Ebook Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor
The Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor oftens be great reading book that is understandable. This is why this book Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor comes to be a favored book to review. Why do not you desire become one of them? You could appreciate reviewing Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor while doing various other tasks. The visibility of the soft file of this book Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor is type of obtaining experience quickly. It includes just how you should conserve guide Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor, not in racks naturally. You might save it in your computer system gadget and gadget.
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor
Ebook Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor
Discover the strategy of doing something from many resources. One of them is this publication entitle Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor It is an extremely well recognized publication Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor that can be suggestion to review currently. This advised book is among the all wonderful Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor collections that remain in this website. You will additionally discover other title and also motifs from numerous writers to look right here.
The perks to consider reviewing the publications Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor are coming to improve your life top quality. The life quality will not just about the amount of understanding you will get. Also you review the enjoyable or enjoyable books, it will help you to have boosting life top quality. Feeling enjoyable will certainly lead you to do something flawlessly. Additionally, guide Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor will certainly offer you the driving lesson to take as a good need to do something. You may not be worthless when reading this book Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor
Never mind if you don't have enough time to head to guide shop and also hunt for the preferred book to read. Nowadays, the on-line publication Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor is concerning provide simplicity of reviewing practice. You might not should go outside to search guide Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor Searching and downloading the e-book entitle Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor in this article will certainly offer you far better solution. Yeah, on the internet publication Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor is a type of electronic book that you could enter the link download offered.
Why should be this on the internet book Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor You may not have to go somewhere to read the books. You can read this publication Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor every time and also every where you desire. Also it remains in our extra time or sensation burnt out of the works in the office, this corrects for you. Get this Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor today and also be the quickest individual which finishes reading this publication Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), By Flannery O'Connor
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.
- Sales Rank: #29445 in Books
- Brand: O'Connor, Flannery
- Published on: 2007-03-06
- Released on: 2007-03-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.19" h x .71" w x 5.48" l, .44 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
Amazon.com Review
Wise Blood is a comedy with a fierce, Old Testament soul. Flannery O'Connor has no truck with such newfangled notions as psychology. Driven by forces outside their control, her characters are as one-dimensional--and mysterious--as figures on a frieze. Hazel Motes, for instance, has the temperament of a martyr, even though he spends most of the book trying to get God to go away. As a child he's convinced that "the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin." When that doesn't work, and when he returns from Korea determined "to be converted to nothing instead of evil," he still can't go anywhere without being mistaken for a preacher. (Not that the hat and shiny glare-blue suit help.) No matter what Hazel does, Jesus moves "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..."
Adrift after four years in the service, Hazel takes a train to the city of Taulkinham, buys himself a "rat-colored car," and sets about preaching on street corners for the Church Without Christ, "where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way." Along the way he meets Enoch Emery, who's only 18 years old but already works for the city, as well the blind preacher Asa Hawks and his illegitimate daughter, Sabbath Lily. (Her letter to an advice column: "Dear Mary, I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as we all know, but I have this personality that makes boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not?") Subsequent events involve a desiccated, centuries-old dwarf--Gonga the Giant Jungle Monarch--and Hazel's nemesis, Hoover Shoats, who starts the rival Church of Christ Without Christ. If you think these events don't end happily, you might be right.
Wise Blood is a savage satire of America's secular, commercial culture, as well as the humanism it holds so dear ("Dear Sabbath," Mary Brittle writes back, "Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to re-examine your religious values to see if they meet your needs in Life.") But the book's ultimate purpose is Religious, with a capital R--no metaphors, no allusions, just the thing itself in all its fierce glory. When Hazel whispers "I'm not clean," for instance, O'Connor thinks he is perfectly right. For readers unaccustomed to holding low comedy and high seriousness in their heads at the same time, all this can come as something of a shock. Who else could offer an allegory about free will, redemption, and original sin right alongside the more elemental pleasure of witnessing Enoch Emery dress up in a gorilla suit? Nobody else, that's who. And that's OK. More than one Flannery O'Connor in this world might show us more truth than we could bear. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bronson Pinchot turns in a virtuosic performance of O'Connor's darkly comic classic first novel. After serving a stint in the army, Hazel Motes finds himself adrift, alone, and rent by spiritual confusion. Pinchot's narration is superb: dynamic, well paced, and infused with a perfect Southern drawl. Instead of simply creating voices for the characters, Pinchot embodies them. His Hazel is nasty, nasally, and angry; his Enoch Emery boasts a congested twang; and the entire cast is likewise brought to life by Pinchot's precise and perceptive characterizations and his brilliant evocation of O'Conner's grotesqueries. A Farrar, Straus, and Giroux paperback. (Aug.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
“This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so relentlessly inventive it feels comic.” ―Marilynne Robinson, New York Times Book Review
“No other major American writer of our century has constructed a fictional world so energetically and forthrightly charged by religious investigation.” ―Brad Leithauser, The New Yorker
“I was more impressed by Wise Blood than any novel I have read for a long time. Her picture of the world is literally terrifying. Kafka is almost the only one of our contemporaries who has achieved such effects. I have tremendous admiration for the work of this young writer.” ―Caroline Gordon
Most helpful customer reviews
79 of 85 people found the following review helpful.
"I have now reached the lunatic fringe"
By D. Cloyce Smith
In May 1952, after Flannery O'Connor published "Wise Blood" to mixed notices, she wrote to her publisher, Robert Giroux, and demonstrated her ability to take even the bad reviews with aplomb: "I have a request for a complimentary copy of 'Wise Blood' from Captain W. of the Salvation Army for their reading room and would be much obliged if you would send them a copy.... I'm always pleased to oblige the Salvation Army. According to some of the reviews you have sent me, I ought to be in it."
Throughout 1950s America--and especially in her hometown-the few readers who came across O'Connor's novel were dismayed or shocked by the its violence and its seemingly amoral characters; even two years after publication, still receiving fan letters ("what happened to the guy in the ape suit?") from the scattering of readers who liked it, O'Connor was able to joke, "I have now reached the lunatic fringe and there is no place left for me to go." A half century later, though, O'Connor has the last laugh, because the dark humor that pervades her "Southern Gothic" tale is more readily digested by modern audiences reared on films by the likes of David Lynch and Lars Von Trier
A quick and easy read, "Wise Blood" portrays a series of unforgettably creepy losers in haunting, disturbing scenes. Hazel Motes, a soldier discharged from the army because of an injury, becomes a street-corner preacher for the nihilistic "Church Without Christ" (with a congregation of one). He meets, and can't shake off, a friendless and troubled adolescent, and the two of them subsequently encounter an alcoholic charlatan who pretends to be a blind preacher and who hopes somehow to take advantage of Hazel by getting him to marry his young daughter. Eventually, Hazel acquires a congregant for his atheistic church, but the first disciple rebels and sets up his own ministry. There's so much more that happens, and I certainly won't give away the finale, but those who have already read the book will be intrigued by the knowledge that O'Connor decided how to end the novel after reading Sophocles.
There's no doubt that "Wise Blood" is an influential, memorable novel--just barely short of a classic. Even its fans agree that the book seems disjointed at times--and that's because it was cobbled together from several disparate stories. The first chapter is an expanded version of her Master's thesis, "The Train"; and other chapters are reworked versions of "The Peeler," "The Heart of the Park," and "Enoch and the Gorilla." Sometimes an author can use this approach and jerry-rig previous works into a cohesive whole, but "Wise Blood"--while surely a work of genius--still feels like a patchwork quilt. Fortunately, O'Connor's portrayal of the eccentrics who populate her fictional town of Taulkingham saves the book from the distraction of its all-too-visible seams.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Reminds me of a 14-yr-old trying to write a novel.
By Viktor Wolfe
Not good at all. The way this is written reminds me of a freshman girl in high school making her first attempt at writing a novel, and trying to be "controversial" at the same time. I don't have anything against 14-yr-old girls, but they shouldn't be writing novels. Nice try, but epic fail.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Alienating and intimate
By Kat Zeigler
Stunning beyond words. Creepy, unsettling, religious and nihilistic southern gothic. I recommend this book to anyone with an existential sense of humor and no qualms about being shocked and confused. This is a masterpiece.
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor PDF
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor EPub
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor Doc
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor iBooks
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor rtf
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor Mobipocket
Wise Blood: A Novel (FSG Classics), by Flannery O'Connor Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment