House of Earth (trilogy)

This year I’m discovering Pearl S Buck. I found in a second-hand bookshop all 3 volumes of The House of Earth for 20 RON (~ 5 EUR) so I took them and read them all in a few days. I was in China following the Wangs, being happy, struggling, suffering and prevailing with them. Favorite characters ? O-Lan, Wang The Tigre (to some extent) and his son - Yuan and his step mom. First volume – The Good Earth is rapid, strong, babies are being born one after another, Wang Lung is working hard and gathers a great deal of land, ensuring the future and wealth of his family. Sons (the second volume) is more difficult to read, things happen a little bit slower and Wang The Tigre is far away from his father’s land. He is a warier. The third volume is about the 3^rd generation of Wangs being as far away as possible from their roots. I loved the trilogy, I loved the writing, it felt different from one volume to the next. In the Romanian literature we have realistic novels (high school lit) about the relationship between a men and his piece of land and this relation trespasses culture and language and time. I cannot put my finger on it, but the Chinese description was more romantic in a way, or maybe I was too young and not interested in anything that had to do with Romanian peasants and their struggle to survive solely on the fruits of their land. I liked that characters are what they seem to be and with few surprises, what you think they will become. The women of the trilogy are not many, but different and their status changes – from slave (O-Lan) to well read woman (one of Tigre’s wives) to “modern” woman (Ai-lan) as the time passes by.

I’m fan of sagas and this one in particular.
The Good Earth - the first volume was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932.