I can remember being puzzled by this book the first time I read it years ago. I came to it expecting Cannery Row and was disappointed that it wasn't. I had the same expectation this time around, even though I knew better, and I was disappointed all over again. I kept expecting to like Danny and the Paisanos like Mac and boys, but I just couldn't feel a whole lot for them. They may have intended good, but their lack of perspective, the "moral" shortcomings kept torpedoing those good intentions. They were just fooling themselves.
Maybe part of the problem was trying to listen to the book when I was already tired and driving down to Durango late. The more that I drove, the sleepier that I got, and the more disjointed that the story felt. When I eventually turned the story off, I wasn't sure that I wanted to continue.
But I persisted in listening to the second half of the book, and that made all the difference. No, it still wasn't Cannery Row--very few things are--but the book seemed to pick up with Danny's gift of the vacuum cleaner to Sweets and take on a new comic richness that I found lacking before. The electric vacuum cleaner raised Sweet's status in the community which had no electricity. She ran it over the floor of her house making a humming sound, and that was OK since it turned out that the vacuum cleaner had no motor in it anyway.
That led to the episode where Big Joe Portagee stole the money that the Pirate had been saving to buy a candle for Saint Francis. The money had become a central trust between the boys, and the violation of the trust was met with a vengeance and a brutality that was shocking, but also totally in character for the paisanos. The money was restored, the sacred trust was reestablished, Big Joe Portagee was readmitted into the society, and the Pirate bought the candle. The scenes where the dogs burst into the church to find the Pirate, and then his preaching to them in the woods, were some of the funniest and most touching scenes in the book. That led to the boys going on a crime spree to feed the children of Teresina Cortez, also central to the book. Critics have made a lot of the ironic parallels with Arthurian legends, and these chapters certainly best best represent the comparisons, although, in all honesty, I didn't feel it at the time.
The final scenes, with Danny going berserk and trying to regain his freedom, and then the boys trying to restore Danny's health with a party, leading to the final confrontation with the Beast outside the door, reminded me a lot of Mac and the boys trying to throw a party for Doc. It's as if Danny and the paisanos morphed into Mac and the boys, with the same wry humor in describing their ways of thinking, justifying their own short term wants with ironic turns of logic and self-deception. Certainly what Doc said about the boys, that they were the true philosophers, applies to the paisanos, but somehow they don't seem quite as agreeable as the boys.
Author: Steinbeck, John
Date Published: 1935
Length: 7 hr 03 min
Narrator: McDonough, John
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