The Good Earth

This book is a strong contender for my Top 10 list. It is so moving and so beautifully told. Set in pre-revolutionary China, The Good Earth is the story of an honest, humble farmer, Wang Lung, and his stoic, selfless wife O-lan. The novel opens on the couple’s marriage day and follows their lives through the births of children and grandchildren, years of prosperity and years of famine, flood or drought. It follows their rise from poverty to wealth, through the whole cycle of life to their final return to the land.

A quote from Pearl Buck: "The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women."

I'll tell you upfront, you will find in this book rampant misogyny. It caught my attention from Chapter 1. Women are little more than a commodity in this culture. They are bought and sold and even killed if the burden of their femaleness seems too great. Female babies are considered worthless and burdensome, a misfortune and a bad omen. They are literally called slaves from the moment they are born, and they have no claim to a place in the family. When a family needs money, they sell a girl—into prostitution if she is pretty, into slavery if she is not. There is no question of a daughter being educated alongside her brothers—her options are slavery, prostitution, or marriage (and sometimes they are all the same thing). It’s all very maddening, but the author in no way condones it—Pearl Buck was a feminist. In this book she shows us life in rural China for what it was and lets it speak for itself.

The most important theme in The Good Earth is probably not the one I got so hung up on; as the title indicates, it’s the earth. To Wang Lung, land is more valuable than anything because it is always constant—it can never be taken from him, unlike other material possessions. It is the source of life and the foundation on which his family stands. It is also a source of inner peace. It heals. As life's complications weigh on Wang Lung, he returns again and again to the earth, to his land and to the hard physical labor it requires, and his mind clears and his soul finds its equilibrium. The simple-and-true message of the book is that one’s life should be centered on something good and honest and purposeful.

I loved reading this book. I wanted to start over again after I turned the last page. (Isn't that a great feeling? But I can never justify reading the same book twice while so many wait expectantly on the nightstand!) Anyway... It was pure pleasure to read Pearl Buck's lovely, uncomplicated prose, and the story is timeless.

For those who like to read a book with credentials, Pearl Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and in 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.