Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
While I love all of this novel, what made it a five-star book
for me is a line of description of Tea Cake, one of the characters the
protagonist marries. It begins, "Ready with his grin." Something
about this passage sticks with me even now, years after reading this novel.
But there are many reasons to read Their Eyes Were Watching God. The language is certainly one of
them: it's dazzling. Most of the novel is presented in dialect, so acutely
captured I can imagine voices speaking the story. It is a Modernist novel,
although it defies the sterile and emotionless wasteland that had by the 1930s
largely become the Modernist space; Their
Eyes is sensual in a wide-ranging way, far beyond sex and sexuality. Their Eyes is also something of a
romance, albeit involving a very complicated series of relationships, some of
them bleak. Most importantly, it is the text of a black woman writer from an era
that would happily have silenced her voice, and simply to read her story is to
experience a world that we might never otherwise have known.
This book was not well received on its original publication;
apparently the novel required feminist rediscovery and the rise of race studies
in the 1980s and 1990s to find its real place in the canon (assuming, of
course, that there is such a thing). Another reviewer succinctly captures my
wish for this book: "Just read it. Please." Indeed.
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