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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There is not a single character in this book that I would say I liked, but the stories as a whole are captivating. The author is flawed and her callousness toward racism is pretty clear. This book is a demonstration of southern American racism in a lot of ways. It’s not outright insulting but demeaning and insidious. I enjoyed these stories and you will too if you view them in the context of a flawed narrator that is certainly at the mercy of her own biases. The craftsmanship of the stories is seriously impressive, the craftsman her self, not as much.
Had I not been stuck on a plane for ten hours, I would not have read this book in it's entirety in one sitting.
Don't get me wrong, I love Flannery's writing- I'll never forget the smack in the face delivered by A Good Man is Hard To Find (in fact, I highly recommend any Flannery newbie start with that story). I just think her stories are best read in small doses. An entire collection of dark and tragic with a heavy dose of just desserts becomes a bit much. Everything in moderation.
There are some fantastic stories in this collection, my favourites being the title story and The Lame Shall Enter First. Each story features a thoroughly detestable character (or two), gives an honest accounting of man's inherent flaws (if somewhat exaggerated), and the perils of acting on those base wants and needs, all with Flannery's unmistakable, spare style.
I found reading the collection all in one sitting a bit wearying- the themes in each story being so similar in nature that I found most just became less memorable, apart from two or three. Basically: man behaves badly under the misapprehension that he is righteous, harms others, comes to a tragic end and ultimately just before his demise sees the error of his ways. In a nutshell, more or less, which is sad because Flannery deserves so much more.
I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from
reading the collection- they're great stories- this is a collection I highly recommend if your a fan of southern literature, just spread the stories out a bit.
Don't get me wrong, I love Flannery's writing- I'll never forget the smack in the face delivered by A Good Man is Hard To Find (in fact, I highly recommend any Flannery newbie start with that story). I just think her stories are best read in small doses. An entire collection of dark and tragic with a heavy dose of just desserts becomes a bit much. Everything in moderation.
There are some fantastic stories in this collection, my favourites being the title story and The Lame Shall Enter First. Each story features a thoroughly detestable character (or two), gives an honest accounting of man's inherent flaws (if somewhat exaggerated), and the perils of acting on those base wants and needs, all with Flannery's unmistakable, spare style.
I found reading the collection all in one sitting a bit wearying- the themes in each story being so similar in nature that I found most just became less memorable, apart from two or three. Basically: man behaves badly under the misapprehension that he is righteous, harms others, comes to a tragic end and ultimately just before his demise sees the error of his ways. In a nutshell, more or less, which is sad because Flannery deserves so much more.
I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from
reading the collection- they're great stories- this is a collection I highly recommend if your a fan of southern literature, just spread the stories out a bit.
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
O'Connor is so talented, I kept notes while I read her short stories to attempt to make some small effort at emulating her masterful way of creating characters that are true to life with just the right amount of exaggeration to make her point. Such a gifted writer who left us too early, but left behind beautiful gifts in the writing she was able to complete.
read this for a course and we did not read all of the stories (odds are i'll return to this one day but that day is not today)
Flannery O'Connor's final short story collection was compiled and published after her death. All except for one story, Parker's Back, were published previously and the final story in the collection, Judgement Day, is a reworked version of her first published story. It does help to know that O'Connor did not choose the stories or place them in the order they appear in the book.
The titular story starts things off and it's O'Connor at her biting best. A woman has her son accompany her on a bus trip in Atlanta, feeling she needs protection now that the buses are integrated. The son is resentful, both of this small task and of his mother, who raised him on her own and continues to support him. As he stews and sulks, she becomes increasingly outgoing and everything becomes more and more uncomfortable. And then it all ends very badly. It's both brilliant and immediately recognizable as being written by O'Connor.
The following stories continue in this vein, pitting hard-working yet silly mothers against idle sons who resent them. And then things always end very badly. In lesser hands, this would result in stories that feel too similar, but O'Connor's returning to the same ground results in a feeling of cohesion. And then there are the variations -- a man both resents his wife and longs to win her admiration in Parker's Back, a widower takes in a homeless young man with a club foot and soon prefers him over his own son, a lonely ten-year-old who misses his mother. But don't confuse heart-rending circumstances for authorial empathy; O'Connor eviscerates her characters, leaving them not a shred of dignity as she explores their darkest weaknesses.
My one quibble with this collection lays with the final story, Judgement Day. Even in descriptions of her given by admirers, her racism is evident. Yet her stories aren't racist -- she's equally willing to lay bare all the dirty hate and hypocrisy of a well-heeled racist in a new hat as she is to call out someone setting themselves in opposition to racism, but benefitting from it. But this final story, of an elderly man living in his daughter's New York apartment and longing for home, is the exception. Not only does the n-word appear numerous times in each paragraph, the Black characters all conform to a Southern racist's stereo-types. All the justifications, all the she-was-a-product-of-her-time excuses can't cover up what is going on in this story. Other than that, and it's a pretty big other-than-that, this collection is brilliant. Approach with caution.
The titular story starts things off and it's O'Connor at her biting best. A woman has her son accompany her on a bus trip in Atlanta, feeling she needs protection now that the buses are integrated. The son is resentful, both of this small task and of his mother, who raised him on her own and continues to support him. As he stews and sulks, she becomes increasingly outgoing and everything becomes more and more uncomfortable. And then it all ends very badly. It's both brilliant and immediately recognizable as being written by O'Connor.
The following stories continue in this vein, pitting hard-working yet silly mothers against idle sons who resent them. And then things always end very badly. In lesser hands, this would result in stories that feel too similar, but O'Connor's returning to the same ground results in a feeling of cohesion. And then there are the variations -- a man both resents his wife and longs to win her admiration in Parker's Back, a widower takes in a homeless young man with a club foot and soon prefers him over his own son, a lonely ten-year-old who misses his mother. But don't confuse heart-rending circumstances for authorial empathy; O'Connor eviscerates her characters, leaving them not a shred of dignity as she explores their darkest weaknesses.
My one quibble with this collection lays with the final story, Judgement Day. Even in descriptions of her given by admirers, her racism is evident. Yet her stories aren't racist -- she's equally willing to lay bare all the dirty hate and hypocrisy of a well-heeled racist in a new hat as she is to call out someone setting themselves in opposition to racism, but benefitting from it. But this final story, of an elderly man living in his daughter's New York apartment and longing for home, is the exception. Not only does the n-word appear numerous times in each paragraph, the Black characters all conform to a Southern racist's stereo-types. All the justifications, all the she-was-a-product-of-her-time excuses can't cover up what is going on in this story. Other than that, and it's a pretty big other-than-that, this collection is brilliant. Approach with caution.
These stories are so visceral – you get inside the head of these characters and their values and world view roll out to mold the stories. For better or worse, usually worse, most of the stories revolve around the disconnect between people and sometimes within themselves. There is a theme of generational divide and wholesale rejection of deeply held values – attributed to the younger or older generation depending on the story. It is a divide of place, people, religion and race. I was struck by how unknowable we can be to each other and ourselves as illustrated through these immanently familiar characters.
O'Connor is an American treasure and this is a golden example of the short story form at its finest. I started my adult reading journey as a horror enthusiast, meaning that I'm sort of inclined to like short stories, but the form sort of fell away from my attention over the past year and it's been hard for me to finish collections; not so with this one, which completely took over my brainspace in the week that I read it and got its emotional talons so deep into me that I pretty much couldn't focus on any other book I was reading besides it. These are not only classics of American literature, they practically define great short form writing - tightly written with their lengths completely justified, rich with allusion and symbolism she never gets bogged down in explaining, oozing with style and the verve of a one-of-a-kind imagination, and so deeply attuned to what makes the human brain tick that these stories expand beyond time and region while also being emblematic of the cultural contexts in which they were written. And of course O'Connor's religious views prevail, like the ever-so-elusive hand of Providence, over every single one of these tales, settling into the DNA of her dark Catholic universe in a way that is subtle yet immense, and overall cementing this work as completely her own - to call it simply "southern gothic", while true enough, would be a disservice to her vision.
And that's the key - even when O'Connor's Catholicism and moral message informs the text and subtext of these tales, her approach to storytelling and the humanity of her often doomed characters is too complex, too empathetic to approach any one-size-fits-all peg you can square these down to. Any artist with religious convictions risks one-dimensionality, because often one is tempted to use their preferred form simply as a vehicle for a moral lesson, but O'Connor is way too skilled at narrative to have this problem even remotely. She deeply understands people not only within the context of the Godly truth in her literary cosmos, but through the society of the Southern US in which informs their behaviors. Many of these stories (Greenleaf, A View of the Woods, Judgment Day) deal in part with land ownership and its relation to the abuses of people, who are in turn viewed transactionally; the deep and abiding racism of American culture that has its soul in the south is interrogated throughout. But mostly O'Connor is deeply attuned to her characters' psychology, what informs their bad decisions - God, or more accurately a lack of Him, is the pervading idea here, but especially human beings as individuals and their relationship to the cosmos. And overall, these stories are rich with so much diverse symbolism and theological, political depth that there's an ever-present sense of ambiguity even when the message is clear; there's simply so much working on here on so many levels that nothing about it ever feels preachy.
Irony and a lack of understanding oneself and one's place in the universe are big themes here, manifesting to some extent in every story. Many of her characters are "damned" (for lack of a better term) by their inaction, or their inability to understand the cause of their actions and their eventual effects, and the hypocrisies and human hangups that blind them from seeing truth and overcoming sin. In "The Lame Shall Enter First" Sheppard subsumes himself so much into a skewed idea of charity that he fails to realize he has neglected his own child - in "Revelation", Mrs. Turpin is unable to see the fruits of her racist, classist thinking until she receives a direct warning from Hell (well, according to her - like all great fiction, O'Connor refuses to spell out the details too plainly). Characters see the truth or come close to it - both their personal truth and its relation to God - but often times the revelation comes too late, when the damage can not be undone. Basically O'Connor is big on accountability, where lesser writers would let their characters off with a handwave, O'Connor knows that every action has consequences and no one in this fallen world is innocent. And she accomplishes this so well by the raw humanity of her characters - these are not grotesque caricatures of poor people [though like anything there is an element of obvious authorial stylization], these are people who have the same ideas and psychologies and insecurities known to the human experience, they are a mirror, not something we can separate ourselves from; O'Connor challenges the bourgeoise discomfort with the disenfranchised by showing that they are real, flawed human beings, capable of incredible good and incredible evil just like all people.
But it really is that metaphysical and religious substance that makes O'Connor's universe so scintillating, so ominous and beautiful and pulsing with life, even when these people's lives are enshrouded in monstrous darkness. God is everywhere in these stories, not only metaphysically but within the actual mechanics of her fiction. She puts in all these subtle details to make the presence of a divine Hand of Providence known, while never overplaying that hand. There's something that's always there, lurking at the periphery, informing Nature and existence, so close but just out of reach, which in our fallen state we cannot touch until we have humility and accountability for our sins. Judgment is always there, through the gaps in the trees where a strange light shines, and regardless of whether you believe in God, we will always have to answer for our actions eventually no matter how far we run. The omniscient third person narration becomes a vehicle for this divine eye watching over everything and everyone here - something there that knows more than the characters about themselves, and initiates their quests or failures to attain knowledge without ever directly interfering.
Religion has such a sour history with me that something like this should in theory be difficult to sway me - but as I've said, O'Connor is just so damn good that to boil her work down to religion alone would be a crime. These are deeply spiritual stories, but they are also deeply human, radically empathetic and in tune with even the worst of us - because even the worst of us are human - and understanding of the infinities which make up our existence on this rock. But they are also sardonically funny, atmospheric and beautiful and disturbing and dark as pitch [two stories here in particular haunt me to my core, "A View of the Woods" and "The Lame Shall Enter First"], and no one but Flannery O'Connor could have written them. She reflects the truth present or latent within all of us through her off-kilter characters, she forces us to see the ugliest and the best parts of ourselves and, like Mrs. Turpin at the end of "Revelation", only we alone as individuals can make the choice of whether that will lead to complicity or salvation. She makes us see, because we must - what else is there to do to be saved?
And that's the key - even when O'Connor's Catholicism and moral message informs the text and subtext of these tales, her approach to storytelling and the humanity of her often doomed characters is too complex, too empathetic to approach any one-size-fits-all peg you can square these down to. Any artist with religious convictions risks one-dimensionality, because often one is tempted to use their preferred form simply as a vehicle for a moral lesson, but O'Connor is way too skilled at narrative to have this problem even remotely. She deeply understands people not only within the context of the Godly truth in her literary cosmos, but through the society of the Southern US in which informs their behaviors. Many of these stories (Greenleaf, A View of the Woods, Judgment Day) deal in part with land ownership and its relation to the abuses of people, who are in turn viewed transactionally; the deep and abiding racism of American culture that has its soul in the south is interrogated throughout. But mostly O'Connor is deeply attuned to her characters' psychology, what informs their bad decisions - God, or more accurately a lack of Him, is the pervading idea here, but especially human beings as individuals and their relationship to the cosmos. And overall, these stories are rich with so much diverse symbolism and theological, political depth that there's an ever-present sense of ambiguity even when the message is clear; there's simply so much working on here on so many levels that nothing about it ever feels preachy.
Irony and a lack of understanding oneself and one's place in the universe are big themes here, manifesting to some extent in every story. Many of her characters are "damned" (for lack of a better term) by their inaction, or their inability to understand the cause of their actions and their eventual effects, and the hypocrisies and human hangups that blind them from seeing truth and overcoming sin. In "The Lame Shall Enter First" Sheppard subsumes himself so much into a skewed idea of charity that he fails to realize he has neglected his own child - in "Revelation", Mrs. Turpin is unable to see the fruits of her racist, classist thinking until she receives a direct warning from Hell (well, according to her - like all great fiction, O'Connor refuses to spell out the details too plainly). Characters see the truth or come close to it - both their personal truth and its relation to God - but often times the revelation comes too late, when the damage can not be undone. Basically O'Connor is big on accountability, where lesser writers would let their characters off with a handwave, O'Connor knows that every action has consequences and no one in this fallen world is innocent. And she accomplishes this so well by the raw humanity of her characters - these are not grotesque caricatures of poor people [though like anything there is an element of obvious authorial stylization], these are people who have the same ideas and psychologies and insecurities known to the human experience, they are a mirror, not something we can separate ourselves from; O'Connor challenges the bourgeoise discomfort with the disenfranchised by showing that they are real, flawed human beings, capable of incredible good and incredible evil just like all people.
But it really is that metaphysical and religious substance that makes O'Connor's universe so scintillating, so ominous and beautiful and pulsing with life, even when these people's lives are enshrouded in monstrous darkness. God is everywhere in these stories, not only metaphysically but within the actual mechanics of her fiction. She puts in all these subtle details to make the presence of a divine Hand of Providence known, while never overplaying that hand. There's something that's always there, lurking at the periphery, informing Nature and existence, so close but just out of reach, which in our fallen state we cannot touch until we have humility and accountability for our sins. Judgment is always there, through the gaps in the trees where a strange light shines, and regardless of whether you believe in God, we will always have to answer for our actions eventually no matter how far we run. The omniscient third person narration becomes a vehicle for this divine eye watching over everything and everyone here - something there that knows more than the characters about themselves, and initiates their quests or failures to attain knowledge without ever directly interfering.
Religion has such a sour history with me that something like this should in theory be difficult to sway me - but as I've said, O'Connor is just so damn good that to boil her work down to religion alone would be a crime. These are deeply spiritual stories, but they are also deeply human, radically empathetic and in tune with even the worst of us - because even the worst of us are human - and understanding of the infinities which make up our existence on this rock. But they are also sardonically funny, atmospheric and beautiful and disturbing and dark as pitch [two stories here in particular haunt me to my core, "A View of the Woods" and "The Lame Shall Enter First"], and no one but Flannery O'Connor could have written them. She reflects the truth present or latent within all of us through her off-kilter characters, she forces us to see the ugliest and the best parts of ourselves and, like Mrs. Turpin at the end of "Revelation", only we alone as individuals can make the choice of whether that will lead to complicity or salvation. She makes us see, because we must - what else is there to do to be saved?
Reading this for the second time! March, 2011
So. I'm done - still love it, still one of my favorites. But I noticed this time around that reading these stories actually made me feel cheerful. WTF does that say about my state of mind right now???
*Read Aug. 6, 2009*
I've never been a big fan of short stories. Maybe it's just that I hadn't read Flannery O'Connor. Thanks to Lost, that's no longer the case. I freaking loved this book! Every single story was engrossing and I could not put it down. As I was reading, I had this feeling that I just couldn't shake, like something really bad was about to happen. Ah yes, that would be impending doom. It's not too often a book provokes a visceral reaction in me, but this just blew me away.
There wasn't a bad one in the bunch, but my favorites were The Lame Shall Enter First and A View of the Woods.
So. I'm done - still love it, still one of my favorites. But I noticed this time around that reading these stories actually made me feel cheerful. WTF does that say about my state of mind right now???
*Read Aug. 6, 2009*
I've never been a big fan of short stories. Maybe it's just that I hadn't read Flannery O'Connor. Thanks to Lost, that's no longer the case. I freaking loved this book! Every single story was engrossing and I could not put it down. As I was reading, I had this feeling that I just couldn't shake, like something really bad was about to happen. Ah yes, that would be impending doom. It's not too often a book provokes a visceral reaction in me, but this just blew me away.
There wasn't a bad one in the bunch, but my favorites were The Lame Shall Enter First and A View of the Woods.
This collection is fantastic. I love so many of these stories, these tales of generational disconnect, how dim hostility lies underneath, not-quite-hidden below many parent-child interactions, especially after the child enters adulthood. (I don't know if Flannery lived with her parents in her adulthood, or if her children did in theirs. I imagine that if so, it was not a happy time.) And the horrible situations people will blindly stroll into just to prove "I'm right. You're wrong. I will make you see that." There is so much that is unfairly true in these stories; Older generations refusal to see change, Young people who blithfully force the world to acknowledge their view with no empathy, the South's bittersweet disconnect with new culture ( not always presented terribly, mind you) and abject fear with the concept of "New York" ( which is absolutely real). My favorite story was "A View of The Woods", which, while not written such, is one of the best horror tales I've ever read, and a look at why exceptional people are often at odds with the world and people around them. (take notes, Ayn Rand) But all of the stories say real things about how we are to those that touch us, especially those who are closest.