Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Mike Cordle, January 5, 2010 (view all comments by Mike Cordle)
With enrapturing lyricism Their Eyes Were Watching God captures the heart of the human experience. Hurston's use of dialect is so rich and authentic the reader almost feels as if the words lift themselves right off the page, becoming audible and full of life. Whether Hurston is writing about sex, God, hate or love, I found each presentation, indeed, each word, was filled with a sacredness on par with some of the Bible, or the Koran.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the finest examples of why the written word will never perish and why I will read books until the day I die.

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Felicity, July 9, 2009 (view all comments by Felicity)
I found this a quick read, once I'd had a few pages to soak into the dialect. I enjoyed the frame, which placed the narrative firmly in a storytelling tradition, and gave enough clues about Janie's eventful life that the reader could quickly realize it was the life, not the events themselves, that mattered.

The dialogue throughout the book is spritely, marked by inventive habits of wordplay, and the narrative itself is often beautiful, evocative, and skeweringly apt. I love the recurring images that pervade it, like bright threads glinting throughout the fabric.

It's short, and much of its character work is expertly begun early and tied off neatly at the end, although there are some episodes that I still found enigmatic. It raises knotty issues of colorism, beauty, self-esteem and self-definition, and succeeds as a bildungsroman all these years and bildungsromans later.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780060916503

Subtitle:

(a novel )

Author:

Hurston, Zora Neale

Publisher:

Perennial Library

Location:

New York :

Subject:

Self-realization

Subject:

Psychological fiction

Subject:

Epic literature

Subject:

Allegories

Subject:

Self-realization -- Fiction.

Subject:

African-American women

Copyright:

1990

Edition Description:

1st Perennial Library ed.

Series Volume:

125.

Publication Date:

1990

Binding:

TRADE PAPER

Illustrations:

Yes

Pages:

xiv, 207 p.