Summer school (Hurston)

I was so in love with reading our last book for class, Mrs. Dalloway, that I have found it difficult to move on to TEWWG.  I will just say that Mrs. D has rocketed to the top of my favorite novels list, along with Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto.  In this class I read Mrs. Dalloway for the second time and I think that it is a book that needs more than one read.  I loved being in the minds and thoughts of everyone in the novel, despite some of the stories, like that of Septimus, being tragic.  I think that Virginia Woolf had an incredible capacity for nuance and exploring her character’s daily thoughts and lives.

Their Eyes is a very different book.  If Mrs. D is often internal in its focus, Their Eyes is about characters but also community.  Janie is a young African American girl who has been raised by her grandmother, a woman who recalls slavery.  Her wish is to keep Janie safe and to protect her, so Janie, a dreamer, is soon married.  Over the course of the novel, her relationships with the men in her life are explored as is her lack of agency with her first two husbands.  The community that her second husband Joe wills into being comes to vivid life.

Much of the novel is in a dialect which adds to the sense of place, a small town in Florida, and takes a bit of adjustment for the reader at first.  Zora Neal Hurston was deliberate in this choice.

Below is one writer’s assessment of the novel.  If you have read this book, I would love to know what you thought of it.

“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie Smith