Comments on: The Magic of Realism in Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth

By: Haylee

Haylee — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 19:03:06 +0000

I just started reading this book and I love it. I can’t wait to read more books by this author!

By: Janice Doyle

Janice Doyle — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 16:15:07 +0000

I, too, love the book and have read it many times. It truly is magical and I think in her later life she realized that her time in China had been just that as a child — magical. She was an amazingly brilliant woman and yet very simple in ways of the world. It is valuable to read her biographies of her parents \”The Exile\” and \”Fighting Angel\” if you\’ve enjoyed The Good Earth.

By: Lynn

Lynn — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 01:24:55 +0000

I love Pearl S. Buck\’s The Good Earth. I read it when I was 14, a freshman in high school (decades ago) and still remember being transported to another place, another time. The story has stayed with me all these years. As a matter of fact, thanks Erin, I think I\’m going to read it once again.

By: Kevin A. Lewis

Kevin A. Lewis — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 18:25:27 +0000

By the way, my remarks re the Vatican are of the don\’t-ever-try-this-at-home hyperbolic irony type; one doesn\’t talk to continent-spanning deities with access to fault lines and asteroid paths in the same cavalier fashion as a minor Taoist god with a writ of a dozen or so square miles. Magically real enough?

By: Kevin A. Lewis

Kevin A. Lewis — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 18:11:12 +0000

There’s a few things about this book which are notable; the realism comes somewhat from the fact that Pearl Buck was born in China and spoke Chinese before she spoke English; she picked up the atmospheric tenses of the culture and language and miraculously brought them across the fence to the West. You may not also realize that the Good Earth was originally the first of a trilogy called House Of Earth which is now long forgotten and out of print-there was an original copy of all three in a relative’s house I read as a kid dated 1936 or thereabouts; it fell apart years before I could rescue it, though. I hope to live to see the day when Pope Francis refuses to hold Easter Mass because of the crummy previous year with the words, “Thus it is with gods who do evil to men!!!”