Tortilla Flat

I met my nephew at a station the other day and dipped into my suitcase for the book I'd just finished. We sit on different poles of the political spectrum (he was jetting off to a forum of right-wing thinktanks) but the wonders of great books reach everybody. He's now in America reading John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat.
Working through Steinbeck's letters some years ago I found him sitting on a hillside in the dark (his electricity had been cut off), with his wife and surrounded by dogs, demanding that his publisher return his latest novel so he could destroy it. He had decided it was not true ... he hadn't let the characters be themselves but instead had steered them toward his own didactic aims. He was poor, but returned the advance and burned the book.
Tortilla Flat is a wry gem, as true to its characters as a book can get. Steinbeck sets up this tale of several paesanos in a house above Monterrey to be a modern court of Camelot. The men are wastrels, happy to sacrifice most anything for a gallon of wine, but friendship is an absolute. The book is brief, the writing taut and often comic, and it's the greatest celebration of community I've read since Charles Mungoshi's Waiting for the Rain. It surprised me to tears at its close, sitting on a train as the levels of Belgium streaked past outside.