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The book does not live with me after reading. Hurston's writing style and peripheral character creation were great, but I felt the story and plot were lacking in development. In my opinion, Janie is an under-developed protagonist; I would've liked to have more of an insight into Janie as a person outside of any relationship to a man. The story is easily forgettable to me. The book is more style rather than substance.(via [.].)
I bought this book for college. It was hard to get through the first couple pages because of how it was written but after I got through it, it was a hard to put down book. I loved it.
Moonlight is "amber fluid"; a darkening night "puts on flesh"; Tea Cake, one of Janie's lovers, "melts her resistance" immediately following an argument and loves her while their "fumes and emanations" fill the room and they collapse in "sweet exhaustion". The book is set in Eatonville, Florida, an all-black community founded as a sanctuary from the racism of the Deep South. Spelling out dialect like this is an amateur mistake of which most beginning writers are warned, and which gives the average reader a migraine. The little introspection that exists in the book is about Janie "waking" to her newfound feminist identity as a woman. Hurston's prose is melodramatic and far too sappy to have survived on its own in literary history. While this may sound creative, as some kinder reviewers have suggested, the dialect renders the book almost insufferably incoherent, at least to someone who appreciates the usage of proper English. The dialogue and even some of the prose is written totally in dialect, spelled exactly as it would be spoken: "Ah" for "I", "tuh" for "to", "laks" for "likes," etc.
When you have to simultaneously decipher sentences such as "Ah laks tuh go tuh dat dere store wid mah chillun and buys me a drink uh two fo' mahself" and understand their meaning to the story, the novel practically requires you to reread a passage several times to grasp what it's trying to say. The dialect, while realistic to the setting/era, often spiels for pages at a time and is woefully unreadable. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman in the 1930s whose entire life, from her childhood discovery of her color to her multiple relationships, divorces and trials, is chronicled through a narration given by Janie to her best friend Pheoby in the present. He insults/abuses her, and she leaves him. Everything is filled with a curiously dry straightforward logic. Her character is clearly more of an expression of Hurston's thoughts on women than a fully fleshed person. That some schools stress proper language usage and in the same breath refer to "Eyes" as an enduring classic seems simply shameful. He renders dialect with word choice, using phrases such as "I aim" to give it a Southern feel, and only occasionally alters a spelling.
The novel is, unfortunately, a dud. To think that some people would call Anne Rice baroque and yet have the audacity to term "Eyes" literature. The characterization is also bland and one-dimensional. The novel follows this pattern for the first half: Janie marries a man whom she loves at first, then discovers to be a sexist pig. Some reviews have compared this book to Faulkner's work; while Faulkner, like Hurston, is sometimes incomprehensible at first reading, his writing is more original, deeper in meaning and populated with more realistic characters than Hurston's.
There are ways to write an affective story and get the language across without making it completely unreadable. I understand the importance of this novel and I applaud Zora Neale Hurston as an American novelist who happens to be black and a woman to make such a name for herself in the literary world. But this book hurts my eyes and is so hard to read because you have to sit down and disect every sentence of dialect. It takes so much longer to read than it should, and with the frustration of trying to read the dialect, the beautiful story gets lost, and I'm not even sure what it's about anymore. That's my opinion anyway, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Hurston's attempt at capturing the dialect of African Americans is quite honestly hard to read and understand. This book really doesn't deserve to be called a classic. For all the effort a reader puts into deciphering her meaning, all the reader gets is a trite love story. It's just not in the league of other classic literature. The writing is mediocre at best, insufferable at its worst. There's a reason this book almost fell into obscurity. Good for a beach read, but not for the classroom.
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