[Essay in My Heart]

Tortilla Flat

It's autumn, a good time to read. I was wondering if there would be any interesting stories again and remembered a book my friend lent me a few years ago. That book was a collection of short stories by John Steinbeck.

There were six novels, the first of which was 'Tortilla Flat', published by John Steinbeck in 1935, which caught my eye, and read it. Tortilla, also known as torta or tortita, is a round, flatbread made mainly from coarse-grained hominy (a kind of corn) in Central and South American cultures. The word 'flat' means 'a low multi-family house of about two or three stories.'  In the translation published in Korea, I saw that ‘flat’ was translated as ‘臺地 (tower-like earth)’. Tortilla Flat, the setting of this novel, is a residential district located in the northern highlands of Monterey, California.

First of all, I was curious about the title of the novel and started turning the pages. Tortilla Flat is the story of six paisanos, poor workers living together in a house near Monterrey, a city on the northern coast of California, working in a squid cannery or logging trees. The word “paisano” originally refers to a rural farmer of Spanish or Italian descent. The owner of the house is a man named Danny, and the novel contains various episodes that take place while living together with his five residents and six dogs. Danny is a paisano. According to Steinbeck, the paisanos are of a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and assorted Caucasian blood, whose ancestry is people who have lived in California for at least a hundred years.

This novel deals with the problem of 'food, clothing, and shelter' necessary to meet the basic living conditions of human beings, and also shows how different people with their own unique personalities live in harmony with each other.

Paisanos make a living by paying a little bit of the money they earn from their daily work to the landlord, Danny, but one day, the owner of the house, Danny, suddenly disappears. They manage to find him, but unlike before, he is very melancholy and quietly alone without saying anything.

The friends who are worried about Danny try to comfort him by throwing a big neighborhood party to change his mood. However, their attempts fail in the end despite their diligent efforts, and Danny suddenly dies, and a funeral is held. Even the funeral is held with courtesy by the villagers, but paisano friends, who did not even have the proper clothes to wear at the funeral, watch the funeral from a distance.

After the funeral is safely held, they return to their home, Tortilla Flat, to chat. The paisano friends accidentally handle the fireplace and the fire spreads quickly, turning the house into ashes and losing the house they lived in overnight. In the end, the remaining five paisanos all go on their own path, leaving behind the memories they have accumulated over the years.

Some of the first words that come to mind while reading this book are friendship, love, hunger, greed, humor, sympathy, compassion, and faith. In order to solve the problem of ‘food, clothing, and shelter’, the three basic elements that humans need to live as human beings, this novel clearly shows what kind of actions and what kind of thoughts people who suffer from hunger generally carry out their actions.

paisanos don't have anything to eat, so they steal food and share it with each other. Meanwhile, they drink to forget the hardships of daily life for a moment, and they naturally feel guilty about their wrong actions. In this novel, various and unique personalities, and psychological descriptions of paisano are introduced in detail through various episodes.

In this novel, John Steinbeck calmly and in detail describes the various events that people live in a small community and the subtle changes in human emotions felt through such events. In addition, the very detailed and accurate descriptions of the backgrounds appearing in various episodes also show his outstanding literary talent.

Despite the fact that it was published in the 1930s, I feel that even now, almost a century ago, the same problems that Steinbeck tried to present through his work are still emerging more clearly in our society these days. For example, human greediness, racism, economic inequality, social customs and myths, and the problems of the religious life based on the concept of sin and punishment can be cited.

Another thing I learned while reading this work was that I came to understand American society and the perception of Americans more concretely than before. In terms of experimenting with American culture to better understand American culture through literature, I would dare to recommend you read Tortilla Flat in a dazzlingly beautiful fall.  ***

October 30, 2021

Solti

한국어 번역: 

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