John Steinbeck
Furore

It's pouring rain outside. A bare breast, a youthful nipple offers maternal milk to the mouth of an unknown person close to death from the hardships endured. It is a huge gesture for her, who, just a few hours earlier, lost everything: a sublime way to capture the misery of the crisis and the immense solidarity that often follows. This is how "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck ends.

In this particular historical moment, I wanted to awaken from slumber a book that had been peacefully resting on my home shelf for too long. I just wanted to read a few passages, the ones I had highlighted over the years, but soon I found myself traveling Route 66 with the Joad family. I was then invited to take a seat in a patched-up truck even though I was convinced of getting off in about ten pages, no more. I make my way on a filthy mattress between the back of a little brat and the old feet of a silent lady. I begin to read about a daily war against gasoline, shredded tires, smoking radiators, meat, potatoes, and then there's money, those damn dollars. 

To incite inequality, to speculate on the desperate situation that drives hundreds of thousands of people to leave their birth home and accept any employment condition. To raise prices thus well beyond usury and infamy for what is most demanded: $20 cars are stuffed with sawdust and patches and sold for $100. To almost violently savor the situation of power because it's precisely in the crisis that real money is made, when you can grab by the balls starving families who can do nothing but unite in misery or struggle. The pages turn, and from the truck, the gleaming orange groves of California are finally seen; scurvy rages, but those fruits are inedible and cannot be picked because they were intentionally smeared with oil. Poverty must indeed be maintained. Acres of uncultivated fertile land, food that is left to fall to the ground. Swept from the East by the world's broom (an agricultural machine that has rendered sharecropping obsolete and impractical), these Okies are finally welcomed with beatings and insults from the local populations of the West who see their lifestyle threatened: these paupers, after all, are so hungry that they will lower wages.

I don't think it's possible to read and not feel, in an inexorable crescendo, the mounting rage. Once you land in California, your fists will probably begin to clench, your knuckles will whiten, and you will need to take a couple of steps before you can continue reading. Not because Steinbeck's prose is difficult, far from it, but only because that wall of ink you will face will become unbearable unless you are robots or people with a fin on the back. What an apt title, "The Grapes of Wrath."

It is a sentiment often repressed, nurtured in the utter misery of the story's protagonists, and only briefly able to manifest itself with violent outbursts. On this nascent fire, a blanket is placed with exceptional violence and speed: those in power feel besieged by a mass potentially lethal to the maintenance of their unearned, exorbitant wealth. It is dry writing, free from rhetoric, that manages to move with bare descriptions capable of contrasting inhumane gestures and hardships with total, almost mad, generosity.

I re-read, and as much as I try, I don't think I've conveyed the idea. I don't give a damn: my purpose was not to review and judge a masterpiece, but rather to encourage someone to pick up this very current and devastatingly powerful tome for the first time.