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delphinaris's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
annalisenak97's review against another edition
4.0
I have never really read Flannery O'Connor before. I found her work extremely engaging but also very, very weird. Every character she writes is a total enigma, which I think is one of the most fascinating things about her writing. I loved the short stories in this collection but found the novellas kind of disturbing. Her assertions on faith through these works was FASCINATING but I also feel like I had no idea what was going on. After reading this I get the feeling like I've looked at a piece of modern art for a long time but still don't really understand it.
amittaizero's review against another edition
5.0
I checked this book out from the library of the college where I teach. I'd read [b:Wise Blood|48467|Wise Blood|Flannery O'Connor|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389629799s/48467.jpg|1046530] earlier in the year, or perhaps last year.
O'Connor is Southern without the kitsch. She is dark, smirking, haunted, and almost unbearably subtropical. Reading O'Connor during the apex of a Southern summer is almost like getting into a hot tub on a humid day: chest crushing.
There's nothing saccharine about O'Connor's work (a feature of some Southern lit) but there's nothing exaggerated either. She seems to write what she knows either by direct experience or observation.
Poet [a:Maxine Kumin|78739|Maxine Kumin|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1273603680p2/78739.jpg] writes about visiting O'Connor's family home in Georgia (years after O'Connor's death). Kumin, a New Englander, admits: "What can an outsider know, except/the shell of things?"
"The shell of things" is what typifies most Southern lit, especially the contemporary. There's a tendency to continually want to revisit/romanticize the South of the sharecropper, the slave, the War, the tragic mulatto, the help.
O'Connor, along with [a:James Agee|29611|James Agee|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1257464997p2/29611.jpg], [a:William Faulkner|3535|William Faulkner|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1437805575p2/3535.jpg], [a:Dorothy Allison|5599|Dorothy Allison|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1203572721p2/5599.jpg], [a:C.D. Wright|80899|C.D. Wright|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1199452786p2/80899.jpg], [a:Randall Kenan|10524|Randall Kenan|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1186528437p2/10524.jpg], [a:Alice Walker|7380|Alice Walker|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1406752585p2/7380.jpg], and others, can be an antidote of sorts.
O'Connor is Southern without the kitsch. She is dark, smirking, haunted, and almost unbearably subtropical. Reading O'Connor during the apex of a Southern summer is almost like getting into a hot tub on a humid day: chest crushing.
There's nothing saccharine about O'Connor's work (a feature of some Southern lit) but there's nothing exaggerated either. She seems to write what she knows either by direct experience or observation.
Poet [a:Maxine Kumin|78739|Maxine Kumin|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1273603680p2/78739.jpg] writes about visiting O'Connor's family home in Georgia (years after O'Connor's death). Kumin, a New Englander, admits: "What can an outsider know, except/the shell of things?"
"The shell of things" is what typifies most Southern lit, especially the contemporary. There's a tendency to continually want to revisit/romanticize the South of the sharecropper, the slave, the War, the tragic mulatto, the help.
O'Connor, along with [a:James Agee|29611|James Agee|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1257464997p2/29611.jpg], [a:William Faulkner|3535|William Faulkner|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1437805575p2/3535.jpg], [a:Dorothy Allison|5599|Dorothy Allison|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1203572721p2/5599.jpg], [a:C.D. Wright|80899|C.D. Wright|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1199452786p2/80899.jpg], [a:Randall Kenan|10524|Randall Kenan|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1186528437p2/10524.jpg], [a:Alice Walker|7380|Alice Walker|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1406752585p2/7380.jpg], and others, can be an antidote of sorts.
snazel's review against another edition
4.0
A very memorable book. I've been trying to summarize it in my head, and that's all I've come up with. Very, very memorable.
When I started reading Wise Blood, the first of three books in one, I didn't like. I was just feeling stubborn though, so I set myself to reading a chapter at a time. By the end of the story, I was starting to pick it up voluntarily. But I still didn't like it. Moving through A Good Man Is Hard To Find, I sometimes read more than one story at a sitting- but I still didn't like it. Today I huddled up on the couch and read The Violent Bear It Away in one sitting. And I still don't like it.
This wasn't an easy book to read. Wise Blood made my skin crawl. I was reading through A Good Man Is Hard To Find with physical revulsion and fear, dreading the sting in the tail of each story. The Violent Bear It Away I read in one sitting, because it had me mesmerized. In the original sense of the word. As in, "the snake mesmerized the small bird before it devoured it alive." It wasn't a pleasant read, at all.
Despite all this, however, I found it mind-blowingly good. There is no doubt in my mind that Ms. O'Conner is an incredibly gifted writer, and these stories are all little masterworks. So, so good. Dreadful, terrifying, awful and not for the faint of heart, but also incredible! You should read it. ;)
When I started reading Wise Blood, the first of three books in one, I didn't like. I was just feeling stubborn though, so I set myself to reading a chapter at a time. By the end of the story, I was starting to pick it up voluntarily. But I still didn't like it. Moving through A Good Man Is Hard To Find, I sometimes read more than one story at a sitting- but I still didn't like it. Today I huddled up on the couch and read The Violent Bear It Away in one sitting. And I still don't like it.
This wasn't an easy book to read. Wise Blood made my skin crawl. I was reading through A Good Man Is Hard To Find with physical revulsion and fear, dreading the sting in the tail of each story. The Violent Bear It Away I read in one sitting, because it had me mesmerized. In the original sense of the word. As in, "the snake mesmerized the small bird before it devoured it alive." It wasn't a pleasant read, at all.
Despite all this, however, I found it mind-blowingly good. There is no doubt in my mind that Ms. O'Conner is an incredibly gifted writer, and these stories are all little masterworks. So, so good. Dreadful, terrifying, awful and not for the faint of heart, but also incredible! You should read it. ;)
bjr2022's review against another edition
4.0
I've had this Signet paperback (pub. 1964) on my bookshelf for decades. I'd read parts of it many years ago, and, in a minute, I'll get to why I recently decided to read the whole book.
The anthology is in three parts: a novel (Wise Blood), a collection of short stories and a novella ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find"), and another novel (The Violent Bear It Away). Since I couldn't remember what I'd previously read, I went from back to front in the hope of sampling the new material first.
Part 3. I was brought up with no religion and in some ways I think that has sensitized me to fundamentalism in many forms—not only religious, but political (including progressive fundamentalism). Fundamentalism is characterized by somebody's absolute certainty that their belief is the only true one and anybody who does not agree is wrong, misguided, an idiot. In The Violent Bear It Away, O'Connor painfully evokes the feeling of being torn to bits by warring sides, of being a confused and helpless angry child without the wherewithal to deal with this level of extremes. O'Connor was Christian and deals with Christian fundamentalism, but the pain transcends the particular story. Reading through all the Scriptural references was a slog for me, since this is not my natural territory, but ultimately I found myself riveted by the basic human drama: a child torn apart by warring adults, and everybody is nuts. I can relate … Unless I completely missed the point and the great-uncle prophet who creates a murdering boy prophet is supposed to be sane. This was the most difficult (unenjoyable) section of the anthology—not easy reading.
Part 2. The short stories and novella ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find") are simultaneously painful, exhausting, and glorious. The writing is exquisite, the normality of rural Southern racism is excruciating, and reading story after story that exposes the worst of humanity is exhausting. One story in a magazine would have been a better way to encounter this work, but I'm glad to have had access to everything in one collection. I feel like O'Connor's student; there are no clichés and every narrative description comes from her idiosyncratic and formidable powers of observation. O'Connor is not a person to copy, but she is a model for finding your own way of observing and reporting on the world.
Part 3. Wise Blood is a Southern-gothic kind of Keystone Kops of insane true believers: Hazel Motes, the protagonist who espouses a Church Without Christ, and his many antagonists. In the opening note to the story, O'Connor describes it as a "comic novel about a Christian malgré lui." She confirms that one must understand that "belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death" and that Hazel Motes, an obsessed prophet who murders people, has an integrity that "lies in his not being able to" deny the Christ that his preaching denies. Yes, the novel is sometimes comic, but the story ends so darkly that I think it could only be perceived as positive by a Christian whose belief in Jesus's divinity is so important that it invalidates the value of life, compassion, and mortal kindness.
I decided to read and reread this anthology now because I believe Flannery O'Connor's work sets a precedent for my own. When I was looking for writers to blurb my novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, I found that there really were no current female writers writing comic and grotesque characters. (Please correct me if I'm wrong; I'd appreciate knowing of any.) If O'Connor were still alive, I'd have begged her for a blurb, but instead I've quoted her sage explanation about why she wrote what she wrote. In The Fiction Writer and His Country, O'Connor says:
I would never define myself as a Christian (or any other religion), but I feel that my protagonist Zelda McFigg’s perhaps grotesque character is my attempt to shout about (and learn from) the deeper concerns in this novel: the insanity of some of the distortions of our American Dream—a zero-sum culture where you’re either right or wrong, good or bad, etc., and dependent on those dualities, you win or lose. In my opinion, the antidote is the sane vision of nonduality (that we are simultaneously right and wrong, good and bad), or compassion—which can hold the fact that we—all of us—are both love and hate; one does not wipe out the other. And it's the compassion for our human condition that makes the whole thing bearable.
But that leads to my problem with O'Connor's work. Yes, it is sometimes humorous, but pain and oblivious cruelty rule, the characters learn nothing from it, and she leaves us with such bleakness (not quite as bad as what I've privately labeled the "Bleak School of Literary Book Writing"), that I often found myself confounded by the point of it all. It's an odd thing to both admire and dread a writer's work. So there I am again, in that awkward but true nonduality of opposites.
The anthology is in three parts: a novel (Wise Blood), a collection of short stories and a novella ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find"), and another novel (The Violent Bear It Away). Since I couldn't remember what I'd previously read, I went from back to front in the hope of sampling the new material first.
Part 3. I was brought up with no religion and in some ways I think that has sensitized me to fundamentalism in many forms—not only religious, but political (including progressive fundamentalism). Fundamentalism is characterized by somebody's absolute certainty that their belief is the only true one and anybody who does not agree is wrong, misguided, an idiot. In The Violent Bear It Away, O'Connor painfully evokes the feeling of being torn to bits by warring sides, of being a confused and helpless angry child without the wherewithal to deal with this level of extremes. O'Connor was Christian and deals with Christian fundamentalism, but the pain transcends the particular story. Reading through all the Scriptural references was a slog for me, since this is not my natural territory, but ultimately I found myself riveted by the basic human drama: a child torn apart by warring adults, and everybody is nuts. I can relate … Unless I completely missed the point and the great-uncle prophet who creates a murdering boy prophet is supposed to be sane. This was the most difficult (unenjoyable) section of the anthology—not easy reading.
Part 2. The short stories and novella ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find") are simultaneously painful, exhausting, and glorious. The writing is exquisite, the normality of rural Southern racism is excruciating, and reading story after story that exposes the worst of humanity is exhausting. One story in a magazine would have been a better way to encounter this work, but I'm glad to have had access to everything in one collection. I feel like O'Connor's student; there are no clichés and every narrative description comes from her idiosyncratic and formidable powers of observation. O'Connor is not a person to copy, but she is a model for finding your own way of observing and reporting on the world.
Part 3. Wise Blood is a Southern-gothic kind of Keystone Kops of insane true believers: Hazel Motes, the protagonist who espouses a Church Without Christ, and his many antagonists. In the opening note to the story, O'Connor describes it as a "comic novel about a Christian malgré lui." She confirms that one must understand that "belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death" and that Hazel Motes, an obsessed prophet who murders people, has an integrity that "lies in his not being able to" deny the Christ that his preaching denies. Yes, the novel is sometimes comic, but the story ends so darkly that I think it could only be perceived as positive by a Christian whose belief in Jesus's divinity is so important that it invalidates the value of life, compassion, and mortal kindness.
I decided to read and reread this anthology now because I believe Flannery O'Connor's work sets a precedent for my own. When I was looking for writers to blurb my novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, I found that there really were no current female writers writing comic and grotesque characters. (Please correct me if I'm wrong; I'd appreciate knowing of any.) If O'Connor were still alive, I'd have begged her for a blurb, but instead I've quoted her sage explanation about why she wrote what she wrote. In The Fiction Writer and His Country, O'Connor says:
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
I would never define myself as a Christian (or any other religion), but I feel that my protagonist Zelda McFigg’s perhaps grotesque character is my attempt to shout about (and learn from) the deeper concerns in this novel: the insanity of some of the distortions of our American Dream—a zero-sum culture where you’re either right or wrong, good or bad, etc., and dependent on those dualities, you win or lose. In my opinion, the antidote is the sane vision of nonduality (that we are simultaneously right and wrong, good and bad), or compassion—which can hold the fact that we—all of us—are both love and hate; one does not wipe out the other. And it's the compassion for our human condition that makes the whole thing bearable.
But that leads to my problem with O'Connor's work. Yes, it is sometimes humorous, but pain and oblivious cruelty rule, the characters learn nothing from it, and she leaves us with such bleakness (not quite as bad as what I've privately labeled the "Bleak School of Literary Book Writing"), that I often found myself confounded by the point of it all. It's an odd thing to both admire and dread a writer's work. So there I am again, in that awkward but true nonduality of opposites.
jnepal's review
5.0
This was my introduction to Flannery O'Connor. I was impressed and delighted. However, if you do not or are unable to appreciate the morbid side of life then you will not enjoy her writing. She did not write about the darkness for the thrill of it, that would be gross, she wrote morbid tales to awaken us to the light. To appreciate her writing we must understand her motivation.
Wise Blood was a story about a man obsessed with God, with Jesus Christ, and no matter how he consciously attempted to kill God in his mind Mr. Motes could not dispel the reality of Jesus Christ in his soul. Eventually Hazel Motes blinds himself as a last act to try to purge himself of his inability to escape the image of the Christ. Hazel's landlady near the end of the story says to him in reference to a restaurant, "You'll pick up an infection. No sane person eats there. A dark and filthy place. Encrusted! It's you that can't see Mr. Motes." He could see, but he did not want to see. Ultimately, then, Hazel really was blind even though he saw.
The next novel was The Violent Bear it Away. Three generations of men reject Christ. Each one rejects Christ, but all take different paths. Once again the focus on Christ manifests the need the characters had for Christ, for the true Christ. But they bore it away because they rejected Him, they were unable to reject Christ peacefully.
The rest of the book contained a compilation of some of O'Connor's short stories. Two scenes from two of these stories jumped out to me. One was a scene in which a widowed middle-aged woman who owned a farm was gored to death by a bull, at which point she finally saw the light, finally saw how she should have lived her life as she was being pierced by the horns of the bull. The other was about a 14 year old boy, homeless and deviant, who was taken in by an atheist welfare worker. At dinner the boy stands up with a Bible in his hands and begins to tear out pages of paper and eating them saying, "I've eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth!"
Wise Blood was a story about a man obsessed with God, with Jesus Christ, and no matter how he consciously attempted to kill God in his mind Mr. Motes could not dispel the reality of Jesus Christ in his soul. Eventually Hazel Motes blinds himself as a last act to try to purge himself of his inability to escape the image of the Christ. Hazel's landlady near the end of the story says to him in reference to a restaurant, "You'll pick up an infection. No sane person eats there. A dark and filthy place. Encrusted! It's you that can't see Mr. Motes." He could see, but he did not want to see. Ultimately, then, Hazel really was blind even though he saw.
The next novel was The Violent Bear it Away. Three generations of men reject Christ. Each one rejects Christ, but all take different paths. Once again the focus on Christ manifests the need the characters had for Christ, for the true Christ. But they bore it away because they rejected Him, they were unable to reject Christ peacefully.
The rest of the book contained a compilation of some of O'Connor's short stories. Two scenes from two of these stories jumped out to me. One was a scene in which a widowed middle-aged woman who owned a farm was gored to death by a bull, at which point she finally saw the light, finally saw how she should have lived her life as she was being pierced by the horns of the bull. The other was about a 14 year old boy, homeless and deviant, who was taken in by an atheist welfare worker. At dinner the boy stands up with a Bible in his hands and begins to tear out pages of paper and eating them saying, "I've eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth!"
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