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The Wayward Bus (Penguin Classics)
Binding: Paperback
Author: John Steinbeck
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Features:
Average Rating: 4.5
Total Customer Reviews: 29
List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $10.20
Sales Rank: 261847
Product Description
Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works, beginning with the six shown here, will be published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art. Of this initial group of six titles, The Wayward Bus is in a new edition. An imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California’s back roads. This allegorical novel of pilgrimage includes a new introduction by Gary Scharnhorst. 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: Less popular than Cannery Row for good reason A random group of people who all end up on a bus together in California. Some of the people are respected by the group (a couple that has a "perfect marriage" and their daughter, a beautiful girl, a businessman) and some are generally ignored by the group (the bus driver, a boy and girl who worked in his shop and the attached diner, and an old man). Most of them are unhappy when the book starts and unhappy when it ends. If it helps any, two of them might be slightly happier. If you're looking for a book like Cannery Row, read Sweet Thursday and skip this one.
Product Review Summary: very good but not a five star book The Wayward Bus is a very good novel by John Steinbeck but not a 5 star classic The novel starts at a place that is convenience store and auto The novel starts at a convenience store auto repair shop combination called Rebels Corners. We get intorduced to the characters and they are developed in a thorough way. The strong character development is the best part of the novel but the novel has too many repetitive moments to be 5 stars. Steinbecks writing style is strong as always.He gets you to turn the pages this is a very good book and ihighly recommend it.
Product Review Summary: Sexy Steinbeck What seems to be the most accurate written statement I've come across about The Wayward Bus is the sort of secondary synopsis on the back of my aged paperback copy - "THE WAYWARD BUS is Steinbeck writing with honesty and passion of the raw, primal urges of men and women."
Yes, it's a character study. Yes, it examines aspects of society, values, dilemmas, etc. in post-WWII era America that still apply today. Yes, the people in the story are "mismatched" (as in, not likely to have much to do with one another, or at least so intimately as their numerous adventures lead them to be?). But what makes this book so refreshing and continues Steinbeck's tradition of not rehashing the same style, content, or desires repeatedly in his work (despite having such a distinctive voice) is that it's essentially about one thing: SEX. And not just people thinking about sex and their behaviour within potentially or actively sexual relationships, but a poignant examination of sexuality as somehow being simultaneously drawn from and responsible for every aspect of our feeling, being, and actions, whether we are aware of it or (usually) not. And instead of dropping a little hint of these ideas now and then, it's clearly the premise of the whole story and dealt with not just directly but nearly exclusively.
Whether in Steinbeck's trademark "character development" in his description of the biggest and smallest details of these characters' lives previous to their day-long encounter, our glimpses into their conscious thoughts and daydreams, or in the revelations Steinbeck must give us secondhand due to his character's inability to offer us the information themselves (such as his description of Mrs. Pritchard's sexual arousal upon eavesdropping in on a story of a young girl's manipulation of a man she ended up leaving in order to gain a full-length mink coat, then counter-balanced with Mrs. Pritchard's "own" horror at the vulgarity of the story as told in an imagined letter to a friend)), there is little if anything happening in this book without direct allusions to the character's sexuality as indeed a "primal" force, as in, number one!
The result is a daring and touching portrait of how sexuality is more than what goes on between the sheets, doing good and honest tribute to just how clearly it's plays the tune that we all dance to.
BUT he does it so well that people barely seem to notice it, even when a man virtually rapes his own wife in a cave, causing her to tear her fingernails down her own face until they draw blood. This is some pretty nutty stuff, but by the time we get there we've been so immersed in such savage underlaying sexual tension that when it comes to the surface, we're still later calling it another wonderful "character study!"
Which just goes to show we must be just as repressed and thoughtless as he thought we were. It should be telling that the only people who have real sex in this book are the most consistently aware of how badly and wonderfully they want genuine sexual release and the accompanying love, if only temporarily, with the people around them: this is more than reality, it's advice! A little book about a little day that proves what a big man this genius really was.
Product Review Summary: Kirkus Schmurkus This sort of snotty snobbery is why one can't trust what one might call the Reviewer Community. Among them, Steinbeck has always suffered unjustly, mostly one now suspects, decades after the fact, because he wouldn't play their games. At his most lackluster, which is not the case in The Wayward Bus, he can be a bit of a disappointment. But at his best, whether his important best or his light and airy best, he is really great.
This book, while not up to the benchmark set by East of Eden, his greatest if not most "important" work, is a great read, a compelling story, told really well. For anyone who has read Tortilla Flat, Sweet Thursday and the rest of Steinbeck's smaller books, this is a good choice for moving ahead on the path to Eden.
Product Review Summary: Really great book! I really enjoyed this book!
Among other things I like about Steinbeck, that all persons have faults as well, even the ones you like. And they are very interesting characters. And its very easy to read.
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