I cannot tell you how impressed I am by this wonderful novel. I bought Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) on the recommendation of the wonderful John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns and others) who said something to the effect of: ‘read this if you want to know what it means to be American’. As a non-American student of American fiction I am quick to leap at any opportunity to immerse myself, and I am now pleased to say that it is the best book I’ve read so far in 2013. Here is some of the magical prose of Zora Neale Hurston:
‘Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.’
‘She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. [...] She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.’
‘She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. [...] mostly she lived between her hat and her heels.’
‘Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon – for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you – and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it around her grand-daughter’s neck tight enough to choke her.’
I really must borrow this! The extracts are beautiful :)