Con las bendiciones de su fallecido padre resonando en su cabeza, el joven granjero Joseph Wayne abandona la casa familiar en Vermont para iniciar una nueva vida en California. Allí hará realidad su sueño de construir una granja en un fértil valle, mientras cada vez más obsesionado con un imponente árbol que crece junto a la casa, acabará convencido de que en él mora el espíritu de su progenitor. La prosperidad le decide a traer junto a él a sus hermanos y sus familias, pero uno de ellos, atemorizado por lo que considera creencias paganas de Joseph, talará el árbol. Y todo cambiará para siempre... Esta segunda novela de John Steinbeck, repleta de referencias a los ritos paganos, los mitos griegos y la Biblia, es una hermosa indagación en la relación del hombre con la Naturaleza, y una magistral reflexión sobre el destino.

2.5

I’ve never read a book so aggressively mediocre ( )

While the book is a bit lacking in focus, there are some interesting pieces in it, particularly the rock and all the nature around it and its lack of interest for the human beings who think they own and control it through stories and myths. ( )

Livros que constroem

Rating: how it hurts me to do this, but a squeaking-by three stars of five

Steinbeck's second novel, which he labored over for five years, was damned near never published. The title is from a Vedic hym to Prajapati, who is occasionally the Supreme God and, at other times, an avatar of "...Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Agni, Indra, Vishvakarma, Bharata, Kapila and many others." (Dalal, [Hinduism: An Alphabetical Guide]). The inspiratin for the novel's ancient tree spirit, then, explains the novel's complete and utter incoherence of purpose. Are we pro-tree-worship or anti-? We're both? But surely on opposite sides the characters discussing the subject are...wait, they *aren't* different characters? But, but that's waffling! It's not? Why isn't that waffling? Pshaw, the characters aren't Jungian archetypes and larger-than-life...what? There's a thirty-seven page essay introducing the book, written by Steinbeck scholar [[Robert DeMott]] saying it isn't?

The prostitution rests.

If you need thirty-seven pages of waffle to explain why something's good enough to read, nobody wants to read it and for a reason. Steinbeck got a few hundred for the book as an advance and, as the opus sold a whopping 598 copies, it lost money. The publisher also rejected, in breaking this bad news, [Tortilla Flat]; a sad mistake on his part as that was an altogether superior book and went on to make pots of moolah. Read it instead of this one. To a God Unknown deserves its commercial and scholarly oblivion. ( )