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A review by maryehavens
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
5.0
What is the most horrific emotion you can experience? Helplessness? Pity? Foolishness? Hopelessness? O'Connor describes all of these emotions throughout her complete stories.
I didn't know what Southern Gothic really was until I read 500 pages of it. Now I know. And it's that stomach-churning, squirmy feeling you get when you watch someone making terrible mistakes and repeating the same pattern, fruitlessly, because they are trapped in circumstance/behavior or just sheer stupidity.
Her stories are rife with racism, social and economic depression, and just about all the nasty sides of human behavior. All her intellectuals are mean and nihilistic, mostly towards their own mothers. All the mothers are shrews that hen-peck their sons and tenant farmers while gossiping about their neighbors and trying to jockey for a feeling of self-importance. All the neighbors are also striving for their place in the world while stepping on the necks of everyone else around them. Everyone is kind of swirling around in this big ball of the South, with nothing and everything to do.
Now, after reading that, you probably think: this sucked. It did not, at all. Each story goes in a direction I would not necessarily have predicted. But the journey getting there is one of the hardest train wrecks I've had to witness.
If you are interested in O'Connor's work, I recommend starting with a smaller short story collection, perhaps "A Good Man is Hard to Find." No reason to flog yourself throughout the whole thing like I did :)
I didn't know what Southern Gothic really was until I read 500 pages of it. Now I know. And it's that stomach-churning, squirmy feeling you get when you watch someone making terrible mistakes and repeating the same pattern, fruitlessly, because they are trapped in circumstance/behavior or just sheer stupidity.
Her stories are rife with racism, social and economic depression, and just about all the nasty sides of human behavior. All her intellectuals are mean and nihilistic, mostly towards their own mothers. All the mothers are shrews that hen-peck their sons and tenant farmers while gossiping about their neighbors and trying to jockey for a feeling of self-importance. All the neighbors are also striving for their place in the world while stepping on the necks of everyone else around them. Everyone is kind of swirling around in this big ball of the South, with nothing and everything to do.
Now, after reading that, you probably think: this sucked. It did not, at all. Each story goes in a direction I would not necessarily have predicted. But the journey getting there is one of the hardest train wrecks I've had to witness.
If you are interested in O'Connor's work, I recommend starting with a smaller short story collection, perhaps "A Good Man is Hard to Find." No reason to flog yourself throughout the whole thing like I did :)