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Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics) Kindle Edition
The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom.
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.
This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateMarch 6, 2007
- File size503 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B009LRWWPE
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First edition (March 6, 2007)
- Publication date : March 6, 2007
- Language : English
- File size : 503 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 95 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #53,632 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #96 in Southern United States Fiction
- #104 in Contemporary American Fiction
- #158 in Southern Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, the only child of Catholic parents. In 1945 she enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women. After earning her degree she continued her studies on the University of Iowa's writing program, and her first published story, 'The Geranium', was written while she was still a student. Her writing is best-known for its explorations of religious themes and southern racial issues, and for combining the comic with the tragic. After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. In 1952 she learned that she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Millidgeville, Georgia. For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She was a good amateur painter. She died in the summer of 1964.
Photo by Cmacauley [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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I’ve always considered myself a fan of O’Connor’s work, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve immersed myself in one of her books. I discovered Wise Blood, O’Connor’s first novel published in 1952, was on Boxall’s 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, along with Everything That Rises Must Converge. The Violent Bear It Away was removed from the list in 2008. I got the Kindle, opened it up, and tried to keep an open mind about what lay ahead, knowing some have found the book appalling.
The book opens with a young discharged WWII veteran riding a train home to Tennessee, only to find the home abandoned, he continues his travels to the fictional city of Taulkinham, Tennessee, believed to be in the western part of the state known for fields and hills, vs the mountains in the east. He determined, like his grandfather before him, to become a preacher, “had known since 12 years old he would be a preacher,” but it turns out he’s now the anti-Jesus kind, as he later explains, “If you believed in Jesus, you wouldn’t be so good.” Some suggest the horrors of war which included an injury may inform his worldview about organized religion and the inhumanity of civil society. He is plagued by bad dreams involving death, which might suggest PTSD, and describes an almost mistrust of faith, “Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”
The supporting cast of characters as well as the protagonist, seem the type of “grotesques” usually lurking in Southern Gothic fiction, and one was described: “Enoch kept wetting his lips. They were pale except for his fever blister, which was purple.” These characters are usually close to destitute, the underbelly of society, struggling just to survive, and those who interact with them, often profiting at their expense. Sometimes uneducated with few marketable skills, they are like peasants from a Peter Bruegel painting transported from their raw and earthy town lives into the future. It is an unblinking look with society’s jaundiced eye at those not normally populating palatable fiction.
Bridgett Marshall describes the mood of such books, “Some of these characteristics include exploring madness, decay and despair, continuing pressures of the past upon the present, particularly with the lost ideals of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy and continued racial hostilities.” It’s fair to say a young man returning from the ravages of war would struggle with lost ideals, a crisis of faith, and “the many wills conflicting in one man,” which may include the vestiges of racism.
One of O’Connor’s great strengths is her ability to create unforgettable, if unsavory, morally flawed characters, who move through their unvarnished lives in often ill advised ways, forcing us to contemplate the human condition, often far from ideal. I ended up with 40 highlights from the book, powerful passages and images, and a respect for O’Conner’s ability to articulate humanity’s struggles.
In The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, editor Sally Fitzgerald notes, “However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as open to the touch of divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. She wrote: ‘Grace changes us and the change is painful.’" O’Connor was a devout Catholic, and raises this in her Author’s Notes: “That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.”
O’Connor’s characters teach us much about our own sense of compassion, the power of forgiveness, and redemption by a higher authority who reaches out to those who understand mistakes they’ve made, like the King in Edward Rowland’s “A Fool’s Prayer.” Rowland writes, "Earth bears no balsam for mistakes; Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool That did his will; but Thou, O Lord, Be merciful to me, a fool! The room was hushed; in silence rose The King, and sought his gardens cool, And walked apart, and murmured low, ‘Be merciful to me, a fool!’" O’Connor’s struggling characters’ lives often appear as Shakespeare’s depiction of life’s drama, “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” But if we pay attention to the artists’ words and the stories they weave, the significance is ours to learn.
Main character Hazel Motes is committed to denouncing Jesus as the Light. He commits himself to the ministry of calling people to the "light" of unfaith. Yet, in his quest, he finds himself in a dark night where the only light is the Light that persistently burns in his soul. No matter how hard he tries, Hazel just cannot stomp out this persistently burning fire. Ignore it as he might, he cannot help but notice it. He eventually comes to the point of reversing course and darkens his physical eyes so he can do a blind walk of penance back to the Light he tried to escape.
Poor Mrs. Flood. She just barely perceives this pin prick of Light in the darkened eyes of her boarder Hazel. But although she just can't seem to help but persistently look for this Light in the darkened eyes of Hazel, it is always beyond her reach, most likely because she is preoccupied with her noble schemes to separate Hazel from his government paychecks. Some might say she preferred the darkness to the Light.
And then there is Enoch. He just wants to be friends. It is his Wise Blood for which this novel is named. Wise blood is sort of a turn of phrase he uses to describe his instincts, which largely lead him to do things that ultimately contrive him to make unconventional (and without a doubt disturbing) human connections. He is compelled to veil himself... he hides in a bush to observe the women at the public swimming pool, he pilfers an ape suit in the expectation that it will help people to shake his hand. He seeks connection -- Communion, even. And so we have another seeker going about it the wrong way.
This book is thick with Christian themes, and presented through characters that are written in such a way that you are compelled to not really relate to them so that you laugh at them and, hopefully, clearly contemplate the seriously significant subject matters regarding the salvation of the soul. O'Connor's approach is definitely a Roman Catholic approach, but I think the elements of penance presented here are worthy of a protestant's consideration. While we are saved by grace, it does not discount the many scriptures that speak to the fact that faith without works is dead. Hazel takes his long penitential walks, and he rightly tells Mrs. Flood that, as far as she is concerned, she is good... making the point clear that there are none so blind as those who will not see.
Top reviews from other countries
i am not saying it is a bad book; but it was totally uninteresting to me
Die Romanhandlung wurde hier schon gut zusammengefasst - so das denn geht, denn es ist kaum in Worte zu fassen, mit welchen Charakteren und Einfällen O'Connor auffährt. Das ist surreal, absurd, manchmal unheimlich oder verzweifelt - und alles sehr bedeutungsschwanger.
Ich bin überhaupt nicht bibelfest, und ich wehre mich auch dagegen, diesen Roman ausschließlich auf sein religiöses Thema hin zu lesen, aber natürlich ist diese Thematik sehr stark (z.B. Schuld, Leiden/Passion und Erlösung), und viele Namen und Symbole verweisen auf Bibelstellen. Schon allein der Name des Romanhelden: Hazel Mote (Haze=Dunst, Nebel; mote=Splitter; Staubpartikel), ein Verweis auf seine Verwirrung und Verblendung und auf einen Satz aus der Bergpredigt: "Was siehst du den Splitter im Auge deines Nächsten, aber den Balken in deinem Auge nimmst du nicht wahr?" (Matthäus 7,3)
Warum ich 5 Sterne vergebe? Man bleibt zwar mit dem Gefühl zurück, sehr Vieles nicht verstanden zu haben, und trotzdem war ich absolut fasziniert von diesem Buch! Bei mehrmaligen Lesen und auch Lesen über die Autorin entdeckt man sicher jedes Mal neue Bedeutungsebenen. Leider ist Flannery O'Connor in Deutschland so gut wie unbekannt.
Drauf gekommen bin ich durch die Aufzeichnung der Online-Vorlesung von Prof. Amy Hungerford an der Yale University, die mir schon viele litearische Entdeckungen beschert hat!