The person who recommended me the book hates this chapter. But to me, it's a beautiful exercise in painting a picture with words: How can you not want to travel to Cali and roll around in the Salinas fields after reading that?Not at all. The man starts East of Eden with a chapter that does nothing but set up the Salinas Valley. The effect is to cast the rest of the book in a perpetual Magic Hour - everything limned in alpenglow, a soft focus filter over life.
Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.
She, and yeah, I felt what they said at the surface about it being description after description. But at the same time, it still has elements story, minus human characters. It's that and the non-personal chapters of Grapes of Wrath that are what I love about Steinbeck. He manages to tie together individual characters in these settings to the larger culture / population and relate their struggles to those faced by the many.
The opening chapters are among my favorite chapters, the imagery is so descriptive and vivid. As you said, sign me up for a trip through the valley.