spoko’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2021)

spoko’s comments from the EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club group.

@Sahara, that’s an interesting question w/r/t the opening sentences. It does seem to be directly about men, given that the next paragraph is all about women: “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

What I got from it is that men are too focused on the world outside themselves, always reaching for something or wanting something that is, as you say, beyond their control. Whereas women carry around what’s important inside themselves, and so they’re able to cultivate and tend it like a garden. So kind of along the lines of what you’re saying, but I hadn’t thought about it in terms of destiny per se.

@Frances, if you’re at all open to audiobooks, I’d definitely recommend it for this one. Ruby Dee gives an amazing performance, and I found the dialogue much easier to follow than it is in the written form.

Surprised there hasn’t been any activity on this thread, but I guess I’m as guilty as anyone! So here are a couple of things, maybe something will spark discussion.

@Betsy, I’m intrigued by your question of whether this is a story of independence or dependence. I very much think it’s the former. Janie does spend a significant part of the novel reliant on Jody, and really under his thumb. But it’s clear that’s not her natural state, and she fully blossoms after leaving him. Her relationship with Tea Cake is much less one of dependence, I think—it’s more interdependence and true love. By the end of the novel, certainly, she seems fully independent—not just of any individual man, but of her own history (unlike her Nanny) and of the society around her (unlike Pheoby, Mrs. Turner, and the other women in the novel).

The thing that sticks with me most about this book is how much Janie’s story is tied to the natural world. Obviously the scene in the beginning, her reverie of the pear tree and the bee, shows the depth to which she is bound to nature. But I also will always think of the difference between her life in Eatonville—civilization, pretty separated from nature—and her life in the Everglades, so tied to the goings on of the natural world around her. Even though it’s the natural world that destroys so much in the climax of the book, still it’s this place of nature where Janie really discovers herself, and that is lasting.

I’m generally not great with spotting symbolism, but I happened to be looking back at the conversation Janie had with Nanny early in the book, and the symbolism of the trees jumped out at me. The second chapter begins “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.” And obviously the pear tree in that chapter is symbolic of Janie. But what really caught me, revisiting this after finishing the book, was the description of Nanny: “Nanny’s head and face looked like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm.” By the end of the book, Janie’s tree has successfully weathered a storm, and come out the stronger for it. Nanny had cautioned her to “take a stand on high ground,” and she literally did the opposite, taking her stand in the low ground of the Glades. But this clinging to nature, I think, is the source of her final independence and strength.

Sorry, got a little wordy there. This has all been banging around my head for a few days now.

I second Homegoing.

I also second the Book of Lamentations.

I second Pachinko.

I nominate In Cold Blood (343 pages) by Truman Capote, last read in 2018.

I second The Woman in White.

I nominate March by Geraldine Brooks (280 pages).

I’ve been wanting to read this book for so long, and it will be my first book with EHRTBM. Can’t wait!

I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve heard a lot of back-and-forth about the way Hurston depicted vernacular speech in this novel, so I’ll obviously be paying a lot of attention to that. But otherwise, I don’t know much about it at all.