I was in love with this book the moment I
realized that this is where the Tom Joad of the Bruce Springsteen album is from
(the album is really quite average, but it’s still Bruce Springsteen). I was
surprised by how I could get captured by a book in which so little actually
happens. I mean, at the end of the day they “just” go west looking for jobs.
This book is about the destruction of the
American dream, a lost battle between men and machines (well, tractors),
family, and supporting each other in troubled times. So many pages in this book
gave me goose bumps, from the first lines about men not breaking while “women
and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear
if their men were whole”, to the actual moment in which men start breaking and
it’s mother Joad who has to lead the family.
And no matter how memorable the characters of
Ma and Tom Joad and the preacher are, the one who has stayed with me the most
is the immature Rose of Sharon, and the absolute beauty (both from a literary
and a human point of view) of her act at the end of the novel.
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