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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I saw this TV movie as a kid, and its deep impression on me has never faded. The book (my second reading) is perhaps even more powerful today.
challenging
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Honestly, I had a difficult time with this book. The prose is written in Southern dialect and frequently includes the n-word. I had to slow down to figure out what was being communicated for the first third of the book, and the repeated racial slurs were tough to see again and again. The purpose of the book was clear, and you could see the same patterns repeating with different characters as Jane's life progressed. While this makes a powerful point about how slavery died in name but not in practice, it made it hard to connect to new characters as I knew their fate would not be pleasant. I did enjoy a few passages of Gaines' writing, especially Ned's sermon on the river. In conclusion, while this book is important and uses the lens of one woman's (long) life to show how much has stayed the same from 1863 to 1963, it was not a book that fully connected with me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Hate crime, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Slavery, Violence, Murder
Moderate: Rape
“After you been round things so many years you get to be like them or they get to be like you. Exactly which way it works I ain’t figured it out yet. Probably never will.” —The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines
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Regrettably, this book sat on my shelf unread for many years, but back in February I decided to change that. When I started reading this it felt familiar in the way like I have read it before.
There is something about Miss Jane that felt like a walking and talking trip into the past reaching back over 100 years to trace back the story that could easily outline a narrative of my great-grandmother. Placing myself in the newness of something many had dreamed of, but never lived to see. Emancipation and what 'freedom' looked like and what it cost ao many who endeavored to forge a path of change, even at great cost to themselves and others.
Freedom at the age of no more than 10 or 12 years old, to have laid claim to something of her own, her very own name, Jane, and being beaten because of it.
When I read Gaines, I'm always impressed by his story telling, an oral history, that's allowed to take shape & expand in our imagination. That was my experience with Miss Jane Pittman.
-
-
Regrettably, this book sat on my shelf unread for many years, but back in February I decided to change that. When I started reading this it felt familiar in the way like I have read it before.
There is something about Miss Jane that felt like a walking and talking trip into the past reaching back over 100 years to trace back the story that could easily outline a narrative of my great-grandmother. Placing myself in the newness of something many had dreamed of, but never lived to see. Emancipation and what 'freedom' looked like and what it cost ao many who endeavored to forge a path of change, even at great cost to themselves and others.
Freedom at the age of no more than 10 or 12 years old, to have laid claim to something of her own, her very own name, Jane, and being beaten because of it.
When I read Gaines, I'm always impressed by his story telling, an oral history, that's allowed to take shape & expand in our imagination. That was my experience with Miss Jane Pittman.
-
Jane Pittman is one spunky and sassy lady. She tells her story of living through slavery, Emancipation, and the civil rights era. Even though it's a fictional account, it still hits you in your feelers.
The book was good! But that ending was so abrupt! I mean really. I was wanting more.
This book marks my first venture among the works of Ernest Gaines, and I can already tell that I am going to enjoy hearing more from him. He expresses depth and breadth in humanity that wins me automatically and wholeheartedly. He does not paint broadly over any aspect of the human condition, even when his subject matter is weighted heavily by a constant reflection on the systemic injustices of man against man. These things said, I think I will like his other works more than this one.
Jane Pittman tells a life story which can hardly be surpassed, both in length of time lived and in impact of events experienced. She shares distinct memories of plantation slavery and of being freed; of trying to escape the culture she came from and of living on in the darkest corners of rural Louisiana for a hundred years or more; and of endless suffering at the hands of cruel people and finally taking a last stand as a centenarian in the Civil Rights movement. She is a stubborn and tenacious character from birth, someone who someone manages to outlast nearly everyone she has ever known in spite of and perhaps thanks to her own surliness and tenacity.
This book is illuminating and expansive. It expands upon realistic experiences from pivotal periods of upheaval in American history. It details all sorts of personal relationships within and between racial divides and fleshes out every sort of character, in circumstances completely foreign to those we live in today. There are the stories you might expect - the tragic and heroic geniuses of African descent who are oppressed to the point of death, the hillbilly whites who find the easiest path ahead is to sell their souls to the devil in working to destroy their black neighbors, and the elite plantation owners whose complicity with systems of oppression leaves them in constant complacency toward the very people raise their children. But their are so many other and more complex stories here, of black and white characters who do not fit any mold that would make sense in a culture of oppression but who are nonetheless illuminating and very real. There are villains and heroes of unexpected race and motivation who provide a more robust and authentic perspective on what it is really like to live in the midst of such wild depravity. Life and the ways in which men react to the shock of living it are somehow complicated in explanation and easy to comprehend. Gaines shows us the complexities of human responses to lawlessness in a way that rings effortlessly true.
The pseudo-biography is not my favorite literary style. When one attempts to tell a life story, even a real one, it tends to meander without a plot. We live life believing there is a story; in retrospect, life meanders. This book is written well to reflect that, and thus it feels disjointed at times. Jane's voice is authentic and so time is skipped over without much reference to how it is passing. This long series of potent vignettes would have been more enjoyable to me as a collection of short stories or interviews between Jane and a narrator than it is as a single narrative that leaps across time.
Similarly, Jane glosses over characters without developing them. Again, this actually makes the story even more believable as a life reflected upon, but it doesn't make the story more engaging. The book is full of fascinating characters and a few of them are really complex through the implications of the stories told about them, but Jane Pittman's reflections are never intimate ones. Perhaps because of her gruff character or because of the difficulty of her existence or because of the distance of time, she never seems to have been especially soft or intimate toward even the more deep connections she reflects on.
I give Gaines the highest marks for his unflinching explorations of depravity and injustice, his insights into the complexities of living through such times, and his robust, authentic, and diverse characterization of men of all stature and social standing. I didn't love everything about the format, the voice, the timeline, and the narrator, but the illumination and reflection provided are a comfort that creates immediate brotherhood with the author across any divide of race or history.
Jane Pittman tells a life story which can hardly be surpassed, both in length of time lived and in impact of events experienced. She shares distinct memories of plantation slavery and of being freed; of trying to escape the culture she came from and of living on in the darkest corners of rural Louisiana for a hundred years or more; and of endless suffering at the hands of cruel people and finally taking a last stand as a centenarian in the Civil Rights movement. She is a stubborn and tenacious character from birth, someone who someone manages to outlast nearly everyone she has ever known in spite of and perhaps thanks to her own surliness and tenacity.
This book is illuminating and expansive. It expands upon realistic experiences from pivotal periods of upheaval in American history. It details all sorts of personal relationships within and between racial divides and fleshes out every sort of character, in circumstances completely foreign to those we live in today. There are the stories you might expect - the tragic and heroic geniuses of African descent who are oppressed to the point of death, the hillbilly whites who find the easiest path ahead is to sell their souls to the devil in working to destroy their black neighbors, and the elite plantation owners whose complicity with systems of oppression leaves them in constant complacency toward the very people raise their children. But their are so many other and more complex stories here, of black and white characters who do not fit any mold that would make sense in a culture of oppression but who are nonetheless illuminating and very real. There are villains and heroes of unexpected race and motivation who provide a more robust and authentic perspective on what it is really like to live in the midst of such wild depravity. Life and the ways in which men react to the shock of living it are somehow complicated in explanation and easy to comprehend. Gaines shows us the complexities of human responses to lawlessness in a way that rings effortlessly true.
The pseudo-biography is not my favorite literary style. When one attempts to tell a life story, even a real one, it tends to meander without a plot. We live life believing there is a story; in retrospect, life meanders. This book is written well to reflect that, and thus it feels disjointed at times. Jane's voice is authentic and so time is skipped over without much reference to how it is passing. This long series of potent vignettes would have been more enjoyable to me as a collection of short stories or interviews between Jane and a narrator than it is as a single narrative that leaps across time.
Similarly, Jane glosses over characters without developing them. Again, this actually makes the story even more believable as a life reflected upon, but it doesn't make the story more engaging. The book is full of fascinating characters and a few of them are really complex through the implications of the stories told about them, but Jane Pittman's reflections are never intimate ones. Perhaps because of her gruff character or because of the difficulty of her existence or because of the distance of time, she never seems to have been especially soft or intimate toward even the more deep connections she reflects on.
I give Gaines the highest marks for his unflinching explorations of depravity and injustice, his insights into the complexities of living through such times, and his robust, authentic, and diverse characterization of men of all stature and social standing. I didn't love everything about the format, the voice, the timeline, and the narrator, but the illumination and reflection provided are a comfort that creates immediate brotherhood with the author across any divide of race or history.
I’m glad I came into this one knowing that it was a collection of stories gathered by the author of several women in his life or else I would have been so disoriented by the plotting and structure of this book. I’ve read an autobiography or two in my day and this felt more like a collection of local legends, parables, and anecdotes than the singular, streamlined story of one person’s life lived.
I did really enjoy the messages and some of the stories that were in the book but I would have loved them even more if I could feel the titular character in all of them.
I read this as part of my Cecily Tyson read-a-thon and am interested to see how the TV movie compares.
I did really enjoy the messages and some of the stories that were in the book but I would have loved them even more if I could feel the titular character in all of them.
I read this as part of my Cecily Tyson read-a-thon and am interested to see how the TV movie compares.
I'm having a very hard time knowing how to rate this book.
On the pros side:
Miss Jane has a strong voice that truly carries the novel, in the vein of Huckleberry Finn or Cassie Logan.
The concept is a very interesting way to cover a wide swath of Black American history. A very old woman is really the only possible narrator for a story of this scale, and Gaines really captures what that might look like.
It's a masterful imitation of the genre it purports to be - I didn't realize it was fiction until I was almost at the end (oops), in part because it so carefully mimics the sprawling, rambling narrative you would expect in an oral life history.
There were some interesting points for reflection - I was especially interested in how Jane started out as a very spirited and determined young girl,
There wasn't a great depth of emotion in this book (more on that below), even through a lot of extremely distressing events - but there was something in that very numbness that gave a bit of a haunting insight into what the lived experience might actually be like.
And the big con:
It was maybe a little too much in line with an oral history. There were a lot of stories Miss Jane told that were sort of charming if you considered them in the light of an old lady sifting through her memory to decide what this random interviewer wants, but as fiction they just make me wonder why Gaines came up with them in the first place. There were a lot of incidents that really had no impact on the later story, even just as character exposition - often, Jane wasn't even an active player in the stories she told, and many of the characters in these side stories never appeared again. The randomness of the stories, and how quickly it jumps through time (...you have to, when there are 100 years in <300 pages) made it hard to connect emotionally with what was happening, making the constant violence and destruction even more of a slog (but see above for the positive spin on that).
Probably 3-4 stars overall.
On the pros side:
Miss Jane has a strong voice that truly carries the novel, in the vein of Huckleberry Finn or Cassie Logan.
The concept is a very interesting way to cover a wide swath of Black American history. A very old woman is really the only possible narrator for a story of this scale, and Gaines really captures what that might look like.
It's a masterful imitation of the genre it purports to be - I didn't realize it was fiction until I was almost at the end (oops), in part because it so carefully mimics the sprawling, rambling narrative you would expect in an oral life history.
There were some interesting points for reflection - I was especially interested in how Jane started out as a very spirited and determined young girl,
Spoiler
only to be beaten down by the trials of her life and drift into a much more passive role for most of her life, before stepping back into active defiance towards the end of her life.There wasn't a great depth of emotion in this book (more on that below), even through a lot of extremely distressing events - but there was something in that very numbness that gave a bit of a haunting insight into what the lived experience might actually be like.
And the big con:
It was maybe a little too much in line with an oral history. There were a lot of stories Miss Jane told that were sort of charming if you considered them in the light of an old lady sifting through her memory to decide what this random interviewer wants, but as fiction they just make me wonder why Gaines came up with them in the first place. There were a lot of incidents that really had no impact on the later story, even just as character exposition - often, Jane wasn't even an active player in the stories she told, and many of the characters in these side stories never appeared again. The randomness of the stories, and how quickly it jumps through time (...you have to, when there are 100 years in <300 pages) made it hard to connect emotionally with what was happening, making the constant violence and destruction even more of a slog (but see above for the positive spin on that).
Probably 3-4 stars overall.