Cannery Row
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4.5 • 45 Ratings
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Publisher Description
Cannery Row is a book without much of a plot. Rather, it is an attempt to capture the feeling and people of a place, the cannery district of Monterey, California, which is populated by a mix of those down on their luck and those who choose for other reasons not to live "up the hill" in the more respectable area of town. The flow of the main plot is frequently interrupted by short vignettes that introduce us to various denizens of the Row, most of whom are not directly connected with the central story. These vignettes are often characterized by direct or indirect reference to extreme violence: suicides, corpses, and the cruelty of the natural world.
The "story" of Cannery Row follows the adventures of Mack and the boys, a group of unemployed yet resourceful men who inhabit a converted fish-meal shack on the edge of a vacant lot down on the Row.
Sweet Thursday is the sequel to Cannery Row.
Customer Reviews
What a weird little book
Strange little story that I just could not put down
If I could find fault with this book for your pleasure, I would
Isn’t that enough?
My favourite book
I have lost count of the number of times i have read this compact book since first finding it amongst my mother's collection as a teenager in the seventies. It's interesting to read it now, through a new lens of awareness of gender snd environmental issues. Yes, a contemporary Steinbeck might have balanced in more positive female or gender diverse or indigenous or people of colour, but his studies are focussed mainly on character rather than appearance. Not much mention of religion either so he comes over as being a humanist of the tolerant variety. The main impact for me with my new 2022 eyes was being inspired by Steinbeck's love of nature. Through Doc's eyes we get an insight into the wonderful, yet almost alien, world of sea creatures. His penultimate chapter is, in a lighthearted way, of a gopher who moved into the vacant lot. Maybe telling us that for all our vanity and dominance as a species on Earth we are after all a part of, and dependent upon, the much wider and diverse ecology. Sad to think that the abundance of sardines upon which this book is named has long been wiped out by over-exploitation. In Steinbeck's characters we see the interplay of human cleverness and wisdom, perhaps the existential issue of present times.