![]() ![]() Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Steinbeck’s tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society, dependant on one another for both physical and emotional survivalA Penguin Classic Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. ![]() “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. This is the opening of the book, which is set in the 1930’s: But oh, how well drawn! And how masterfully Steinbeck paints the landscape of Cannery Row. ![]() ![]() I didn’t like the story much: I found the characters unappealing (but my husband found them delightful). As for me, not only had I forgotten the plot, but I had forgotten what a masterful writer Steinbeck was. Neither of us had read Cannery Row since forever, and both of us had forgotten it totally, so before we made a little trip to Monterey and Carmel a couple of weeks ago, we each reread this book. ![]()
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