A review by documentno_is
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

challenging dark sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

 Baby’s First Socialism / The Saddest Book I've Ever Read

 

I’m ultimately glad I read this, but its obviously for the audience of it’s time. I understand the need to appeal to his largely uninformed audience but the author’s sense of empathy for the working class doesn’t extend much further and is in no way intersectional (the moralizing is very western and very christian with is expected for a Lithuanian man of the time.) 

 

Ch. 26 and on get quite racist in their descriptions and tone, I should have predicted this in even the exotifying way the author spoke of Lithuanians, not even familiar enough with us not to call us slavic but entranced by our “strange” and “foreign” customs. 

 

The whole thing probably could have been a 50 page pamphlet 

 

I also went into this expecting more about Lithuanians in Chicago at the time in a specific way rather than shell characters used to convey an ideology. My own family lived and worked in Chicago in this exact environment so I was curious to know more of what their life was like. 

A good expose on all the ways the capitalist system turns normal hard working people into grifters and manipulators, or kills them in the process. The painstaking detail of all the horrors of reality was a difficult pill to swallow, and Upton refuses to allow his reader to look away from the tragedies that befall Jurgus and his family. No way to win and no way to get out, the wheel just keeps turning. Important literature in a historical sense but we have much better now both for theory and for literature. 

p.s. if you like me are going to consume this novel via audiobook, maybe don't do so if you actually speak Lithuanian because the reader certainly did not.