Last Friday five of us met to review our April read which was Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Three more of us, who were unable to attend our meeting, read the book and emailed me their rating/opinion, and our collective score was a 3.75. This is excellent, considering some of the disappointing books we've read in the last six months! The only real negative that came up was that all of the dialog was written in a vernacular dialect. For some it grew tiresome, for others it was hard at first to figure out what a particular word meant. However, for most of us, once we got the hang of it, it just wasn't that much of a distraction. Upon discussing this topic at great lengths we felt that because this book was about a young black woman in the 1930's, who is very poor and uneducated and lived in the deep south, this is exactly how they would have talked! To change that up would have been ridiculous. The book would not have been the same without it. Furthermore, we came to the conclusion that what we really appreciated about this book was Ms. Hurston's talent when writing in the narrative. She wrote so beautifully and we reviewed many of our favorite passages or paragraphs while discussing this book. We realized that this book had both metaphors and symbolism laced throughout, and just like last months book, we probably needed professional help to explore the true depth of this book. This explains why most of our kids have read it, either in high school or college; so very much to discuss. Unfortunately, we weren't really able to do this book justice in our meeting, but we really enjoyed talking about it. Also, worth noting, by the end of our discussion, three of us who originally gave it a rating of 3.5, changed it to a 4. Now, that's a good discussion!
A note about the author: Hurston was an American-folklorist, anthropologist, and author. She received an Associates degree from Howard University and then went to Barnard College, Columbia University, where she was the college's sole black student. She received her B.A. in anthropology in 1928, when she was 37. Sadly, Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for a number of cultural and political reasons. Many readers objected to the representation of African-American dialect in Hurston's novels. However, Author Alice Walker published "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in the March 1975 issue of Ms. magazine, reviving interest in Hurston's work, unfortunately, fifteen years after her death. Now, this book is considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature.
Next months book is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
