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A review by angieinbooks
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
4.0
I really dreaded reading this every time I picked it up. It had been the longest tenured book on the To Read shelf until I finally decided to read it once and for all. And it was hard and often not enjoyable and I had to force myself to read it. You can't start a new book until you read one of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, I'd tell myself. I will probably never re-read any of these stories again.
The problem with this collection of stories is the fact that they're all collected in a book. (And that may be the weirdest sentence I've ever written). What I mean is, reading these story after story does a disservice to the stories themselves. These stories are dark and bleak and feature really difficult-to-like characters. It made me never want to pick up the book. I can handle a bleak novel with unlikeable characters (I'm looking at you [b:The Corrections|3805|The Corrections|Jonathan Franzen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1355011305s/3805.jpg|941200]), but in a short story format, where I couldn't stay invested in the story for a sustained period of time, it didn't quite work.
So why, if I had such a difficult time getting through this book, did I rate it so highly? In short, O'Connor is brilliant. Very few authors understand people as well as O'Connor does, and even fewer can write about the mundanity of everyday life as candidly as she does. When it comes to the white experience in the South, I'm not sure you'll find a more truthful writer. She's critical and skeptical and brilliant as she deals with racism and Christianity and how those two institutions have shaped and corrupted her characters.
That's not to say she always gets it right. That's not to say that some readers won't be put off by her language and the subjects she's dealing with. There are definitely problems here, but I think she handles it as best as she can as dictated by her experiences. But I leave that for other people to opine on.
The problem with this collection of stories is the fact that they're all collected in a book. (And that may be the weirdest sentence I've ever written). What I mean is, reading these story after story does a disservice to the stories themselves. These stories are dark and bleak and feature really difficult-to-like characters. It made me never want to pick up the book. I can handle a bleak novel with unlikeable characters (I'm looking at you [b:The Corrections|3805|The Corrections|Jonathan Franzen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1355011305s/3805.jpg|941200]), but in a short story format, where I couldn't stay invested in the story for a sustained period of time, it didn't quite work.
So why, if I had such a difficult time getting through this book, did I rate it so highly? In short, O'Connor is brilliant. Very few authors understand people as well as O'Connor does, and even fewer can write about the mundanity of everyday life as candidly as she does. When it comes to the white experience in the South, I'm not sure you'll find a more truthful writer. She's critical and skeptical and brilliant as she deals with racism and Christianity and how those two institutions have shaped and corrupted her characters.
That's not to say she always gets it right. That's not to say that some readers won't be put off by her language and the subjects she's dealing with. There are definitely problems here, but I think she handles it as best as she can as dictated by her experiences. But I leave that for other people to opine on.