Itemize Books During 3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood
| Original Title: | Three by Flannery O'Connor |
| Edition Language: | English |
Flannery O'Connor
Paperback | Pages: 496 pages Rating: 4.31 | 1773 Users | 97 Reviews
Particularize Appertaining To Books 3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood
| Title | : | 3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood |
| Author | : | Flannery O'Connor |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 496 pages |
| Published | : | August 21st 1986 by Signet Classics (first published 1962) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Short Stories. Literature. American. Southern. Novels. Literary Fiction |
Narrative In Pursuance Of Books 3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor is a diminutive, sprite-like woman who writes some of the most powerful fiction (of its type) that I have ever read.If you like Faulkner, you will most likely enjoy O'Connor's work as well. It is a kind of theater of the macabre, southern, holy, and surreal all at once. The characters arrive in the story as if in a fever dream, emerging from some faint mist that she has shrouded them in so that they may pop out at just the right moment; they take on their lives fully-formed, portraying real people with extraordinary personal problems embedded deep in their psyche. O'Connor's action takes place deep in the minds and beliefs of her characters, with their thoughts boiling out into the area around them to wreck havoc. I have seen stills from a movie created about Wise Blood; the characters look like they fell out of a Magritte painting, which I think is an apt tone to give to them.
There isn't much action in the two main novels in this collection (at least not in the traditional sense of action), but the work still draws you in nonetheless. With that in mind, I believe that O'Connor should be read for one of two reasons (though you can get a casual reading pleasure from them both as well):
1) To study, digest, and think about. Her work is incredibly complicated, with symbolic set pieces strewn throughout. Quite frankly, when I finished a recent reread of Wise Blood, I felt like I needed to sit and talk about it for an hour with other readers just to scratch the surface of the meaning. The same could be said of The Violent Bear it Away--each of these two novels captures your (can I call it this?) critical-thinking attention and will not let it go.
2) As a writer. Just as Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf should be read by serious writers in order to explore both their style and the ways in which they bend and break the rules of language, so too should O'Connor be studied for the ways in which she extrapolates character in the simplest of beliefs. O'Connor has a way of stretching these beliefs into monstrous proportions, pulling them like taffy to find all the little nuances that lie within. As a writer, I found it fascinating that she could pull and pull on a character like that, finding new truths hiding deep within that she would then share with the reader. Though in The Violent Bear it Away it gets a bit tiresome at in the first 30 pages, the rest of the two main novels in this collection are to be studied and admired for their scope.
The Signet edition of O'Connor's work is a steal. For less than ten dollars (when I bought it) you can get two of her novels, plus a collection of short stories.
Rating Appertaining To Books 3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood
Ratings: 4.31 From 1773 Users | 97 ReviewsNotice Appertaining To Books 3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood
Wise Blood: One of only two entries that I am aware of in the genre of darkly comic, grotesque Christian novels, and the superior one, as far as I'm concerned (the other being the still-interesting Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West). O'Connor doesn't really tip her hat as to which side she comes down on in the actual text (though she was outspoken in defense of faith elsewhere) and the book can easily be read as vindicating either Hazel's skepticism or his faith, though it takes a cynicalI am sorry but the infusion of religion into all of Flannery O'Connor's writing is more than I can manage at this point in my secular humanist life. Her humor does reach me at times but not enough to keep me going.
I suppose it's no longer possible to quote the most famous line from "Wise Blood" here in public. Certain forms of reticence are easy to understand and sympathize with, but not altogether positive in their effects. "Jesus is a trick on n-words" doesn't quite cut it. I suppose we could propose replacing "kyke" with "the k-word" in Gatsby, but that sounds like a tired dodge to avoid dealing with the issue. You can't take the word out of Hazel Mott's mouth any more than you can out of Huck Finn's.
Flannery O'Connor is a diminutive, sprite-like woman who writes some of the most powerful fiction (of its type) that I have ever read.If you like Faulkner, you will most likely enjoy O'Connor's work as well. It is a kind of theater of the macabre, southern, holy, and surreal all at once. The characters arrive in the story as if in a fever dream, emerging from some faint mist that she has shrouded them in so that they may pop out at just the right moment; they take on their lives fully-formed,
10/4/11: I carted this book around for years and just never gotten around to reading it. So far I've read the introduction, The Violent Bear It Away, and a few of the short stories, but it's just so damn depressing that I don't feel up to spending what reading time I have right now on stories that make me want to kill myself, no matter how brilliantly they're written (and they are written brilliantly, of course, it's O'Connor). I'm not saying that I'm definitely giving up on reading this, but
This book is a set of three short stories.Wise Blood~~~~~~~~~~When I read this in college it was way over my head (or, more likely, at the time my head was too full of other nonsense to take it all in). My second time through demonstrated its power. Not a word is wasted and as you pay attention you quickly realize it's not a story as much as a treatise on people and their notions about life, faith and the way things are.The characters are grotesque:"Mrs. Watts was sitting alone in a white iron
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