Their Eyes Were Watching God

Rating:
Summary: Thier Eyes Were Watching God Review!!
Review: I think "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston deserves a rating of four stars. I think it deserves this rating because of the enjoyment of the book. It is not often that I read a book written and based off the life of an African American woman. I enjoyed reading the book to learn about some of the struggles women went through. I also liked the writing style of the book because it was written in mostly dialect. The book was full of conversations between different characters, which was very captivating. Through the use of dialect the author allowed you to get a deeper connection with the characters and understand how they felt when confronted with various situations.
Another factor that made this book so enjoyable to read was the fact that I could never put it down. It was not a struggle to read nor was it a boring read. By following the main character Janie through her life, the reader can connect with the character by experiencing her strives and triumphs. This book does not only offer pleasure to the reader, but also it portrays many life lessons the readers can apply to their own life. This book teaches you lessons about life and love through the truly captivating story about Janie's life.
The author of this book, Zora Neale Hurston, was a Harlem Renaissance author. She was one of the first authors in this movement to write about the life of African American people, providing this book with historical significance. The historical significance within the book and the overall entertainment are reasons why I recommend this book to all.


Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston is a book about the life of a Negro woman in the 1900s. The story begins with Janie telling about her life, but then the author takes over the book. In the beginning, Janie returns to see some people she used to know sitting on their porch. After they dine with food she brings, Janie begins to tell her story, with Hurston soon taking over the point of view.

We first hear about Janie's grandmother wanting her to marry Logan Killicks, an older man. She protests her decision, but her grandmother wants her to have someone who can offer Janie the security and protection of his older age and a large potato farm. The marriage occurs in the next chapter, but soon after Janie leaves her new husband to be with another man - Joe Starks.

Joe and Janie go off to another place in Florida. Joe becomes mayor of a new town, named Eatonville, of all black people. Joe also builds a store in this town. At first, Janie is enjoying this relationship. But after the town starts developing, Janie doesn't enjoy life with Joe as much. This is partly because Joe is becoming the man of the town and Janie feels left out. She is asked by Joe to run the store, as Joe is busy doing town duties as the mayor, such as getting a new street light installed.

Later, many other events happen in the story, but if I told you anymore I'd spoil the book.

The author, Zora Neale Hurston, uses the dialog of Negroes in the story. Phrases such as "Aw, Tea Cake, you just say dat tuhnight because de fish and corn bread tasted sort of good" let you imagine the dialect used by southern black people. The characters created by the author really do let us know that they were blacks. We know this because of the way they talk, and because of the life that they are living as explained to us by Hurston.

One theme of this novel relates to man versus society. In this case, man is Janie and society is the men of the south. Janie finally realizes all the hardships she has been through and how her life has changed. In a nutshell, this novel tells the life a Negro woman trying to live a happy life through difficult times.

Rating:
Summary: Zora as Muse
Review: Criticized for not writing a protest novel by some of her fellow African-American writers of the time, Zora instead wrote one of the most poetic novels ever written in the United States. Written in the vernacular of her African-American characters while narrated in standard form, this novel is a blues tale which uses both variations of the language to tranport the reader into the heart and soul of Janie, a young African-American woman in the 1930s on a search.

Musical, heartbreaking, endearing, hilarious, and a novel where the issues of the day enter in horrific ways, this book's title has to best describe Zora as she wrote this book, divinely inspired. There is love, there is marriage, there is separation, there is an irrepressible woman who still speaks to all about the search all meaningful lives undertake.

Alice Walker so loved this book and this author she restored her grave.

Rating:
Summary: Great book, much better than expected
Review: I didn't expect to like this book. This book was required reading and, to tell you the truth, I was going into the experience expecting not to like it. I had just read "I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings" and had heard this book was very similar to it. The people who told me that were blatantly wrong.

This book has nothing to do with race. This book is the story of Janie and her microcosm of southern black culture. This book deals with cultural boundaries and cultural identitiesÑas WEB Dubois said "the reality of the hyphenated African-American." What I loved about this book was that it didn't deal with oppression or hatred, it simply celebrated the brilliant uniqueness of Janie's culture and all of its characters and lovable imperfections.

Hurston did a good job with this book, as she showed the dichotomy between the American culture and the African-American culture through the use of dialogue and poetic prose. The story was interesting and Tea Cake was an intriguingly perfect character with so many imperfections. Reading this book, it is hard not to be engrossed in the culture of Eatonville and the other cities.

Why only four stars? I thought Hurston tried a little too hard in some of the "poetic prose" sections and it sounded a little overdone. I think all meaning can be extracted from the exceptional dialogue of the book. A minor qualm. A great book nonetheless.

milo

Rating:
Summary: I Couldn't Put It Down
Review: I truly loved this book. I fell in love with the characters and cared about what happened to them. I couldn't put it down until it was done; and then I was disappointed, but only because there was no more to read.

I became quite interested in the author because I find it amazing and brave that she had the resources to write such a compelling work of fiction (and get it published!) in the 1930s. I highly recommend this book. It was thoroughly entertaining, which is the sole reason that I read.

Rating:
Summary: "She passes nations through her mouth."
Review: Janie is raised by her grandmother, who was born in slavery. Nanny loves Janie, but has her mind set on seeing her "sittin' on porches lak the white madam", so before she dies, she arranges a marriage for Janie. But it's one that stifles Janie's soul, and she meets and runs off to Florida with Jody. Jody is a leader, a hard worker, a born politician, and helps build, and becomes mayor of, an all-black town in Florida. But he puts Janie in the background, and once again she is "sittin' on porches". When Jody dies, he leaves her well-off, but she "aint' grievin' so why do Ah hafta mourn?" And then Tea Cake comes to town, a dozen years younger, dark-skinned, a gambler, a roustabout, a migrant worker, and she is off to the Everglades with him to build "no race after property and titles. Dis is uh love game". They fight through jealousy, suspicion, hurricanes, illness.

My edition of this book has an afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in which he quotes Hurston describing her dying mother: "Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice".

I think, in some respects, that sums up this book. It's about choosing how your voice is heard, how the story of your life is told. And, oh, Hurston uses such language to tell it! Southern black dialect, high poetry, soaring and swooping, there's not a page, not a paragraph in this book that doesn't hold a gem. I could open it anywhere, stab my finger on the page, and say, "listen to this!!".



Rating:
Summary: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Review: Janie, the heroine of Their Eyes Were Watching God, sees something important when she is sixteen years old:

"She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation."

So she knows what a marriage is, or should be. Later, she knows that her first marriage does not measure up, and neither does her second. But then she meets Tea Cake, a young man who shows her the world and the good people in it. Janie is uneducated and speaks in the dialect of poor Southern blacks in the early twentieth century, but her speech is powerful and poetic.

The Perennial Classics edition includes a chronology, a bibliography, and a nice afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In the afterword, Gates describes Their Eyes Were Watching God as the first Afro-American feminist novel, and he outlines Zora Neale Hurston's legacy to writers of our generation like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. For example, he quotes Alice Walker as saying that Hurston had "a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings," a sense that Walker herself has too. I was happy to encounter Hurston through this lovely, unsentimental novel, and I'll be reading more of her.


Rating:
Summary: They were searching their personal voices
Review: Language is the biggest drawback that a contemporary reader may face when he/she starts reading Zora Neale Hurston's most famous novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God". The narrative gravitates towards two different kind of speech -- both not easy to read. The first we can find is a very literary narration, slow and sometimes meditative; the second device is the use of the rural Southern black dialect.

However, the use of both structures has an important raison d'être. By alternating the two different voices, Hurston is exploring and exposing the culturally rich voices that inhabit the novel protagonist's world. At the same time, these voices also represent Jane in the quest for her own voice. So, speech has a very important role in this book, and for enjoying and understanding this narrative, the reader must get the hang of it.

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" tells the story of Jane Mar Crawford, a woman ahead of her time. Her strong personality insists on finding love and freedom, but both things never come together and it takes her almost the whole novel to realize so. Before that, she will face awful marriages and relationships, prejudice against gender, age and color, among other things.

It is very likely that many other writers would be very preaching when telling such a story, but Hurston avoids this tone. And however she touches upon issues like racism, never is it by all means the main theme of the novel. This point is subtly raised throughout the narrative. Therefore, the novel is more about the human condition in general rather than a distinctly African-American one. Like Alice Walker once wrote, "I think we are better off if we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period-rather than as the artist/politician most black writers have been required to be."

By the way, if nowadays Zora Neale Hurston is regarded as an important American writer, this is thanks to Alice Walker -- who brought us her text and pointed out its importance to the world literature. And however Hurston and her works are associated with the Harlem Renaissance, her books can be discussed in another context.

The biggest criticism that the writer faced when she published the novel was that "Their Eyes Were Watching God" was not a political novel. And despite the fact that many people thought it by that time, nowadays the fact of not carrying a political or moral message proves the strength and beauty of the book.


Rating:
Summary: A moving piece of literary prose
Review: Never before has an author entranced me under the spell of their writing prowess as much as Hurston has. From the first few words on page one to the final words on page 240 I was utterly moved and fascinated by Janie Crawford and her life. Hurston uses mythology as a backdrop for the book, starting each chapter with various allusions to different mythological scenes. It is hard to write about a book which has the ability to evoke such emotion. All I can say is trust me and read Their Eyes Were Watching God, you'll fall in love with Janie and with Hurston.

Rating:
Summary: A Growing Thread
Review: The story begans with Janie's return home. She begins to tell a story to one of her acquaintances from the town in which she left. She begans to spin her tale of times in which she lived with her grandmother on a white family's land. She tells of how her grandmother wanted her to marry before she died. Janie quietly protests her end of innocence and with the obedience of a child quietly marries and old field hand who had acquired much in the eyes of her grandmother. She later becomes smitten by a young man with a dream, and quietly sneaks off and makes love to him while her husband is at work. She later while frying corn pone or some type of bread for her husband decides to meet her lover and make his dreams her dreams. While doing this she lives a financially priveleged life of quiet abuse and loveless nights. Her husband dies and later Janie finds herself over a substantial estate and businesses. She is lonely and finds time to reflect. Later, while enjoying her quiet freedom she happens upon a sharply dressed drifter by the name of Tea Cake who captures her heart. Once again, she abandons her present life in search of adventure and fun.

This story is beautifully written in an unusual venicular. I thoroughly enjoyed it and at parts of this book I even cried. I was stunned by the similarities of this character with life as well as the life of others in whom I call friend. I noticed the singular thread that was so well woven in the life of Janie. She did not attain true freedom until she really understood and knew herself. I can understand that her grandmother did not want to leave her "uncovered" after she was gone (meaning without anyone to care for her). She wanted Janie to have better covering than and security than she presently had. The author's choice of title was not by fluke, it was apparent that in the midst of the storm that all she and Tea Cake could do was keep their eyes upon God. It was through the storm that affirmed their love and it was because of the storm that tore them apart.

The thread that I mentioned earlier was apparent even more after she married her first husband. My discernment was that the character still enjoyed her freedom, but out of a certain desire for security was uncertain as to exactly what freedom that she longed for and desired. I feel that after she met her second husband the young go-getter. She felt that at last her dreams could be fulfilled. But later there is disappointment by way of physical and verbal abuse.

There seems to be a thread a growing thread and throughout the book it is woven and finally connected into a final bow. In the last segment we see how life changes Janie. Through her circumstances and through her own personal "storm" she this time chooses a rainbow in which her life though tumulous at times still has signifies magnificent growth and intense meaning.