'Hot Steinbeck Summer'

It started as an internet meme and has become a reading trend among younger people: John Steinbeck is in vogue. The thing is that the actress and screenwriter Zoe Kazan is directing the adaptation of East of Eden which will premiere on Netflix this fall, so the forgotten classic of more than six hundred pages that follows the intertwined destinies of the Hamilton and Trask families from the Civil War to the First World War is on all the nightstands of young American readers. Florence Pugh appears in the miniseries conceived by Kazan, and it is already known that there will be an adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, the Nobel laureate's other great novel, with rumors that Ryan Murphy could embody the endearing and nonconformist Tom Joad.All this is good news, of course. Firstly, because here at home Steinbeck is beginning to reappear after many years out of print. Proa reissued just over a year ago the short and magnificent Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, translated by Xavier Pàmies (I had a version by Pedrolo of the first and I remember reading a translation by Jordi Arbonès of the second, if I'm not mistaken). Viena has in its catalogue The Red Pony (trad. Joaquim Mallafrè) and the chronicle the author wrote of his adventures with his dog, Travels with Charley (trad. Marc Donat). And the best news: Tigre de Paper has dared to publish East of Eden for the first time in Catalan, with an excellent translation by Miquel Sorribas. And the worst news: The Grapes of Wrath continues to be out of print, only available in some libraries with a translation by Mercè López Arnabat.All this is good omen, too, for what it may mean for Steinbeck to be read again. It will be necessary to see if Kazan's adaptation maintains the epic and tragic spirit of the author, who delves into the problem of identity, betrayal, inheritance, and love without concessions, or if it creates a digestible product, as Emerald Fennell did with Wuthering Heights, which Mariana Enríquez described as a "boring and silly" film, as it turned a dark and demonic story that explores the beauty of the abyss, depression, and love for darkness into something sexy.Will the same happen with Steinbeck? We will see. For the moment, however, he is being read, and for many young Americans it will involve discovering, in the story of Adam Trask, that there was a Civil War in their country, migratory waves of workers on the Californian coast, and a World War that marked millions of families. Even more: they will discover that the mantra of "you can", so totemic and unappealable in their culture, is a fallacy, and that social determinism condemns the majority of lives, including American ones.I started the Hot Steinbeck Summer with The Grapes of Wrath, in a nineties edition from the MOLU collection, and I thought the same thing I thought with East of Eden: that it is a privilege to be able to read it. Because no one describes like him the inseparable bond between man and the land he works (we realize it now, with the viral clip of a farmer from Calonge lamenting the fire that devastates everything). Because no one finds more enduring images to portray poverty: that of Rose of Sharon, who has just given birth to a dead baby, breastfeeding a starving and skeletal worker. Because in the caravan of the Joad family heading to California seeking the promise of a better life, the history of what awaits us in the coming years is written: climate and political refugees, people desperately seeking an opportunity (and the impossibility of finding it). Because just for Tom's monologue to his mother, it's worth reading: "Like when he explained that time he went to the desert to find his soul, but then he found he didn't have one of his own. He says he discovered he only had a piece of a big soul. And he said that staying in the desert was useless, because his piece of soul was useless if it wasn't next to the rest, if it wasn't part of the whole soul".Reading Steinbeck will not cure us of anything, but it will prepare us for everything.