The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
0 CommentsBy Lostcheerio on Monday, June 5, 2006 at 7:34 AM.
It took me a long time to read this. It wasn't a book where one thing leads to the next in a single plot that you follow from page to page. The plot is more like a spiral that circles through five main characters in various states of poverty in a small Southern town. The owner of an all night diner, slave to nickles and daily routine. The black doctor, powerless to inspire his neighbors to follow his ideas about birth control or politics. The teenage girl whose family runs a boarding house, dirt poor, ignorant, and an unnoticed musical prodigy. The deaf/mute jeweler who has no one to speak sign language with. The labor agitator, frustrated to violence by the circumstances of those he sees around him. The book goes around and around through the lives of these, people, following them for one year. For all of them, in this year, bad goes to worse. There is uniform decay, devastation, disappointment... it is a bleak bleak landscape that only gets more grim as the book goes on.
It's written brilliantly. There are lines in the description of the people specifically, of the milieu in general, of the zeitgeist, that are just exquisite perfection. Descriptions I will remember and take away with me, into other books, into my understanding of the South during the depression. Her handling of the point of view shifts, around the town, and how the different characters' worldviews are reflected in the quality and nature of the narrative... it's nothing short of genius. I can't even think of a crack to make about this book, because it was so completely shatteringly good.
Nothing I ever want to read again. I could get the same sensation of hopelessness, ignorance, waste, and want by... wait... WHY would I want that sensation? Why don't I just go put my head against the sidewalk and flatten it with a sledge hammer?
It's a book that I should have read, and I'm glad I did, and I'm glad it was written, but now I want to eat strawberry ice cream, and read P.G. Wodehouse, and kiss my kids.
It's written brilliantly. There are lines in the description of the people specifically, of the milieu in general, of the zeitgeist, that are just exquisite perfection. Descriptions I will remember and take away with me, into other books, into my understanding of the South during the depression. Her handling of the point of view shifts, around the town, and how the different characters' worldviews are reflected in the quality and nature of the narrative... it's nothing short of genius. I can't even think of a crack to make about this book, because it was so completely shatteringly good.
Nothing I ever want to read again. I could get the same sensation of hopelessness, ignorance, waste, and want by... wait... WHY would I want that sensation? Why don't I just go put my head against the sidewalk and flatten it with a sledge hammer?
It's a book that I should have read, and I'm glad I did, and I'm glad it was written, but now I want to eat strawberry ice cream, and read P.G. Wodehouse, and kiss my kids.
Labels: books, Carson McCullers, novels
I'm on to the next. Carson McCullers wrote her first novel, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, at the age of 22. By that age she had also had rheumatic fever and several crippling strokes. She had been sent to New York to study the piano at Julliard. After losing (I wonder how this happened?) the money for her tuition, she decided to become a writer.
By the age of fifty, she was in a wheelchair, then a coma after a final stroke. Then she died.
She rolled with people like Capote, Marilyn Monroe, John Huston, Tennessee Williams, WH Auden, Benjamin Britten. Two of her novels were made into movies. She married, divorced, and was married again to a bisexual man named Reeves McCullers, who eventually tried get her to commit suicide with him in Paris. She didn't. He did. He overdosed on sleeping pills. She wrote a play about it called, The Square Root of Wonderful.
Having read about her life, I think she must have been very intense, and agonized, and frail. She wrote the books she wrote. After a stroke at the age of 30, her entire left side was paralyzed.
Here is her Wikipedia entry, and here is a web site called the Carson McCullers Project.
I'm planning to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and also Ballad of the Sad Cafe (and whatever other stories are in that volume).
By the age of fifty, she was in a wheelchair, then a coma after a final stroke. Then she died.
She rolled with people like Capote, Marilyn Monroe, John Huston, Tennessee Williams, WH Auden, Benjamin Britten. Two of her novels were made into movies. She married, divorced, and was married again to a bisexual man named Reeves McCullers, who eventually tried get her to commit suicide with him in Paris. She didn't. He did. He overdosed on sleeping pills. She wrote a play about it called, The Square Root of Wonderful.
Having read about her life, I think she must have been very intense, and agonized, and frail. She wrote the books she wrote. After a stroke at the age of 30, her entire left side was paralyzed.
Here is her Wikipedia entry, and here is a web site called the Carson McCullers Project.
I'm planning to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and also Ballad of the Sad Cafe (and whatever other stories are in that volume).
Labels: Carson McCullers, writers
