East Of Eden: Why You Have To Read The Novel
Because I'd been thinking about East of Edem lately, my wife and I watched the 1956 Elia Kazan film on DVD over the weekend. It's unquestionably one of the greats, but because Kazan limited its scope to the last third of the novel, there's an enormous gap in the portrayal of Adam Trask, Caleb's father, that leaves an important issue unexplained. As I've said, East of Eden covers a swath of what might be regarded as recent memory as of the early 1950s, much like Middlemarch in the early 1870s. a 65-year period between the Civil War and World War I, three generations of the Trask family. Kazan leaves the patriarch, Cyrus Trask, completely out. The problem is that, like Middlemarch , East of Eden has secrets, and a key one is buried in Cyrus Trask's career as a professional Civil War veteran who becomes some sort of Washington, DC fixer -- exactly what he does isn't specified, except that although Cyrus loses track of his son Adam, he leaves both A...