Doc. It's moving because every character's always changing and evolving. I'm sure anyone who read this book would find a character for them.

Cannery Row convinced me that John Steinbeck is one of the greatest character creators and he can weave incredible stories around his masterpieces. John Steinbeck never flinches away from life he takes it fully into his novels without becoming gratuitous in any way. Cannery Row was an ingenious novel about real life.

Some of the best proof of that statement is the way that not only the characters evolve but our perceptions of them evolve. Mack is a hood but he's also a nice guy that tries to help people out... when he's not swindling them. The prostitutes that play big roles in this novel are sophisticated and caring. Steinbeck makes no assumption of any human nature in this novel and he doesn't let the reader either.

Cannery Row is a beautiful representation of real life. Steinbeck completely takes on the growing organism of Cannery Row and works with it, shapes it, becomes it. He did it so well that in the end it's not even his novel: it's the readers. I would recommend this book to anyone from a teenager, to a middle aged person, to an elderly person.

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Genius Rising

It isn't my favorite Steinbeck to date, but as always I can still admire it. He has such a fantastic home-grown quality to his writing. Each chapter is like a short story set in the same place sometimes using the same characters sometimes introducing new ones that are only tangentaly related to the characters we have met in previous chapters. There is an over arching plot--but each chapter is self contained as well.

The boys of Cannery row want to throw a party for Doc, the nicest guy they know. Throughout the book they try various ways to acheive this and each misadventure is filled with more heart and soul than the next.

Unlike alot of the books from this era that high schoolers are forced to read this book is overall, pretty uplifting and certainly has a happy charm to it that "Grapes of Wrath" lacks (which is a genius work, but is never going to win feel good book of the year)

In this book you can see Steinbeck's genius as it is still gestating you can sense as the reader that he still has even better things to write, but this is still an amazing work. Well worth the read.

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Lovable characters, and interesting themes.

I found cannery row to be one of my favorite steinbeck novels. The characters are very easy to relate to, and the way he worked in the theme of contentment is perfect.

An Ambivalent Excursion into a Vanished Past

I was given this book by my bishop and I'm glad I read it. Today, Monterey California's Cannery Row, where Steinbeck told of poor folk and sardine canning, has been developed into a world of quaint shops, high prices, and quizzical tourists.Doc's Western Biological Company, where he collected lab animals for science, has morphed into The Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the worlds great aquariums and conservation organizations. (A very favorite place of mine.) The freewheeling life Steinbeck depicts at the Palace Flophouse is today thought of more sordidly as "homelessness." Too bad. Poor folk have stories and grace; indeed, their stories are deep and diverse. The grace of the lives within this book is abundant, the sense of life as scaps in a quilt, not "lifestyle." This is a book about men. Women who are not whores with hearts of gold are domesticators and nags. Its central image is the tidepool, battered, changeable, and full of life and hidden tragedy. Its scene stealer is a spoiled pointer puppy named Darling.

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