Sabrana dela 15: Sinovi

Sons (1932) is the second part of The House of Earth — a trilogy that began with the famous novel The Good Earth. The plot continues after the death of Wang Lung, a peasant who rose from poverty to wealth, and follows the fate of his three sons through three decades of social unrest in China.

The youngest son, Wang Tiger, is the main hero. While his older brothers squander their father’s wealth and defy old customs, he becomes a soldier, seeking glory and power in the whirlwind of insurgent wars. Buck devotes the most attention to this character: his story is the story of a man who has rejected the land, but not his father’s desire to create and possess something.

The eldest son, educated and vain, seeks a comfortable bourgeois life; the middle son becomes a petty merchant, stingy and calculating. Each of them bears a different face of the new era — decadence, capital, war — and together they leave their father’s legacy to the winds. The novel is thus a chronicle not of one family, but of China itself in revolutionary turmoil: the old order of land and sons is crumbling under the onslaught of money, weapons, and ideologies.