The Pastures of Heaven
Written by John Steinbeck
Narrated by Sean Runnette
4/5
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About this audiobook
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck (Salinas, 1902 - Nueva York, 1968). Narrador y dramaturgo estadounidense. Estudió en la Universidad de Stanford, pero desde muy joven tuvo que trabajar duramente como albañil, jornalero rural, agrimensor o empleado de tienda. En la década de 1930 describió la pobreza que acompañó a la Depresión económica y tuvo su primer reconocimiento crítico con la novela Tortilla Flat, en 1935. Sus novelas se sitúan dentro de la corriente naturalista o del realismo social americano. Su estilo, heredero del naturalismo y próximo al periodismo, se sustenta sin embargo en una gran carga de emotividad en los argumentos y en el simbolismo presente en las situaciones y personajes que crea, como ocurre en sus obras mayores: De ratones y hombres (1937), Las uvas de la ira (1939) y Al este del Edén (1952). Obtuvo el premio Nobel en 1962.
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Reviews for The Pastures of Heaven
240 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This collection of interlinking stories about the valley known as the Pastures of Heaven is fascinating, and written in the thought-provoking and humorous prose that only Steinbeck can provide.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5super awesome
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Pastures of Heaven by John SteinbeckLove hearing how this book came about and how he achieved writing it.Starts in very old days of 1700's and the book explains who founded the area and who lived in the house through the centuries til Monroe's move in.Love explanations of words as they appear, informative. Enjoy the different households and the things that are important to them in this town.I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very good short stories that make a great novel. Very clever.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I really liked this book! It's 'Steinbeck Country' filled with 'Steinbeck People'! This one is a collection of short stories, all set in, and connected by "Las Pasturas Del Cielo", the pastures of heaven! I enjoyed them all, but my favorites were Chapter Three, with "Shark" Wicks and his fantasy ledger of wealth, Chapter Four, and the story of Tularecito, the giant man/boy who drew beautiful animals, and Chapter Seven, with the joyful sisters Maria and Rosa, and their 'tortilla' business! And Steinbeck does a beautiful job of wrapping it all up in a literary bow with the wistful last chapter, with even myself dreamily waving goodbye to the fertile, peaceful valley.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'd always assumed that Steinbeck was an overly sentimental and moralizing author who would annoy me with rotten cliches about the value of every human being and simple rural life while emphasizing romantic and simple tragedy in a way that tread perilously close kitsch. Turns out I was wrong. Not that he's totally unlike the writer I imagined, but it was a caricature that, if I'd really thought about it, I should have realized couldn't be true. It's not the first time and (sadly) won't be the last time that I've taken an exaggerated dislike to something just because it's popular.
The book itself? The characters are (mostly) well drawn, the stories interesting, the setting well realized. Most of the stories seem to turn on the notion that, ultimately, we all live alone with our various needs, desires, and fears. When people try to intervene in the lives of their neighbors it often goes sour, through a lack of understanding or a conflation of their neighbors needs with their own. Family is paramount and there are a couple of examples where the bond between husband and wife transcends the general limitation on humanity's ability to know and support one another. Interesting, the bonds between parents and children seem much looser. There are a few times where I felt it was all being laid on just a tad thick.
The description of small scale agriculture is lovely and sentimental and I can't help but think that it would have been particularly potent for my parents and others (many of my parents' age) who are one generation removed from the land. I wonder how much this contributed to Steinbeck's popularity in the 20th century and how it will change in the years to come as fewer and fewer people have recent family, or youthful personal, experience with life on a small farm. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In 1919, Sherwood Anderson published a collection of short stories centering around a town. The book was called Winesburg, Ohio. It remained popular into the 1930s. Around this time, a young journalist named Elizabeth Ingels developed an idea of interconnected stories similar to Anderson's work, but based in California. She mentioned the idea to a young writer named John Steinbeck. At the time, Steinbeck was struggling with his first novel (the later published To a God Unknown) and had managed to publish his second (the cringe-worthy Cup of Gold). He had yet to find his voice and his readers. So he did what any young, unappreciated artist has at least struggled with—he borrowed a good idea.Now I've heard the argument from some of Steinbeck's devoted fans and scholars: Steinbeck's idea was unique from Ingels' original concept... Ingels wasn't ever going to do anything with the idea anyway... whatever. It doesn't matter and here's why: this book kind of sucks (relatively speaking, anyway). No, some people love it. Many do in fact. I didn't. I consider this one of the author's worsts. This is the twenty-second book I've read of Steinbeck's and, well, personally, Burning Bright made a bigger impact on me. Burning Bright? The experimental one about circus clowns and farmers and sailors? Yes, that one.What the casual reader of Steinbeck may not know is that the author's earliest works are often far from the realism that Steinbeck is generally known for. The author repeatedly tried to separate himself from this label, a categorization that was cemented with works such as In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. This spiritual, magical Steinbeck is most evident in the author's earliest books and latest books. Sometimes these subtle elements of magic worked for the author, other times they didn't; largely, they're either missed or ignored.The Pastures of Heaven holds some of this early Steinbeck magic. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. Either way, the collection as a whole has a rather absurd feel to it. Curses, gnomes, and sex-dealing proprietors of a Mexican restaurant who take “buy one, get one free” to a new level... yet, it's all Steinbeck. The author didn't spend as much time with the setting as he did in later works, but his signature style of laying out the scenery and breathing life into it is intact.But where The Pastures of Heaven succeeds most is in its characters. I would argue that, amongst Steinbeck's earliest works, this is one of his most character-centric books. These are brief character studies of the people who populate the valley. In these short pieces, no character is given the time to be developed fully, however. Aside from some of the characters, and a couple stories, there's nothing horribly exciting about this collection. Compared to Steinbeck's greatest works, nothing in these stories stands out. Compared to the town of Winesburg, Ohio, however, Las Pasturas del Cielo, California, is much more spellbinding.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pastures of Heaven is John Steinbeck’s 1932 collection of twelve intertwining short stories set in a fertile valley near Salinas and Monterey, California. As time passes, the characters, all of whom know each other in the way that people in small communities usually do, come and go as their individual stories and fates unfold. Some set their roots so deeply that they and their descendants will be there forever, but others are only there long enough for some personal tragedy or failure to send them on their way.In the collection’s second story, one Bert Battle, a man with a history of personal failure, comes to the valley to take over a farm that locals believe is both cursed and haunted. Bert, though, makes such a success of the farm that he is soon accepted into the community and even becomes one of the most influential citizens in the entire valley. Reflecting upon his great success at the valley’s general store one day, Bert remarks, “Maybe my curse and the farm’s curse got to fighting and killed each other off.” This leads the storekeeper to make a prophetic observation of his own, one that sets the tone for the rest of the book: “Maybe your curse and the farm’s curse have mated and gone into a gopher hole like a pair of rattlesnakes. Maybe there’ll be a lot of baby curses crawling around the Pastures the first thing we know.” It was only a joke on the storekeeper’s part – but that is exactly what would happen.Several of Steinbeck’s stories are about dreamers who cannot resist the lure of the valley’s beauty and tranquility. They come seeking shelter but find that their personal failings travel to the valley with them. One man tries to raise his little boy in a kind of isolated poverty he believes will give the child an untainted life of the mind, only to watch his world crumble when school authorities demand that his son attend public school. A woman comes to town with her mentally disturbed daughter hoping that the solitude will be good for both of them; an abandoned baby is found and taken into the care of a local rancher; two sisters decide to supplement their income by opening up a home business; and a new schoolteacher comes to town hoping to leave her family’s past behind her for good. And it does not end well for any of them.Along the way, a few dreams do seem to come true. But those “baby curses” are always out there waiting to destroy those who dare to dream, especially those who dare to dream as big as the protagonist of the collection’s next-to-last story (the stories are numbered, not titled separately). Richard Whiteside came to the West to start a family dynasty and he immediately went to work building the family home that he envisioned would anchor the Whitesides there for many generations to come. But Richard’s personal “baby curse” just smiled and waited in the background. The Pastures of Heaven is certainly not an optimistic short story collection, but readers of the book will get a preview of many of the themes that would influence John Steinbeck’s work throughout the rest of his career.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In his early California novels, Steinbeck focused on the land he loved and the people who lived there. The Pastures of Heaven (which is based on a real valley and whose characters have roots in real people) is one of those novels and uses the same format he employed in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row—a collection of stories around an organizing theme. One of his earliest books, The Pastures of Heaven, focuses on the people who work the land and live in its town. The stories are fairly independent; there are recurring characters but each can stand alone. Steinbeck has an eerie way of foreshadowing the emotional climate of his early books in his prologues. Some are gently humorous, some cast a shadow of foreboding; because Steinbeck’s prose in these books in which the land is at the heart of everything is lyrical, it’s sometimes difficult to understand why. In The Pastures of Heaven, the prologue recounts the discovery of the valley by a Spanish corporal leading a punitive expedition to recover a group of converted Indians who had the audacity to desert the mission to which they were bound. On his return, by accident this man who had “whipped brown backs to tatters, he whose rapacious manhood was building a new race for California” accidentally stumbles on this hitherto undiscovered (by whites) valley. Overcome by the beauty of the valley, he murmurs “here are the green pastures of Heaven to which our Lord leadeth us”. Intending always to go back when he retires, he dies instead of the “pox” (syphilis). And that story sets the tone for the rest.Running through the book like a theme is the history of the Battle farm, named after its first settler. Although one of the best pieces of land in the valley, nothing good happens to George Battle and his son John is a crazy religious fanatic who dies appropriately by snake bite. Others buy it, and finally Burt Munroe is the last in a line of people who buys the old Battle Farm as a refuge, a retirement, from battle with the forces of the hostile business world. But the land has a force of its own; somehow Munroe is never quite able to come into harmony with it and really make the place his own. Burt is one of the recurring characters, and this disharmony with the farm runs through the stories. Other characters appear for their moment in the sun, but somehow or another, nothing ever quite works out for them. It’s as if the valley rejects the evil of the Spanish corporal in the only way it can—by rejecting the people who come to settle there. Not that there’s any black cloud that hangs perceptibly over the valley and the town (with the exception of the Battle farm)—it’s just that somehow life in the valley never quite lives up to its promise.The last chapter is an epilogue, in which a group of people in a tour bus look down over the beautiful valley from a view point. An old man, a successful businessman, a priest, the driver of the tour bus—all are caught up in the apparent tranquility and prosperity of the valley, and each imagines in his own way what it would be like to retire from the hostile world to this refuge. It's a perfect, ironic close to the cycle of stories.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful book full of interwoven stories. I love how everything fits together and the theme of place is so apparent. The land is a mysterious thing, especially with the way us humans interact with it. Read this and experience The Pastures of Heaven. Move into their community and see what life is like.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A short story collection depicting the gradual downfall of some residents within a California valley. The human theatre on display.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Short stories set in Corral del Tierra near Salinas.