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Of Mice And Men (2002)

Of Mice and Men (2002)

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Rating
4.4 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0142000671 (ISBN13: 9780142000670)
Language
English
Publisher
penguin books

About book Of Mice And Men (2002)

Of Mice and Men: I am my brother's keeper"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 nearly 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."— John Steinbeck in his 1938 journal entryJohn SteinbeckFirst Ed., Covici-Friede, Ny.,Ny., 1937John Steinbeck based Of Mice and Men on his own experiences as a bindlestiff in the 1920s. The source of his title is "To a mouse" by Robert Burns."But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,In proving foresight may be vain:The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley,An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!"George Milton and Lennie Small had plans. Lennie delighted in hearing of them.“George's voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times before. 'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake, and the first thing you know they're poundin' their tail on some other ranch. They ain't got nothing to look ahead to.” John Malkovich as Lennie Small and Gary Sinise as George MiltonFrom the time I first read Cain asked God if he was his brother's keeper my answer has always been "Yes." Perhaps that is why Of Mice and Men has remained one of my favorite novels and John Steinbeck has remained one of my favorite authors. It is a philosophy by which my family lived and which they instilled in me.I have often wished that Steinbeck had told us how George entered the lives of Aunt Clara and Lennie. However, over time I have come to believe the answer to that question is not important. It only mattered that Lennie was another human being who needed help and care because of his limited mental ability. Small, he was not, though his reason was.Steinbeck casts the end of this short novel with unmistakable foreshadowing as the two unlikely friends camp before heading into yet another ranch during the great depression. George tells Lennie that if he should get into trouble as he did in Weed he should come back to their camping spot and George will meet him there.Aunt Clara had unwittingly built into Lennie a fetish for the touch of soft things at an early age, a piece of soft velvet, mice, which Lennie kills because he does not know his own strength. In Weed he has seen a girl in a red dress. All he wanted to do was to touch that red dress. But the young girl who wore it raised the cry of rape. George and Lennie were on the run. That's the reason for George's warning.Steinbeck deftly paints a multitude of themes with a relatively small cast of characters working on the ranch to which George and Lennie come. There is every form of prejudice one could imagine on this ranch in the Salinas valley. Candy who has lost a hand is old. He could be kicked out at any time. He is a swamper, sweeping up and washing dishes. Crooks is a stable buck with a crooked back and black. He doesn't come into the bunk house, nor do the whites enter his separate room. He is the target of isolation and discrimination. The boss's son is Curly, a small man, filled with hate and violence, a bully. He is recently married. Curly's wife is a young girl with a past. The men in the bunk house have two sexual outlets, a prostitute or Curly's wife. Curly's wife has a roving eye. Merely being a woman is weakness. Sexism is rampant.Steinbeck paints the American vision of hope and dreams. George and Lennie plan on getting a little place of their own. They seem so close to realizing the dream when Candy joins them, providing the greatest part of their stake. One month of work will provide what they need.But it will not happen. Curly's wife turns her eye on Lenny.Lara Flynn Boyle and John Malkovich in the barn"Feel my hair. It's soft." It will be the last mistake Curly's wife makes. Curly forms a lynch mob to track down Lennie. George can only hope to get there first to save Lennie from the terror he knows Lennie will face. Lennie is waiting for him by the river. He asks him to tell him how it's going to be. George tells him to look across the river. George commits the ultimate act of being his brother's keeper at the cost of a tremendous emotional toll.“I see hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hundreds of them. They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out there. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody never gets no land. It’s just in their head.”--Crooks, Stable Buck

The title of this novel is only 50% accurate, a very poor effort. Yes, it’s about men, but there’s little or nothing about mice in these pages. Mice enthusiasts will come away disappointed. This got me thinking about other novel titles. You would have to say that such books as The Slap, The Help, The Great Gatsby, Gangsta Granny, Mrs Dalloway and Hamlet have very good titles because they are all about a slap, some help, a Gatsby who was really great, a no good granny, a woman who was married to a guy called Dalloway and a Hamlet. I have no problem with those titles. But you may be poring over the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird for a long fruitless evening to find any mockingbirds coming to any harm at all. Indeed, to coin a phrase, no mockingbirds were harmed during the making of that book. So I rate that title only 5% accurate. And some titles seem to have a word missing, such as Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. Four what? It doesn’t say. Perhaps he completed the book and left the title to the very last minute and died as he was writing it down. Same thing with The Crimson Petal and the White. White what? Wallpaper? Hat? Cat? Mouse? Mockingbird? Could be The Crimson Petal and the White Gangsta Granny for all we know. A poor title. And what about The Dharma Bums? I think a Cigarette or You Out is clearly missing from that title. Another grossly misleading title is Women in Love . I can’t be the only reader who was expecting some strong girl on girl action from DH Lawrence but I would have been better off fast-forwarding to the middle part of Mulholland Drive. Now that’s what I call Women in Love. DH, take note. Another badly chosen title is Hitler’s Niece - yes, it is 100% accurate, but at first glance it can look like Hitler’s Nice, and surely that is going to put off a lot of potential readers (except for the readers you really don’t want). And what about Call it Sleep? – call what sleep? The Catcher in the Rye, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Flaubert’s Parrot, The Camomile Lawn – sometimes obscure titles can be solved if you understand that the author is referring to Death, so, the Catcher is Death, the Postman is Death, the lawn is Death and the Parrot is Death. Of course, I may have got that wrong. It’s something I read somewhere and it just stuck in my mind. Some other titles I would give low ratings to :The Turn of the Screw completely baffled me – I know that “screw” is what inmates call prison officers, so I was expecting a story about a concert put on by the staff of a large correctional institution. It was nothing like that. The Little Prince according to my system does rate 100% but I still think The Little Faux-naif Idiot would have been better.The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – actually, I rate this as 90% accurate – there are two guys who are named Kavalier and Clay, and they do have adventures, but they aren’t amazing. A Clockwork Orange – this must be a metaphor for “I have given up thinking of a title for my novel”No Name – like A Clockwork Orange this must be where the author couldn’t think of any title so in this case he left it without one, like the Byrds’ album Untitled, or () by Sigur Ros, or several paintings by De Kooning and those other abstract expressionist types; but to call a novel No Name is self-defeating, because No Name then becomes its name – epic fail, Mr Collins.The Violent Bear it Away - this is another example of a word missing - possibly "took" or "dragged", I expect that's the sort of thing a violent bear would do I’m surprised the publisher did not catch this error.

Do You like book Of Mice And Men (2002)?

One more book that everyone has already read, if they have not been living under a rock. At least I can join the club now. I wish I had read it earlier, because Of Mice and Men is, putting it simply, a beautiful book. The descriptions are beautiful, idyllic - both the natural world and the human environments. You can see them in your mind's eye - the pool is still, warm water in the river bend, the bunk house where Curly faces the wall, the barn with its hay and its streaks of light. These descriptions had the same pacing you come to expect from a rural life, and provide a sense of the goodness which can, presumably, be found when you are away from the din of the grand cities.But these incredible descriptions are juxtaposed over a tragedy of character and humanity that hovers over every single one of the characters in the story. In some situations, they are even a part of it. There is a moment in the barn where sun, lighting the hay in bright lines of light slipping through the wooden slat walls, is used to both calm and alarm at the same time. This description, while less aggressive than Camus' use of the sun on the water and on the gun, is almost as poignant. Almost as beautiful.Much of this book focuses on discussing masculinity. There is another scene where a man's dog is put to death and only the executioner seems to hurtle through the moment without any grace. But these men, strangers to each other, not knowing how to comfort, merely sit in the uncomfortable silence waiting for the gunshot. It's a telling, keenly observed scene - certainly one of the most important in the novella. And it is worthy of a great deal of attention.Another subject widely discussed in the book is vulnerability, which is, it seems, the central feature of Steinbeck's Depression. Vulnerability and the effort to fight against it, that is. This book is quiet in talking about it, of course - everything about this book, even the most hurried and tragic scenes, is quiet. But it talks about it carefully. There are scenes, only a couple, where there are many characters having a conversation, and everybody is talking about the predicament of their life - the predicament of their situation as it compares to the rest. Nobody, it seems, is perfectly secure. Everybody can be broken. That may be what sticks out about this story. Everybody can be broken. Except for George maybe. And Slim, maybe. And George is clearly broken by the end of the story, because he has chosen to care for Lennie.Of course, there is room for hope. It takes the face of a ranch, hidden somewhere in George's mind, which can be purchased and owned and developed over time into something that is both self-sufficient and perhaps even profiting. Hard to say. It isn't discussed much, but it grabs so much of the imagination! This cloudy future ideal which, for so short a time, seems probable. Even that, though, can be usurped by the folly of mankind. Regardless, Of Mice and Men is a good story and I'm glad I finally put it on my read shelf.All considered, this is a good story. Interesting quotes that I didn't include in the review: Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other. Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella. The Last Passage(view spoiler)[ But George sat stiffly on the bank and looked at his right that had thrown the gun away. The group burst into the clearing, and Curley was ahead. He saw Lennie lying on the sand. "Got him, by God." He went over and looked down at Lennie, and then he looked back at George. "Right in the back of the head," he said softly.Slim came directly to George and sat down beside him, sat very close to him. "Never you mind," said Slim. "A guy got to sometimes."But Carlson was standing over George. "How'd you do it?" he asked."I just done it," George said tiredly."Did he have my gun?""Yeah. He had your gun.""An' you got it away from him and you took it an' you killed him?""Yeah. Tha's how." George's voice was almost a whisper. He looked steadily at his right hand that had held the gun.Slim twitched George's elbow. "Come on, George. Me an' you'll go in an' get a drink."George let himself be helped to his feet. "Yeah, a drink."Slim said, "You hadda, George. I swear you hadda. Come on with me." He led George into the entrance of the trail and up toward the highway.Curley and Carlson looked after them. And Carlson said, "Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin' them two guys?" (hide spoiler)]
—Ademilson Moraes

I happened to be in the library at the time and I just put the book down and started SOBBING. And then I found out said character wasn't really dead and I just jumped around and did a mini victory dance. I am a crazy reader sometimes. *grins*
—♥ Innocent Lamb ~ Forever Reading ♥ - AKA Smarties

Only a writer capable of assembling the symbolic with the folkloric can pen a novella that straddles genres, writing techniques and figurative voices and tug at the heartstrings of both commonplace audiences and the most exigent of readers. Such indisputable universality is what Steinbeck accomplished with “Of Mice and Men”, a fabled novella with a linear plot delivered in a succession of theatrical scenes, compact on the surface and with simply drawn characters that might be accused of being excessively melodramatic and verging on the caricaturesque.Yet when reflected upon, this deceivingly modest tale appears designed in concentric layers of deep meaning that orchestrate a rich parable on thematic complexities like the natural goodness of man, the alienation triggered by a socio-economic system that endorses exploitative working conditions and the need to cling to illusions to face a mirthless existence.Set in a few miles south of Soledad, Spanish for “solitude”, Steinbeck introduces two antithetic characters combining coarse and fast paced dialogue with lush descriptions of the Salinas river.Lennie Small is ironically heavily built and as strong as he is good-natured. Of a gullible disposition and feeble minded he depends solely on his workmate George to be hired as a temporary hand harvesting seasonal crops in the farms of California. George, a sharp and resourceful rogue, tries to protect Lennie mostly from himself but also from the maliciousness inherent in most of their fellow labourers. They both dream of owning a rabbit farm and “living off the fatta the lan’ ”, an ideal that Lennie begs George to repeat over and over again with the exact same words creating the mesmerizing effect of an invocation or a soothing lullaby that equals a spell capable of transforming the inconceivable into a tangible possibility.Alternating the romantic with the myopic vision of hope and gloom, the story is shaped by the intense friendship between these disparate characters and their legitimate aspirations to achieve a respectable livelihood, creating an expansive allegory for the dehumanization the itinerant labourers were victims of during the years ensuing the Great Depression. George’s attempts to shelter Lennie from the viciousness of foremen and masters also exposes the juxtaposition between the innate solidarity of man and its posterior corruption when trapped in the dynamics of an abusive social hierarchy.The lonely(*), the dispossessed and the crippled become the easy target of such system with only love, friendship and compassion as shielding forces.“Of Mice and Men” is a heart-warming story with a chilling conclusion. A story of marginalized men and women who live on the fringes of an impassive society and navigate the stirred waters of human dignity and animalization, reason and instinct, courage and weariness, narcotic dreams and hopeful illusions. In the same way an innocent dummy might crush a tiny mouse unwillingly and with only good intentions human beings crush each other not truly grasping the full consequences of their atrocious acts. There is irony in that equation, but a gentle one.This is a dark tale, a bitter pill to swallow. It hurts. But it also illuminates with its moving tenderness, allegorical scope and unflinching naturalism. Dreams mightn’t come true this time, but maybe that’s a weighty reason to start loving the things we’ve got.(*) A quick note to mention Steinbeck’s shocking depiction of women as an object of desire who use erotic mysticism to lure men into the social stability offered by marriage. This notion highly contrasts with his previous approach to the essential role of females in the family unit as seen in The Grapes of Wrath.Perfect soundtrack for this book:Things that stop you dreaming
—Dolors

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