Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

When I turned over the last page of this book and stared at the blank page that publishers put in before the jacket takes over, I couldn’t get myself to put this book down. For this particular book, the blank page actually was a necessity. I needed a placeholder to fix my eyes on as my mind continued to marvel at the fabulous book that I had just finished. Detailed sketches of the story and the emotions drew themselves on that bare page and I finally put this book down with reverence, firmly believing that this was one of the best books I had read so far.

George and Lennie are ranch workers, migrating from one ranch to the other, in the hope of making some money, saving it, and then heading off to utopia. Utopia, for these labourers, is a piece of land for themselves, which they sow and harvest on their own terms. Utopia, for Lennie, is a place where they can “live of’ the fatta’ the lan’ “. However, there is one slight problem. Lennie is mentally challenged and George has been around since his childhood to help him sail through life’s complexities.

For George, Lennie has been like the proverbial albatross around his neck, preventing him from leading a worry-free life. But, this is an albatross he loves. And takes good care of. When one of Lennie’s acts causes the two to run away from their employer’s ranch, they head South and get work in another ranch. Another ranch where the work remains the same, their dream remains the same. Lennie continues to wait for living off the fatta’ the lan’ and George continues to keep him away from trouble from intellectually refined men around him. But till when can George continue to do so? When does the albatross become too heavy to carry around? What does Lennie do to make George question himself? Read the book, is my simple answer.

Steinbeck, through his writing, paints brilliantly the American ranch way of living, American dreams and in the process, makes the reader come on a head to head confrontation with one of the book’s most painful moment. What happens next? Do you deal with the moment? Does it simply go away leaving you to contemplate on just what happened? Or does it consume you leaving you at the mercy of the hopelessness of your role as a reader?

Of mice and men derives its title from a Robert Burns’s poem titled “To a mouse” which has given English the now famous literary quote “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”.

There is something about books whose titles are inspired by Robert Burns’s poems. The other famous book to have done so is Salinger’s masterpiece – The Catcher in the Rye. This is a personal favourite and is also a book which I cherish the most.

Ladies and gentlemen, read Of Mice And Men and prepare to be taken into the depths of human understanding. And of course, remember to buy an edition which has a blank page at the end. You will need it.

Previous Book reviews:

Adam Kirsch writes about the recently published The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Harvard, 688 pages, $39.95) at The New York Sun.

Excerpts:

To see the difference, consider Frost’s lecture “On Extravagance,” which he delivered at Dartmouth in November 1962, less than two months before he died. In this talk, Frost expatiates genially on “the extravagance of the universe. What an extravagant universe it is. And the most extravagant thing in it, as far as we know, is man — the most wasteful, spending thing in it — in all his luxuriance.”

This is the terror that has always loomed behind the willful optimism of the Emersonian tradition, and which Frost, very much like Nietzsche, was able to exhume from the corpse of Emerson’s gentility. Perhaps not even Nietzsche ever captured that terror in an image as striking and bottomless as Frost’s: “We get truth like a man trying to drink at a hydrant.” At such moments, Frost’s “Notebooks,” like his best poems, remind us that there has never been a more genuinely mystical American writer.

Although I haven’t been able to appreciate poetry very much in life, I consider Frost and Burns as two of my favourite poets. Burns scores a little extra on my scale solely for the reason that one of his poems forms the basis for that epic – Catcher in the Rye.

Browsing through Catcher in the Rye notes yesterday, I came upon quotes/excerpts from the book at Wikiquotes.
(Spoiler warning: The quotes might reveal the plot and the ending. They also contain profanity)

Here are some excerpts:

“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.” “Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.” Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right— I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.

I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while when it rains and all, and I can’t make a real fist any more— not a tight one, I mean— but outside of that I don’t care much. I mean I’m not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.

The Navy guy and I told each other we were glad to’ve met each other. Which always kills me. I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.

The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl— a girl that isn’t a prostitute or anything, I mean— she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them. I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn’t any brains. I don’t know. They tell me to stop, so I stop.

You could tell he didn’t feel like discussing anything serious with me. That’s the trouble with these intellectual guys. They never want to discuss anything serious unless they feel like it.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
- Quotation of Wilhelm Stekel written down on a piece of paper by Mr. Antolini for Holden.

D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn’t know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

For obvious reasons, I have left out the best quote from the book since that would give away the meaning of the title.