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The Moon Is Down
Binding: Paperback
Author: John Steinbeck
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Features:
Average Rating: 4.5
Total Customer Reviews: 66
List Price: $13.00
Our Price: $9.23
Sales Rank: 21302
Product Description
Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again.
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Users Product Reviews: |
Product Review Summary: Earning Your Nobel It's fashionable these days to dismiss Steinbeck's Nobel Prize as an example of the bad judgment of the Committee. In fact, Steinbeck is the one of "the big three" (Papa, Bill, and John) most likely to hold his preeminence among American novelists in a century. I don't know of a writer who more truly represents his own century than Steinbeck, except perhaps Mark Twain.
If you want to know why the Committee chose Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down is a painless way to find out. Everything is there -- the brilliant, understated, economical writing, the visionary faith in the common people, the embracing spirit that understands without applauding or condemning. You can find all that in other books, familiar ones like Of Mice and Men or Grapes of Wrath. Of Mice and Men has become such a staple of obligatory writing that it's hard to appreciate, and Grapes of Wrath is dauntingly long for Twitterers. But The Moon Is Down can be read in a couple of leisurely hours, and Steinbeck walks the slack rope between sentimentality and simplicity as deftly as Thomas Paine, creating a story simple enough for children that ends, with enormous cheek, by recreating the death of Socrates.
Steinbeck's instincts are refined to a kind of purity here. He makes fun of the pretentions and priggishness of young officers, confronts one of them with the crude reality he disdains ("love" costs "two sausages, nice plump ones"), and yet allows the woman in question to keep her honor and dignity. He never says so in so many words, but the leader of the Resistance is not the honest and courageous mayor, it's his cook, an aging curmudgeon who fights the Nazis because she has a bad temper she can finally be proud of. His "sympathetic" German officer is all the more noxious because he comprehends the moral degeneracy he serves. When the Mayor observes "It is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars," the platitude resonates through every page of the book.
This is an ideal introduction to Steinbeck -- didactic without being preachy, amusing and heartbreaking, as focused as an Ansel Adams landscape, as universal as breath. Any writer would be proud to have written one book this good; Steinbeck wrote nearly a dozen.
Product Review Summary: Good, but not what I wanted This book is fantastic! I can see why it was so popular at the onset of WWII. However, I was expecting to receive a paperback, but what I got was a cheap high school issued small hardcover. If I want a hard cover I buy something with historical value - with the original dust jacket, perhaps. But if I buy a paperback it's so I can stuff it in my pocket, enjoy it on the train, etc. I e-mailed the seller as soon as I received the wrong item, but they never replied. Again, I enjoyed the book but am disappointed with the customer service.
Product Review Summary: underrated novel about tyranny and freedom The Moon isDown is aSteinbeck novel which has been downgraded by critics as a propaganda novel and especially by academic ones.I must disagree the novel presents the nazis who are named as such not in the cartoonist cariacature of propaganda but as humans with real feelings who have fear who desire love who suffer homesickness etc. There are some who are remorseless soullessideologues because such did exist but the emotions are realistic and this is why this novel is literature not propaganda, Steinbecks occupiers are a realisitc of how the Norwegians resisted the Nazis and many Norwegians commented on how amazingly accurate Steinbeck captures their resistance blowing up railroads working slow especially when mining equipment needs to be faced etc.All is told with inspiring heartfelt dialogue that some see as sentimental but I see as spirited and full of humane sensitivity and it is concise with few wasted words.The Moon is Down isnt at the level of other5 star novels like OfMice andMen or The Grapes of Wrath but I give it 5 stars anyway for the reasons stated above
Product Review Summary: "... and the flies conquered the flypaper" Today, Steinbeck's World War II novella, sixty six years after it was written, has gained a timeless significance: a brief, yet well thought-out glimpse into human relationships, between occupation and resistance in times of war. Published in 1942, the book was translated, clandestinely distributed and eagerly read by people in German-occupied countries. In the United States, it was also criticized for being too soft and generous in the depiction of the enemy. Whereas early impressions may suggest to the reader a surprisingly light parody or simplistic morality tale, we soon recognize the subtle, and with each page mounting, intensity of Steinbeck's anti-war message.
Set in a small mining town in an unnamed country, invaded by an unspecified enemy force, numerous hints, however, suggest that the story's events take place in Northern Norway at the time of the 1940 Nazi occupation. The townspeople, totally unprepared for an invasion after having lived in peace for a very long time, had forgotten how to fight... Consequently the initial assault is over in less than an hour, well planned with the help of a local quisling. Taking control of the town and its mining operation turns out to be a much more complicated and difficult affair than Colonel Lanser and his battalion had been trained for and anticipated. Their headquarters established in the Mayoral residence, good Mayor Orden has little choice but to tolerate their presence. Steinbeck introduces the main players in the unfolding drama with a few yet defining characteristics. Orden, for example, comes across as an indecisive, somewhat dotty, older chap, fussed over by "Madame", his protective, efficient little wife. Doctor Winter, the local medic and historian and Orden's childhood friend does not appears to be up to the challenges, despite some traits of a Dr. Watson. But, early impressions are certainly misleading in this story.
On the opposing side, the officers are a motley collection of unlikely elite military personnel, described more like army caricatures: spending more time debating than leading the battalion: one is an Anglophile, another more concerned with his model railway than the battle, and yet another honestly believes that he can find real friendship among the women of the town. Except for Lanser, none of them had seen combat before and their naïveté is poignant. While justifying their action with "just following the Leader's orders", they soon realize that that excuse doesn't convince anybody. To achieve their primary objective, that is access to the town's coal, the officers insist on orderly cooperation from the townspeople, increased production and an easy life for the soldiers. Herein, as they soon find out, lies the problem... While the soldiers are muddling through in their attempts to control the locals through arbitrary executions for disobedience and non-cooperation, occupiers and local resistance are caught in a spiral of events that will lead to inevitable results as one side is destabilized and the other made stronger. Nobody can escape, sidestep or ignore the brutality of war.
Steinbeck's subtle build up of the characters' strengths and weaknesses is superb. Orden (his name, incidentally, in German means "medal", often as a military decoration that Orden would have deserved...) is a case in point. His perceived malleability to the colonel's demands grows in fact into disguised and effective opposition: because he cannot represent his townspeople and therefore "cannot control what they do". The townspeople, initially confused, isolated yet quietly resisting, find new defence mechanisms and strength in coordination, and, like the flies the flypaper, may eventually overwhelm the enemy...
Steinbeck's novella is written in a series of tableaux as if set for the stage. (*) Each such set is introduced by a short depiction of the background or description of events beyond the confines of the scene's space, most often the Palace's drawing room. There, the lively dialogue between the main protagonists gives immediacy to the action threads of the story. With this narrative technique, Steinbeck focuses on the personal and intimate interaction between occupiers and occupied and their evolving relationship, underscoring the human tragedy of war and those caught up in it, whatever their personal guilt or innocence. [Friederike Knabe]
(*) It was in fact produced as such in 1943.
Product Review Summary: Occupation In 1942, at the height of the Nazi domination of Europe, Steinbeck wrote this novella about a small mining town under enemy occupation. Neither the country nor the aggressor is specified, and the character names are generically European, but everything fits the German conquest of Norway in 1940. Steinbeck wrote the book frankly as propaganda, as a contribution to the war effort; the introduction by Donald V. Coers to the Penguin Classics edition admirably documents the success the novel had in numerous translations smuggled into occupied Europe. Coers also discusses the controversy that the book stirred up among critics in America, some of whom accused Steinbeck almost of literary collaboration.
But therein lies its fascination. At first blush, the subject suggests a story of helmeted Nazis and daring saboteurs by Alistair MacLean or Jack Higgins, and propaganda would seem a rather low literary form. But the amazing thing -- though obvious in retrospect -- is that Steinbeck keeps his own style intact, just as though he were writing of the American heartland. He is less concerned with great events than with the people caught up in them, and he describes them with the same understanding, warmth, and even humor that he would bring to CANNERY ROW or EAST OF EDEN. Furthermore -- and this is what so shocked his critics -- he finds the same humanity in the occupying soldiers as among the victim population. I titled this review "Occupation" rather than "Resistance" because Steinbeck's book really is two-sided, and shows the soldiers being destroyed as much by their own isolation and loneliness as by the overt acts of the people. The nearest thing to a stereotypical Nazi is the keen-as-mustard Captain Loft, who wants to do everything by the book. But his commanding officer, Colonel Lanser, says of him: "He's frightened. I know his kind. He has to be disciplined when he's afraid or he'll go to pieces. He relies on discipline the way other men rely on sympathy."
Lanser, the First War veteran who sees the folly of his orders even as he is forced to follow them, is one of the two richest characters in the book. The other is Mayor Orden, the aging representative of the townspeople, who is confused by events at first, but gradually comes to realize his true role. The scenes between these two men, impossible negotiations unresolved by their shared humanity, show Steinbeck at his best. Even Steinbeck's slightly awkward reach for grandeur towards the end, when Orden tries to quote Socrates, is redeemed by the fact that the old man cannot quite remember the words. Whatever the context, Steinbeck writes best about ordinary people because he can imagine himself in their minds and feelings. The fact that he is writing about a situation he had never experienced in a country he has never visited, makes that feat of imagination nothing less than amazing.
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