Book Review: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

Everyone's heard of Shakespeare. Like really. He has basically become a household name. But what many don't know is that Shakespeare has started a trend once his works were widely circulated. The trend is of adaptations.

Shakespeare's plays are very universal in nature. Basic human emotions, motives, situations; typical archetypes and motifs. And the later generation took great advantage of this fact by appropriating Shakespeare in their own works, culture and methods.

That's what A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is. It's an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, a play of power, family dynamics and inheritance. But Smiley has put an interesting twist to the tale.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

A Thousand Acres is set in a fictional town of Zebulon County in America. It's a farming community with acres of farms and people with farming mindset. The narrator is Ginny Cook, the eldest daughter of the owner of the largest farm in Zebulon County, Larry Cook. She, along with her sister Rose Cook take care of their father and their own respective families. The youngest daughter Caroline Cook is a lawyer in a nearby city.

Rose had suffered from cancer in the past and is currently in remission. Ginny has had 3 miscarriages and they do in hindsight believe it could be because of the polluted and poisoned farmland.

As the story goes forward, Larry Cook decides on dividing the farm, a thousand acres, between his 3 daughters to evade death and inheritance tax when time comes. Caroline is the only one who shows skepticism and she's impulsively thrown out of the inheritance by Larry.

As time goes forward, Ginny, Rose and their husbands make big changes to the farm and decide on new technologies to use- something which irks Larry as he seems to be at a loss in both authority and decision making. Please note that even thought it's America, ti was still a rural community and the oldest man used to be the head of the family.

Later on in the novel, Larry goes crazy due to the lack of authority and abuses and sues Ginny and Rose to take his farm back with the help of Caroline, all to no avail. However, differences between the 2 sisters also arise when both of them fall for the same guy- Jess Clark- a misfit in the town and the one who's unpredictable and impulsive himself.

It is a wonderful and thought-provoking novel which deals with the concepts of feminism (since the story is told by and from a female perspective), a dysfunctional family with secrets, repressed events, inheritance issues, patriarchy and loss of autonomy and of course with the unique way Shakespeare's play had been molded into one to fit both a feminist as well as an American society.

Bonus: There's also a movie made on this book! It's true to the story but still, unless you knew the whole story, especially the internal dialogues of the narrator, it falls a little behind.

Until next time!!