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Yonnondio: From the Thirties
Yonnondio follows the heartbreaking path of the Holbrook family in the late 1920s and the Great Depression as they move from the coal mines of Wyoming to a tenant farm in western Nebraska, ending up finally on the kill floors of the slaughterhouses and in the wretched neighborhoods of the poor in Omaha, Nebraska. Mazie, the oldest daughter in the growing family of Jim and Anna Holbrook, tells the story of the family's desire for a better life – Anna's dream that her children be educated and Jim's wish for a life lived out in the open, away from the darkness and danger of the mines. At every turn in their journey, however, their dreams are frustrated, and the family is jeopardized by cruel and indifferent systems.
196 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
Tillie Olsen
42 books117 followersTillie Lerner Olsen (January 14, 1912 – January 1, 2007) was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.
Though she published little, Olsen was very influential for her treatment of the lives of women and the poor. She drew attention to why women have been less likely to be published authors (and why they receive less attention than male authors when they do publish). Her work received recognition in the years of much feminist political and social activity. It contributed to new possibilities for women writers. Olsen's influence on American feminist fiction has caused some critics to be frustrated at simplistic feminist interpretations of her work. In particular, several critics have pointed to Olsen's Communist past as contributing to her thought. Olsen's fiction awards, and the ongoing attention to her work, is often focused upon her unique use of language and story form, a form close to poetry in compression and clarity, as well as upon the content.
Reviewing Olsen's life in The New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood attributed Olsen’s relatively small output to her full life as a wife and mother, a “grueling obstacle course” experienced by many writers. Her book Silences “ begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence,” Atwood wrote. “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”
In 1968, Olsen signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
Once her books were published, Olsen became a teacher and writer-in-residence at numerous colleges, such as Amherst College, Stanford University, MIT, and Kenyon College. She was the recipient of nine honorary degrees, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Also among the honors bestowed upon Olsen was the Rea Award for the Short Story, in 1994, for a lifetime of outstanding achievement in the field of short story writing.
Olsen died on January 1, 2007, in Oakland, California.
(from Wikipedia)
Though she published little, Olsen was very influential for her treatment of the lives of women and the poor. She drew attention to why women have been less likely to be published authors (and why they receive less attention than male authors when they do publish). Her work received recognition in the years of much feminist political and social activity. It contributed to new possibilities for women writers. Olsen's influence on American feminist fiction has caused some critics to be frustrated at simplistic feminist interpretations of her work. In particular, several critics have pointed to Olsen's Communist past as contributing to her thought. Olsen's fiction awards, and the ongoing attention to her work, is often focused upon her unique use of language and story form, a form close to poetry in compression and clarity, as well as upon the content.
Reviewing Olsen's life in The New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood attributed Olsen’s relatively small output to her full life as a wife and mother, a “grueling obstacle course” experienced by many writers. Her book Silences “ begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence,” Atwood wrote. “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”
In 1968, Olsen signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
Once her books were published, Olsen became a teacher and writer-in-residence at numerous colleges, such as Amherst College, Stanford University, MIT, and Kenyon College. She was the recipient of nine honorary degrees, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Also among the honors bestowed upon Olsen was the Rea Award for the Short Story, in 1994, for a lifetime of outstanding achievement in the field of short story writing.
Olsen died on January 1, 2007, in Oakland, California.
(from Wikipedia)
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July 11, 2019
Tillie Lerner Olsen (1912-2007) was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, but grew up in Omaha. Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who had been forced to flee from their country. Over the years she worked at numerous odd jobs, but was also a union organizer and political activist who advocated for the rights of women, children, racial minorities, and the working poor. On at least two occasions she was arrested and jailed as a result of her union activities.
As a mother of four daughters and as a result of her activism, her list of published works is a short one. But what she did publish – essays, short stories, one novella, and an unfinished novel – brought her notice, particularly in the academic world.
She received nine honorary doctorates and grants from the Ford and Guggenheim foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. All of this even though she had dropped out of high school at age fifteen.
In 1932, when she was nineteen, she began a novel about a poverty-stricken family attempting to survive first in the coal mining fields of Wyoming, then a year of tenant farming in South Dakota, before settling in Omaha, where the father first worked in the sewers and later in a meatpacking plant.
Because she gave birth to her first daughter at that time and continued her activism, combined with the birth of three more daughters, she never finished the novel. Years later, her husband Jack Olsen, found the manuscript of the incomplete novel, and it was published as an unfinished novel in 1974, under the title Yonnondio: From the Thirties.
Olsen’s original intent was to write a Depression era novel, but she never got that far in the story before she set it aside. Thus, the subtitle causes some confusion, because although the novel reads like a Great Depression story, it is set entirely in the 20s. The subtitle does not refer to the time of the story, but the time in which Olsen had written the story.
"No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the
future:
Yonnondio! Yonnondio! – unlimn’d they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fades – the cities, farms,
factories fade;
A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne
through the air for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost."
from Walt Whitman’s Yonnondio
Yonnondio is the story of the Holbrooks, a poor working-class family in the 1920s. It is only during the year on the tenant farm in South Dakota that the family experienced a shred of happiness or any optimistic hope that their future was brighter than their past. But even there, it was a false hope. They had been warned by a neighbor when they first moved onto the farm:
Unfortunately, he was right.
Coming to the kitchen, she heard her father’s angry voice:
It is a story of unrelenting poverty, but more than that, it is also a story about what poverty does to families. Underlying the story is a subtext in which an economic system that gives them no control over their fate creates a sense of helpless pessimism that causes them to vent their frustrations on each other. And this was in the 20s, a decade of relative prosperity, but one that was not shared by all. But it does make one wonder what she might have had to say about the economic system in the 30s, if the novel had been completed.
The story ends abruptly with a graphic description of the horrible working conditions in the meatpacking plant, one that is remindful of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and is written in a style that brings John Dos Passos to mind.
Tillie Olsen wrote in an afterword:
“Reader, it was not to have ended here, but it is nearly forty years since this book had to be set aside, never to come to completion.
“These pages you have read are all that is deemed publishable of it. Only fragments, rough drafts, outlines, scraps remain – telling what might have been.”
As a mother of four daughters and as a result of her activism, her list of published works is a short one. But what she did publish – essays, short stories, one novella, and an unfinished novel – brought her notice, particularly in the academic world.
She received nine honorary doctorates and grants from the Ford and Guggenheim foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. All of this even though she had dropped out of high school at age fifteen.
In 1932, when she was nineteen, she began a novel about a poverty-stricken family attempting to survive first in the coal mining fields of Wyoming, then a year of tenant farming in South Dakota, before settling in Omaha, where the father first worked in the sewers and later in a meatpacking plant.
Because she gave birth to her first daughter at that time and continued her activism, combined with the birth of three more daughters, she never finished the novel. Years later, her husband Jack Olsen, found the manuscript of the incomplete novel, and it was published as an unfinished novel in 1974, under the title Yonnondio: From the Thirties.
Olsen’s original intent was to write a Depression era novel, but she never got that far in the story before she set it aside. Thus, the subtitle causes some confusion, because although the novel reads like a Great Depression story, it is set entirely in the 20s. The subtitle does not refer to the time of the story, but the time in which Olsen had written the story.
"No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the
future:
Yonnondio! Yonnondio! – unlimn’d they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fades – the cities, farms,
factories fade;
A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne
through the air for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost."
from Walt Whitman’s Yonnondio
Yonnondio is the story of the Holbrooks, a poor working-class family in the 1920s. It is only during the year on the tenant farm in South Dakota that the family experienced a shred of happiness or any optimistic hope that their future was brighter than their past. But even there, it was a false hope. They had been warned by a neighbor when they first moved onto the farm:
“…I tell you, you can’t make a go of it. Tenant farming is the only thing worse than farmin your own. That way you at least got a chance a good year, but tenant farmin, bad or good year, the bank swallows everything up, and keeps you owin ‘em. You’ll see.”
Unfortunately, he was right.
Coming to the kitchen, she heard her father’s angry voice:
“They’re taking all of it, every damn thing. The whole year slaved to nothing. I owe them – some joke if it wasnt so bloody – I owin them after working like a team of mules for a year. They’re wantin the cow and Nellie….The bastards. A whole year – now I’m owin them.”
It is a story of unrelenting poverty, but more than that, it is also a story about what poverty does to families. Underlying the story is a subtext in which an economic system that gives them no control over their fate creates a sense of helpless pessimism that causes them to vent their frustrations on each other. And this was in the 20s, a decade of relative prosperity, but one that was not shared by all. But it does make one wonder what she might have had to say about the economic system in the 30s, if the novel had been completed.
The story ends abruptly with a graphic description of the horrible working conditions in the meatpacking plant, one that is remindful of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and is written in a style that brings John Dos Passos to mind.
Tillie Olsen wrote in an afterword:
“Reader, it was not to have ended here, but it is nearly forty years since this book had to be set aside, never to come to completion.
“These pages you have read are all that is deemed publishable of it. Only fragments, rough drafts, outlines, scraps remain – telling what might have been.”
June 11, 2018
During the beginning of this work, I thought of The Grapes of Wrath. I wondered if Olsen had been able to complete this, if it might’ve been even better than the Steinbeck. Alas, it is unfinished, started when Olsen, author of the wonderful "I Stand Here Ironing”, was only nineteen. She worked on it intermittently over the next four or five years, then stopped writing altogether—for twenty years—due to her raising and supporting her four children. If her life was anything like her protagonist’s, it’s no wonder her writing ceased: there would’ve been no time for writing in the struggle for survival.
The story starts in a coal-mining town. Hoping for better, the family moves to a tenant-farm, a too-brief idyll for the children, one that colors their attitude toward the next move to a meatpacking city. The description of the city and the children’s bewilderment reminded me of the innovative language of John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.
Even unfinished, this work is a testament of the U.S.A. in the 1930s; a witness to the lives, outer and inner, of a family (and communities) stuck in a poverty trap; and to their heartbreaking attempts to find, both without and within, bits of beauty.
The story starts in a coal-mining town. Hoping for better, the family moves to a tenant-farm, a too-brief idyll for the children, one that colors their attitude toward the next move to a meatpacking city. The description of the city and the children’s bewilderment reminded me of the innovative language of John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.
Even unfinished, this work is a testament of the U.S.A. in the 1930s; a witness to the lives, outer and inner, of a family (and communities) stuck in a poverty trap; and to their heartbreaking attempts to find, both without and within, bits of beauty.
January 23, 2018
Probably if I'd read it as a novella, I would have called it the best she's written. If it had been completed that absolutely would have been true. I started it last night, and I stopped after midnight only when it was done.
YONNONDIO: FROM THE THIRTIES is Olsen's only novel, incomplete, and out of print for years. It deserves better. Even in its current state, ending without ending, it is a shocking story of the suffering of people, how great dreams can fall away through no fault of the dreamer. Five stars for not sweetening it or blaming the victims.
(If you have read Big Rock Candy Mountain, Stegnor's ripoff of 19th century women's diaries, you owe it to yourself to read this stunning fragment. I was researching a novel of my own I read every Western memoir and diary I could get my hands on. When reading Stegnor I was shocked to find complete scenes lifted from women's writing. But, of course, that is true of another of his books.)
Olsen started writing in her youth but stopped for decades while raising her children. I teach her story, "I Stand Here Ironing" though only a few students have enough history to appreciate the context of the work or even to understand the pain of the narrator. This "novella" is closer to Upton Sinclair's exposé, The Jungle, than the hero-centered Big Rock. The title is from Walt Whitman. The story is from personal experience and heart.
I am irritated by some reviewers whining about how this book is too sad. If you want a pretty story, there is plenty of gorgeous prose, but no happy story here. If you just want to be entertained or reassured, read something else.
Reviewers, including the one at top, skip South Dakota in mentioning the travels of the family: Wyoming mines, the Dakotas as tenant farmers, then the slaughter houses of Omaha, Nebraska. They work hard and it's never enough.
Olsen is the author of the essential Silences.
YONNONDIO: FROM THE THIRTIES is Olsen's only novel, incomplete, and out of print for years. It deserves better. Even in its current state, ending without ending, it is a shocking story of the suffering of people, how great dreams can fall away through no fault of the dreamer. Five stars for not sweetening it or blaming the victims.
(If you have read Big Rock Candy Mountain, Stegnor's ripoff of 19th century women's diaries, you owe it to yourself to read this stunning fragment. I was researching a novel of my own I read every Western memoir and diary I could get my hands on. When reading Stegnor I was shocked to find complete scenes lifted from women's writing. But, of course, that is true of another of his books.)
Olsen started writing in her youth but stopped for decades while raising her children. I teach her story, "I Stand Here Ironing" though only a few students have enough history to appreciate the context of the work or even to understand the pain of the narrator. This "novella" is closer to Upton Sinclair's exposé, The Jungle, than the hero-centered Big Rock. The title is from Walt Whitman. The story is from personal experience and heart.
I am irritated by some reviewers whining about how this book is too sad. If you want a pretty story, there is plenty of gorgeous prose, but no happy story here. If you just want to be entertained or reassured, read something else.
Reviewers, including the one at top, skip South Dakota in mentioning the travels of the family: Wyoming mines, the Dakotas as tenant farmers, then the slaughter houses of Omaha, Nebraska. They work hard and it's never enough.
Olsen is the author of the essential Silences.
May 13, 2020
Some may be a bit wary of starting a novel they know to be unfinished. In this case, though, the process definitely matters more than the (missing) ending.
Beautifully and poetically written in a narrative that shifts between bouts of stream-of-consciousness and a more regular, omnipotent narration, Yonnondio is a highly evocative little gift to the reader.
Both set and written during the 1930s, it gives insights into poverty during the depression in a way that is untainted by the brushing over and sentimentalism that sometimes accompanies memory.
Partly because the focalization often goes through Mazie, who is 8 or 9 years old, the book opens up a child's perspective that makes it more about emotional experience than reasoned analysis of what happens to the characters. Nevertheless, it remains unsentimental and clearly critical of the conditions endured by workers.
I would recommend this to anyone interested in the 1930s, emotion in narrative, childhood as a field of study, as well as the more obvious socialist and gender themes that come with the plot.
Beautifully and poetically written in a narrative that shifts between bouts of stream-of-consciousness and a more regular, omnipotent narration, Yonnondio is a highly evocative little gift to the reader.
Both set and written during the 1930s, it gives insights into poverty during the depression in a way that is untainted by the brushing over and sentimentalism that sometimes accompanies memory.
Partly because the focalization often goes through Mazie, who is 8 or 9 years old, the book opens up a child's perspective that makes it more about emotional experience than reasoned analysis of what happens to the characters. Nevertheless, it remains unsentimental and clearly critical of the conditions endured by workers.
I would recommend this to anyone interested in the 1930s, emotion in narrative, childhood as a field of study, as well as the more obvious socialist and gender themes that come with the plot.
February 7, 2023
This book........ one of the biggest drags lol. I had to read it for class, so that's certainly the ONLY reason I suffered through it.
Basically, this book was written in the 30s, revisited 40 years later, and compiled into an honestly random depressing book. The family is so unlikeable, and honestly the characters were hard to keep track of which is weird because there's only like 10 of them.. but then towards the end random kids start popping up in town and I had no idea who they were or what the point was. Apparently there was meant to be more of it, but when they put it together in the 70s, they didn't edit it in order to maintain the original feeling.. but at what cost???? Hours of my life that I will never get back??
Basically it's about a family that moves from depressing situation to depressing situation (mining, to farming during the Dust Bowl, to meatpacking) and the family honestly hates each other most of the time and like I get that thats the point but this book is SOOOOO poorly written I could barely stand it. The author uses the word "belly" on almost every page and it's just a bleak book. We deal with poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, postpartum depression, and just general bad vibes.
Idk I'm word vomiting because I'm mad I had to read this and I don't even know what what I'll say in class. It's like maybe let us read a better book??? idk whatever.
Basically, this book was written in the 30s, revisited 40 years later, and compiled into an honestly random depressing book. The family is so unlikeable, and honestly the characters were hard to keep track of which is weird because there's only like 10 of them.. but then towards the end random kids start popping up in town and I had no idea who they were or what the point was. Apparently there was meant to be more of it, but when they put it together in the 70s, they didn't edit it in order to maintain the original feeling.. but at what cost???? Hours of my life that I will never get back??
Basically it's about a family that moves from depressing situation to depressing situation (mining, to farming during the Dust Bowl, to meatpacking) and the family honestly hates each other most of the time and like I get that thats the point but this book is SOOOOO poorly written I could barely stand it. The author uses the word "belly" on almost every page and it's just a bleak book. We deal with poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, postpartum depression, and just general bad vibes.
Idk I'm word vomiting because I'm mad I had to read this and I don't even know what what I'll say in class. It's like maybe let us read a better book??? idk whatever.
Read
March 20, 2024It’s hard to give this a real rating or really distinguish how I ~feel~ or have any valid criticisms. There are some novels, despite the literal content of the words; that their weight holds such a culutural significance it supersedes the ability to “enjoy” reading it. It is no small feat to have crafted a piece of work that encapsulates the intersectionality of ideology in such stagnant times- how class struggle inherently affects all other aspects of one’s life. While the author never actually got to finish writing this novel, I think the ending we’re left with unintentionally comes full circle. To live in poverty is cyclical- each time things get so bad, there is always something to make ease of their situation, and vice versa. You exist to live in the now and take life’s small joys with strife. The writing itself is beautiful in its own way- the ability to mix very blunt truths, descriptions of disgusting bodily functions and smells and scenery, yet to find interwoven pieces of abstract thought through the lens of a child unbeknownst to their own plight. Definitely a really important piece of proletariat literature!
October 20, 2014
God, this book is upsetting. I recommend it to anyone interested in considering connections between families struggling to make it in America's contemporary economic repression/depression and families struggling to get by during the economic repressions/depressions that characterize America's past. While some elements of the Holbrook family's experiences (especially their life in a Midwestern meat-packing city) suggest that the novel's events are set during the Great Depression, other elements suggest an earlier timeframe. Regardless, the novel describes the attempts of the Holbrook family--a hardworking, child-bearing, dream-abandoning Mother, a Father unmanned by his inability to adequately care for his family, and their children, especially the oldest daughter, Mazie, upon whom the third-person narrator is most focused--to live during the hardest of economic times.
Basically, the book testifies to the abject failure of a family to thrive, despite the desperate willingness to work that marks most of its members. It is a short, lyrical, and insightful read--and it will stay with you long after you turn the last page, partly because of its implicit claim that the first casualty of economic disaster is childhood. Knowing that the book is still potentially resonant makes the book a necessity, if not exactly a pleasure.
Basically, the book testifies to the abject failure of a family to thrive, despite the desperate willingness to work that marks most of its members. It is a short, lyrical, and insightful read--and it will stay with you long after you turn the last page, partly because of its implicit claim that the first casualty of economic disaster is childhood. Knowing that the book is still potentially resonant makes the book a necessity, if not exactly a pleasure.
July 24, 2018
This book is a wonderful combination of brutal social realism and imaginative modernism, with a distinctive female voice that is rare in old, working-class novels. The book was written in the 1930s, but, despite the title, it concerns the beleaguered Holbrooke family as they struggle throughout the 1920s, from a Wyoming coal mine to a North Dakota farm to the streets of Chicago's Packingtown. Mazie Holbrooke, age 6 at the beginning, is the center of the novel. She has to watch on in horror as her father struggles for pennies, or drinks himself to stupor, or repents, or beats his wife Anna. Mazie watches too as Anna goes in and out of sanity, stretches budgets, gathers garbage or weeds, and generally tries to keep her and her five children above water. Mazie herself finds refuge in books, of course, but also in dreams and nightmares.
As befits of a modernist novel, we get spare, impressionistic glimpses of all of the family members, but each seems shockingly real, from the sickly and questioning Ben to the callus Willie. The book also summons the otherworldly fire and blackness of a coal mining town, the beauty and brownness of a failing farm, and the filth and stench of Chicago like no book I know. At times, the horror of the book is almost too brutal to take, and the weight of suffering hard to stand. Unlike other social-protest novels, however, that weight does not merely emerge from poverty, but from the hopeless and confusion and fear that are poverty's real handmaidens. It's a painful and wonderful book.
As befits of a modernist novel, we get spare, impressionistic glimpses of all of the family members, but each seems shockingly real, from the sickly and questioning Ben to the callus Willie. The book also summons the otherworldly fire and blackness of a coal mining town, the beauty and brownness of a failing farm, and the filth and stench of Chicago like no book I know. At times, the horror of the book is almost too brutal to take, and the weight of suffering hard to stand. Unlike other social-protest novels, however, that weight does not merely emerge from poverty, but from the hopeless and confusion and fear that are poverty's real handmaidens. It's a painful and wonderful book.
January 15, 2024
This book is written like a fever dream, and often quite literally it is, as there are good chunks where characters are sick with a fever and comprehending life as a splintered dream. This book is quite unique in its writing style and I will be giving it five stars for sure. This is quite artistic and literary, not your pop book writing style. But don’t think that means it won’t draw you in and compel you to read 100 pages in one sitting!
A working class family in the 1920’s to 1930’s Wyoming and Nebraska moves from a mining town, to a farm, to a city. The book follows all family members, and is narrated alternatingly from the daughter Mazie, to Jim the father, to Anna the mother, and follows their life through constant sickness, suffocating environments, relentless labor, despair but also the small moments of beauty and rest, often through nature such as when foraging for dandelion leaves. The book is more about feeling and quotable passages than plot, and this likely due to its complex and unfinished writing and publishing history.
Mazie is a young child, from age 6 to 8 and is narrated as a child thinks, such as “There was something to escape from. The autumn air, sweet with autumn death… Momma’ll hit me for running way thout doin the dishes, she thought, but a hunger and fear pushed her forward.” She deals with the stench and garbage of the city they by dissociating into a fantasy world of still living on the farm. Her interactions with her siblings and neighbors are complex and painful, oscillating between tender sibling and parent moments to taking her frustration out on her brothers with yelling or hitting, and vice versa.
I love this book because it takes the usual background characters of the poor family of current films and books and elevates their everyday struggles to the level of a main drama. This is the key to the genre. There is an incredible section that describes the power dynamics and working conditions of Jim’s job in the city sewers as well as the intense emotional impact of such alienation. I also love how it explores the effects of the Great Depression on a young child and on the mother who works in the house and taking in laundry until she becomes sick and feverish from exhaustion. Yet she continues to be determined to protect her children from disease because of a poster she saw at the health clinic, “Disease… Your Children… Protect… The soap was gone, the water spluttered malevolently at her.” The never-ending exhaustion and tasks and no money to do things with is incredibly relatable even today in drastically different circumstances, while simultaneously being historically specific and a window into the social history of the time. My only negative for the book is the unsatisfying ending and the sometimes difficult-to-follow narration. However, both of these are already stated to be due this book actually not being finished. It wasn’t supposed to end like that, the author said!
I hope every working-class reader (which is most of us, if you are not independently wealthy) reads a book like this at least once in a lifetime. To be shown my own feelings under the horrors of capitalism was a rare, dignifying experience that invoked a fortified determination for solidarity with people in the working class who have been, in history and in the present, worse off than me. And I hope it would be the same for you. If you read this book, please let me know!!
A working class family in the 1920’s to 1930’s Wyoming and Nebraska moves from a mining town, to a farm, to a city. The book follows all family members, and is narrated alternatingly from the daughter Mazie, to Jim the father, to Anna the mother, and follows their life through constant sickness, suffocating environments, relentless labor, despair but also the small moments of beauty and rest, often through nature such as when foraging for dandelion leaves. The book is more about feeling and quotable passages than plot, and this likely due to its complex and unfinished writing and publishing history.
Mazie is a young child, from age 6 to 8 and is narrated as a child thinks, such as “There was something to escape from. The autumn air, sweet with autumn death… Momma’ll hit me for running way thout doin the dishes, she thought, but a hunger and fear pushed her forward.” She deals with the stench and garbage of the city they by dissociating into a fantasy world of still living on the farm. Her interactions with her siblings and neighbors are complex and painful, oscillating between tender sibling and parent moments to taking her frustration out on her brothers with yelling or hitting, and vice versa.
I love this book because it takes the usual background characters of the poor family of current films and books and elevates their everyday struggles to the level of a main drama. This is the key to the genre. There is an incredible section that describes the power dynamics and working conditions of Jim’s job in the city sewers as well as the intense emotional impact of such alienation. I also love how it explores the effects of the Great Depression on a young child and on the mother who works in the house and taking in laundry until she becomes sick and feverish from exhaustion. Yet she continues to be determined to protect her children from disease because of a poster she saw at the health clinic, “Disease… Your Children… Protect… The soap was gone, the water spluttered malevolently at her.” The never-ending exhaustion and tasks and no money to do things with is incredibly relatable even today in drastically different circumstances, while simultaneously being historically specific and a window into the social history of the time. My only negative for the book is the unsatisfying ending and the sometimes difficult-to-follow narration. However, both of these are already stated to be due this book actually not being finished. It wasn’t supposed to end like that, the author said!
I hope every working-class reader (which is most of us, if you are not independently wealthy) reads a book like this at least once in a lifetime. To be shown my own feelings under the horrors of capitalism was a rare, dignifying experience that invoked a fortified determination for solidarity with people in the working class who have been, in history and in the present, worse off than me. And I hope it would be the same for you. If you read this book, please let me know!!
January 23, 2021
This was assigned in my American Lit class last semester, and while I passed that section thanks to Wikipedia, I figured that if I'm paying for the class, I might as well do the reading when I have time. I'm glad I did read it, but can't say it was enjoyable.
Overall, this book was a lot of sad people being sad. Since I knew it was unfinished, I was surprised at how fitting the ending seemed to be. Although I do want to know if the family survives and finds more stability, it seemed apt that this book was just a window into their lives.
Overall, this book was a lot of sad people being sad. Since I knew it was unfinished, I was surprised at how fitting the ending seemed to be. Although I do want to know if the family survives and finds more stability, it seemed apt that this book was just a window into their lives.
February 20, 2010
I read this book way back in high school. As I recall, we were given a list of books to choose from. I chose The Great Gatsby, got bored, switched to Yonnondio, and loved it. In my 20's, I reread The Great Gatsby and absolutely adored it. Now in my 30's, I'm curious how I would compare the two books.
All I can remember about Yonnondio, quite honestly, is that it reminded me of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, though reviews suggest it's even darker than that. I've lost tolerance for dark, having lived quite enough of it. Likewise, I've lost some affinity with Gatsby's idealism. Oh, how very subjective it all is!
All I can remember about Yonnondio, quite honestly, is that it reminded me of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, though reviews suggest it's even darker than that. I've lost tolerance for dark, having lived quite enough of it. Likewise, I've lost some affinity with Gatsby's idealism. Oh, how very subjective it all is!
June 19, 2019
If you took The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle and put them in a blender with a cup of Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness style, you might get a sense of this book. It's beyond bleak, grotesque, horrible, and I can't imagine how it ended up on anyone's high school reading list, except that it gives a picture of what poverty can do and be. A picture of the Great Depression that I won't forget easily. It's a keeper for the poetic nature of its prose alone. But I will need a more uplifting chaser.
January 24, 2010
A gritty depressing look at blue collar life in the 20's and 30's. Beautifully written about the harsh reality of a working class family destined for poverty their entire existence.
The interesting thing is that this novel was pieced together from notes and old writings yet it still is coherently heart wrenching.
Not a heart warming story about overcoming adversity in triumph but a really good read nevertheless.
The interesting thing is that this novel was pieced together from notes and old writings yet it still is coherently heart wrenching.
Not a heart warming story about overcoming adversity in triumph but a really good read nevertheless.
March 2, 2014
Final book I wrote on for my degree. Great exploration of whiteness and class.
January 13, 2019
The saddest book ever... this is the story of a poor family that just got more and more poor. The author's use of imagery helps the reader feel the descriptions of the Earth, the skinny children, the despair of poverty and hopelessness... first, working in the coal tunnels, and the father getting much of his pay in scrip for the company store. Then, tenant farming and the owner taking everything he harvested, yet still he owes...on to the slaughterhouse work he considers himself lucky to get. The air in the town is so stifling from the slaughterhouse and Benjy has asthma and can't breathe.... Things get worse and worse, and the story remains unfinished, but the reader can imagine the ragged end of this family, during the depression that beat them further and further down.
September 20, 2019
Written in fragments: both a novel and an expose of life during the depression. The pages devoted to working in a meatpacking factory in August heat of over one hundred degrees is a worthy addendum to Sinclair's The Jungle. The tragic characters are poverty stricken throughout with no hope of improving their lot. A bleak and an honest portrayal of difficult lives.
March 17, 2020
2*
I am not a big fan of the stream-of-consciousness writing, but the fact that Olson decided to publish something she wrote in her 20s when she was in her 60s makes this a little better
I am not a big fan of the stream-of-consciousness writing, but the fact that Olson decided to publish something she wrote in her 20s when she was in her 60s makes this a little better
June 28, 2021
Depressing story and tiresomely affected writing style.
August 6, 2023
Какая страшная безысходность.
June 26, 2021
Can't really recommend this one too much. You'd probably have to be an Olsen completist or really in to early 20th century Western writing. In content, I enjoyed Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain much more. In style, its has a lot of the Modernist earmarks that were popular in the 30's, think "Call it Sleep."
Its an unfinished novel that she started when she was 19 years old and then rediscovered 40 years later. It tracks the Holbrook family from a Wyoming mining town to a Great Plain farm to the meat-packing slums of Omaha in the 1920s. The narrative is stongly anti-capitalist in the manner of the earlier muckrakers but written in the more modern style.
Not a waste of time, it has some earnest memorable parts.
Its an unfinished novel that she started when she was 19 years old and then rediscovered 40 years later. It tracks the Holbrook family from a Wyoming mining town to a Great Plain farm to the meat-packing slums of Omaha in the 1920s. The narrative is stongly anti-capitalist in the manner of the earlier muckrakers but written in the more modern style.
Not a waste of time, it has some earnest memorable parts.
January 1, 2019
Always reading this one. It's too good to put down for very long.
Tillie Olsen was, above all else, a master of layers who could embody not only the "stratified voices" of society, but could then highlight the importance of understanding the leverage that certain voices (that of the "conjurer" and his "spell") exert upon the voices of the dead and disenfranchised.
Beyond that, Olsen demonstrates the importance of figurative seeing, which allows Mazie to apprehend the complex relations that undergird the "literal" surfaces of things. In Mazie, one finds a "readerly" protagonist whose intuitive, imaginative vision unmasks voices unheard, and sedimented relations unseen.
Tillie Olsen was, above all else, a master of layers who could embody not only the "stratified voices" of society, but could then highlight the importance of understanding the leverage that certain voices (that of the "conjurer" and his "spell") exert upon the voices of the dead and disenfranchised.
Beyond that, Olsen demonstrates the importance of figurative seeing, which allows Mazie to apprehend the complex relations that undergird the "literal" surfaces of things. In Mazie, one finds a "readerly" protagonist whose intuitive, imaginative vision unmasks voices unheard, and sedimented relations unseen.
January 25, 2021
A world whose earth is splitting beneath its workers' feet, a sun blistering backs, the of industrialism ceaselessly in motion. And amidst the depressive, yet achingly beautiful, landscape of 1930s American Midwest, a mother and her family persisting, toiling, hungering. Olsen describes both the domestic and industrial with such sharpness; the home and the kill floor of the local meatpacking plant are both sites of struggle, ruin and resistance. And the cover of this reprint, gosh. How is it that my favourite Dorothea Lange photograph heads this book of my dreams?!
June 30, 2022
I loved this book its depressing but the story, the characters and the tone you can't tear you attention away. It revolve around a family in the midst of war, you get to know their ambition, dreams, hope and struggle in poverty. The fact the author didn't get to finish the story and a lot of people piece these together with the notes she just left speaks volume of what could have happened if she got to finish the story will the end be satisfying or the story is intriguing because it hangs midsentence? I guess, will never know :)
October 29, 2017
Moving and melancholic. I felt like I was there with the Holbrooks, living in poverty, living in hopelessness and pain. I could feel every wrath inflicted upon Anna, on Mazie, on the rest of the children. Olsen's prose is surreal, it opens my eyes to another way of living in another time of different hopes and fears.
May 21, 2013
una famiglia americana durante la depressione, la miseria, la lotta per la sopravvivenza quotidiana, la vita dura che non regala nulla e anzi molto toglie. un inglese difficile e gergale, adatto alla storia- un piccolo grande libro da tradurre assolutamente.
February 19, 2011
Wonderfully written; tragic, yet beautiful. I loved the way this book was put together, despite the fact that it is unfinished. Olsen seems to be drawing from poetical histories as well as socio-political influences in this rich narrative.
January 18, 2021
Having skimmed the reviews already posted here, I see they appropriately emphasize the bleak, pessimistic aspect of the novel. The Holbrook family’s struggle against abject poverty appears doomed to fail. But poignancy is added by the point of view of Jim and Anna’s daughter Mazie, who is only six years old at the beginning, and ten in the final fragments.
Mazie shares in the deprivation of her parents’ lives, but doesn’t understand its causes enough to feel the sting of humiliation and shame that go along with poverty in the U.S. Moreover, she is an unusually curious child, who wonders, questions, and speculates. An important early influence is Old Man Caldwell, the “pioneer” she meets during the family’s time in South Dakota. One evening he finds her lying in the grass by the roadside looking at the night sky:
"'Stars,' she began, 'what are they now? Splinters offn the moon I’ve heard it said. But more likely they’re lamps in houses up there, or flowers growin in the night. I’d like to smell the smell that would be comin offn those flowers.'
"He raised up on his elbow, staring at her. Then said, 'Stars are suns. Like our sun. But so far away – so may miles no one can imagine – they look tiny.'" (32-33)
Mazie visits Caldwell on his deathbed, and he tells her: “'Splinters of the moon, you said. Or maybe flowers in the night. Keep that wondering, Mazie, but try to know. Build on the knowing with the wondering, Mazie…'” (37). Such knowledge, we are invited to believe, could be the key to her liberation from living hand-to-mouth. To help her follow his advice, Caldwell has some of his books sent to her when he dies, but her father sells them for fifty cents. We readers thus view Mazie as capable of transcending her circumstances, only to have our hopes cruelly dashed. On the one hand, her innocence balances out the bleakness, softens it for us. On the other, the potential we see in her makes the economic oppression to which her family is subjected that much more tragic. We are placed in a position of sympathetic witnesses, our indignation sparked not only at the abject condition of the Holbrook family, but especially by the injustice of Mazie’s being unable to realize the potential we see in her, which Caldwell also saw, but few around her do.
In this context, "Yonnondio" has a place in a broader category of books than the Depression-era fiction in which most reviewers here have pigeonholed it. I refer to works of fiction that use the child’s point of view on the adult world to defamiliarize it, pushing readers to question, as Mazie’s brother Ben puts it in one of the fragments added later: “Why’s things like they are? Why?” (144). The earliest such book I can think of that does this is the 16th-century picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes," and of course there are many post-Romantic novels that do, such as several by Dickens and Mark Twain, or, later, "The Catcher in the Rye." I want to end this review, though, by mentioning two books that seem to me very close to "Yonnondio" in their use of the child’s perspective, both classics of Chicano literature: "Bless Me, Ultima" and "…Y no se lo tragó la tierra." Perhaps there are significant links between proletarian fiction and Chicano literature that have yet to be explored. Perhaps that would be a way also of interpreting the title Tillie Olsen chose for her novel, an Iriquois word for “lament,” taken from a poem by Walt Whitman evoking the Native Americans who freely roamed these plains before the “cities, farms, and factories” were built, where white peasants suffer and die, victims of the very system of exploitation European colonizers brought here.
Mazie shares in the deprivation of her parents’ lives, but doesn’t understand its causes enough to feel the sting of humiliation and shame that go along with poverty in the U.S. Moreover, she is an unusually curious child, who wonders, questions, and speculates. An important early influence is Old Man Caldwell, the “pioneer” she meets during the family’s time in South Dakota. One evening he finds her lying in the grass by the roadside looking at the night sky:
"'Stars,' she began, 'what are they now? Splinters offn the moon I’ve heard it said. But more likely they’re lamps in houses up there, or flowers growin in the night. I’d like to smell the smell that would be comin offn those flowers.'
"He raised up on his elbow, staring at her. Then said, 'Stars are suns. Like our sun. But so far away – so may miles no one can imagine – they look tiny.'" (32-33)
Mazie visits Caldwell on his deathbed, and he tells her: “'Splinters of the moon, you said. Or maybe flowers in the night. Keep that wondering, Mazie, but try to know. Build on the knowing with the wondering, Mazie…'” (37). Such knowledge, we are invited to believe, could be the key to her liberation from living hand-to-mouth. To help her follow his advice, Caldwell has some of his books sent to her when he dies, but her father sells them for fifty cents. We readers thus view Mazie as capable of transcending her circumstances, only to have our hopes cruelly dashed. On the one hand, her innocence balances out the bleakness, softens it for us. On the other, the potential we see in her makes the economic oppression to which her family is subjected that much more tragic. We are placed in a position of sympathetic witnesses, our indignation sparked not only at the abject condition of the Holbrook family, but especially by the injustice of Mazie’s being unable to realize the potential we see in her, which Caldwell also saw, but few around her do.
In this context, "Yonnondio" has a place in a broader category of books than the Depression-era fiction in which most reviewers here have pigeonholed it. I refer to works of fiction that use the child’s point of view on the adult world to defamiliarize it, pushing readers to question, as Mazie’s brother Ben puts it in one of the fragments added later: “Why’s things like they are? Why?” (144). The earliest such book I can think of that does this is the 16th-century picaresque novel "Lazarillo de Tormes," and of course there are many post-Romantic novels that do, such as several by Dickens and Mark Twain, or, later, "The Catcher in the Rye." I want to end this review, though, by mentioning two books that seem to me very close to "Yonnondio" in their use of the child’s perspective, both classics of Chicano literature: "Bless Me, Ultima" and "…Y no se lo tragó la tierra." Perhaps there are significant links between proletarian fiction and Chicano literature that have yet to be explored. Perhaps that would be a way also of interpreting the title Tillie Olsen chose for her novel, an Iriquois word for “lament,” taken from a poem by Walt Whitman evoking the Native Americans who freely roamed these plains before the “cities, farms, and factories” were built, where white peasants suffer and die, victims of the very system of exploitation European colonizers brought here.
April 23, 2022
Tillie Olsen's book Yonnondio reads almost like an elegy. The poetic vein is undeniable. It is the story about the Hollbrook family in the late 1920's and the Great Depression. They move from the coal mines of Wyoming to a farm in Nebraska. From there they go to the slaughterhouses, where they live in a poor neighbourhood. Jim and Anna have five children, who seem to spend their lives being hungry. Jim vacillates between being brutal towards his family, and trying desperately to earn money for a better life. Anna vacillates between being pregnant, caring for the children or letting them go uncared for. Most of story is seen through the eyes of the eldest girl, Mazie.
We are not told why the farm in Nebraska was not a success, just that the family does not have enough to eat, a situation that does not change when they move to Omaha, Nebraska.
The tone of the story is very depressing, there is no indication that the family or any of its members will ever get out of the rut, despite the fact that Anna wants her children to go to school so that they may make more out of their lives.
There is very little explanation for the reason for their failure and hopelessness, except that we know that the story takes place during the Great Depression. They just seem to drift from one failure to another, the author does not expound the reasons or look into the politics and social situations of that time.
Olsen's language is strong and without any illusions. But there is nothing in the book that expresses any hope that things could become better. A bleak, dismal story.
We are not told why the farm in Nebraska was not a success, just that the family does not have enough to eat, a situation that does not change when they move to Omaha, Nebraska.
The tone of the story is very depressing, there is no indication that the family or any of its members will ever get out of the rut, despite the fact that Anna wants her children to go to school so that they may make more out of their lives.
There is very little explanation for the reason for their failure and hopelessness, except that we know that the story takes place during the Great Depression. They just seem to drift from one failure to another, the author does not expound the reasons or look into the politics and social situations of that time.
Olsen's language is strong and without any illusions. But there is nothing in the book that expresses any hope that things could become better. A bleak, dismal story.
November 15, 2021
An unfinished novel, written by Olsen in her 20s but not published until she was into her 60s following a chance rediscovery of the manuscript. This is a remarkable work of fiction, even if incomplete. Not only is the quality of writing sublime, exploratory, experimental (I had to keep pinching myself that she wrote this as a young woman nearly ninety years ago) but the story of a working class family trying to escape poverty during the depression is just sheer horror. Olsen’s depiction of surviving in a world of work where death, disfigurement and injury is routine, for a wage that can’t even sustain a family is brutal; never melodramatic. Traversing America to swap one deadly job for another offers no respite. If the daily fight for survival to provide basics for your family is relentless, coping with the constantly hostile environments, be it the brutal cold or smothering heat is reason enough to suck the lifeblood from you. There is magic in Olsen’s writing though, that makes this story burn oh-so-bright. Her language isn’t easy to dip into. Not that it’s dense, but just so damned well crafted it’s poetry posing as prose. You need to wade into her words and let them soak, a book one could read again and again and discover something anew with each reading. More than anything, this has to be one of the greatest accounts of working class life out there. Sheer class.
April 22, 2023
i should've known what i was getting into, and i almost had an idea of what to expect, but it was somehow so much more heart-wrenching n dizzying than i could've ever prepared for (in the best way possible). reading this after olsen's "i want you women up north to know" there r so many of her poetic tendencies that make their way into the book nd lend it a beauty despite? because of? the suffering at its heart. it was just going to be impossible for me to make it out without leaving a bit of myself with them...from chapter five on i was just in awe at how much pain we are capable of inflicting upon one another(i knew we were, really, but seeing it happening again and again wearing down on the character's makes it more visceral), how easily scorn builds when life isn't worth living but you have to anyway..so so good i can't explain how much anna and mazie affected me. almost glad the book wasn't completed because i don't think i could take seeing them endure any more, but i wish i could see them not having to endure (on the page).
it's me vs proletarian literature and between this n the bits of rukeyser's book of the dead i read... i'm losing
it's me vs proletarian literature and between this n the bits of rukeyser's book of the dead i read... i'm losing
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