User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
After reading just a few pages of this book I kept thinking to myself Hazel Motes is doomed.
First of all he is the lead character in a Flannery O'Connor novel. The only thing that could be worst is if he were the lead character in a Jim Thompson novel. The poor bastard hasn't got a chance. For one thing he's got the wrong look to him.
"His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression on his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded." Haze decides that he is an atheist and to prove he is irreligious he sleeps with loose women. Not with any passion or conviction, but with the hope that he can finally reduce the pull of the church on his soul. Much to his irritation people take him for a preacher. People see piety in his hat and his jacket. He is quiet and odd, and people can almost smell the religious conviction boiling beneath the surface of his skin.
He starts his own
religion I mean anti-religion. The church Without Christ. He preaches in the street from the bumper of his Essex car. He decides to seduce a fifteen year old girl, Sabbath Hawks daughter of a "blind" preacher, to prove again to himself what a bad, bad boy he is, but recoils from the prospect when he discovers she is a nymphomaniac.
A local con man, Hoover Shoats, feels that Haze is really mucking up the whole point of starting a new religion,
making money, and first attempts to join up with Motes, but when he is rebuffed finds a Haze look-alike right down to the car he drives. Shoats starts up his own campaign to save the souls of the needy, and extract a few bills in the process. Haze is incensed and takes drastic action to eliminate the competition.
"If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it'll hunt you down and kill you."Haze's
friend acquaintance, Enoch Emery believes he is guided by a spiritual power of his blood.
"He had wise blood like his daddy. Enoch is convinced that Haze needs a new Jesus to make his religion complete. He steals a desiccated mummy from where he works, and gives it to Haze. Haze is of course disgusted by the creature and tears it to shreds. Enoch, a few cards short of a full deck, missed the point that it was the Church
WITHOUT Christ.
When Haze discovers that Preacher Asa Hawks faked his own blindness I could swear I heard the last snaps of the ropes holding Motes's mind in place come loose.
"He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him." Motes felt the loss of the "blind" preacher acutely, and decided there was only one recourse for him to achieve a new awareness. He becomes a martyr. He blinds himself with lye. He puts glass and rocks in his shoes and wraps barbed wire around his chest. As it turns out Haze, as suspected, is not an atheist, but actually has more in common with the most fanatical of the religious ranks, the Flagellants than he does with atheism.
This is a fast read, with more humor than what I expressed in this review. O'Connor pokes a stick at the twisted black parts of our minds, and lets them loose in her fiction. Like everything I've read by her I came away from the experience a little queasy, my convictions stirred up, and feeling the overpowering urge to go hug a puppy.
Like I said at the beginning it wasn't as if Hazel Motes had much of chance. He thrashed away at life trying desperately to escape, trying to see his way clear to a new existence, a higher calling, and freer life. He took away his vision, but to Haze, by doing so, he opened up more possibilities.
"Do you think, Mr. Motes," his landlady asked hoarsely, "that when you're dead you're blind?"
"I hope so," he said after a minute.
"Why?" she asked, staring at him.
After a while he said, "If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold more."If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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Rating: really liked it
Oh Jesus! I feel compelled to cry out, thus involuntarily showing my cultural heritage that comes out in everyday language despite growing up and living among atheists without any relation to the creation myths of Christianity.
This book is horrible, and very, very well written. Describing the ugly reality of a young man, Hazel Motes, who is deeply tainted by the moral preaching of a church he tries to shake off, it offers a panorama of confused, scared, aggressive people. They all try to make their own ideas more valid by forcing them upon others, using the persuasive, abusive, violent vocabulary of missionary Christianity, as well as its notion that there is only one truth in the world, and they themselves are in possession of it and have every right to impose it on others and even commit crimes as long as they are within the realm of their conviction.
The intention of the novel evades me. Does the author want to show the hollow and and immoral essence of religion? Or of atheism? It is populated with people who are too narrow-minded to see more than two possibilities: Church of Christ, or Church Without Christ. In both scenarios, the definitions of sin, redemption, preaching and mission stay the same, as do the means to spread the (Anti-)Church’s messages. Hazel Motes is convinced to be an atheist, but he in fact creates an exact mirror of the religion within which he was growing up. Sadly, that means he is not free at all, but retains everything he rejects, in a negative affirmation.
When catastrophe occurs, it leaves me sad, seeing an eternal vicious circle of angry, righteous people continuing to pester each other with Christianity’s arrogant absolutism, or its antithesis. In a way, it reminded me of Marilynne Robinson’s Home, a novel written in beautiful prose, delivering realistic portraits of people who do not see that it is possible not only NOT to believe in Christianity’s dogma, but also to be quite happy, and free of guilt outside its limits. In Robinson’s as in O’Connor’s world, you can be an atheist, but you are a distinctly CHRISTIAN atheist committing the SIN of NON-BELIEF, and you stay within the boundaries of Christianity’s ancient morality and mythical foundations. There is an implication of ethical failure in atheism. You are surely marked by hell, even if you do not believe in it. In Home, the main character keeps apologising incessantly for not living up to the Christian values, and in "Wise Blood", Hazel Motes lives Christianity by challenging its teachings, like a two-year-old doing exactly what mummy told him not to do.
For me, it was hard to identify with that mindset, but I do acknowledge the irony and wit with which the author illustrated a quite common scenario within monolithic, monotheistic communities. No real detachment is possible from a religion that has immersed itself in every single facet of daily life and even in the language used to describe feelings.
I listened to an outstanding audio book version, and sometimes the aggressive shouting and yelling became almost unbearable, making the latent violence in the characters more evident still than if I had read it silently, skimming through the rants.
As for the comical effects: I could not enjoy them, having seen too much demagoguery and cheap propaganda work out beautifully in the past couple of years. Too dangerous at the moment to be funny. Maybe I will change my mind about that.
Rating: really liked it
Jesus! What a strange book. One guy who lost his faith starts the Church without Christ. The novel gathers some strange characters. The writing is sometimes in jest, other times surreal. I appreciated the novel more than I enjoyed it so I went for the middle rating.
Rating: really liked it
Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's first book and it is a beautiful, brutal work of art. We are introduced to Hazel Motes on a train with his army-issued duffel bag being annoying by the woman next to him on the train. He is completely dislocated, as we see in the first sentence:
"Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the end of the car."He is on the border between this life and some other death:
"In his half sleep he though he was lying was like lying in a coffin."We would probably nowadays recognize him as a victim of PTSD, but in this book, he just seems eternally lost. He refuses to communicate with the overly-talkative Mrs. Hitchcock in the train and instead gets obsessed with the black porter who claims to be from Chicago but whom Hazel believes is from his own hometown Eastrod. He had previously visited there and discovered that his house was destroyed, decayed, obliterated and his mother and any other family or earthly attachment simply gone.
He goes to "the city" which turns out to be a dead end small town called Taulkinham where he meets the other primary characters in the story: the blind preacher with his 15y old daughter Sabbath, the listless and probably retarded if not insane Enoch, and the shyster Hoover Shoats. He immediately sees through the blind preacher's lack of belief and starts the Church Without Christ after buying a "rat-colored" car completely unfit for the road.
The atmosphere in the novel is that of the religiously obsessive South and the language reminds one of O'Connor's primary influences: William Faulkner. Her unique style is quieter than Faulkner's, preferring to describe in detail the absurdities of life in the "city" and the completely erratic psyches of her characters. The narrative frame shifts from Hazel to Sabbath to Enoch back and forth before settling on his forlorn landlady, Mrs. Flood. Ultimately, none of the characters really achieves salvation or relief in the bleakness of their lives. One wonders however if Hazel gets some kind of enlightenment towards the end when he says,
"If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold more."I think that Ms. O'Connor was trying to show that in the insane acts of Hazel (which include murder) and his ultimate mimicry of the blind preacher, that truth cannot be obtained by looking for it in others (as both Enoch and Sabbath and Mrs. Flood do with their devotion to Hazel at various times in the book), but can only come from oneself. As Mrs. Flood observes at the end of the book,
She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn't begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, father and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light."I read this book in high school and was blown away (having been myself raised in a Southern religious atmosphere to a degree, and found this second reading four decades later to be as illuminating and engrossing as I before. O'Connor sadly did not write very much, but what she did write contains a universe of sentiment and pain that is rarely evoked with such realism and as pitiless a gaze. Highly recommended.
Rating: really liked it
(Book 522 from 1001 books) - Wise Blood, Flannery O’ConnorWise Blood is the first novel by American author Flannery O'Connor, published in 1952.
Recently discharged from service in World War II and surviving on a government pension for unspecified battle wounds, Hazel Motes returns to his family home in Tennessee to find it abandoned. Leaving behind a note claiming a chifforobe as his private property, Motes boards a train for Taulkinham.
The grandson of a traveling preacher, Motes grew up struggling with doubts regarding salvation and original sin; following his experiences at war, Motes has become an avowed atheist and intends to spread a gospel of anti religion. Despite his aversion to all trappings of Christianity, he constantly contemplates theological issues and finds himself compelled to purchase a suit and hat that cause others to mistake him for a minister.
شهود - فلنری اوکانر (نشر نو) ادبیات آمریکا؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز نوزدهم ماه نوامبر سال1989میلادی
عنوان: شهود؛ نویسنده: فلانری اوکانر؛ مترجم: آذر عالی پور؛ تهران، نشر نو، سال1367؛ در236ص؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، نشر دنیای نو، سال1382؛ شابک9646564763؛ در216ص؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م
اثر را سرکار خانم «آذر عالی پور»، مترجم رسمی دادگستری، در سال1367هجری خورشیدی ترجمه کرده اند؛ داستان «شهود (خون خردمندانه)» درباره ی جوانی به نام «هیزل موتس» است، که به تازگی با پایان جنگ جهانی دوم به خانه برگشته، و به محل زندگی قدیمی خویش که اکنون متروکه شده میرود؛ این شهر برای او یادآور یادمانهای بگذشته ی ایشان است، او در خانواده ای مذهبی بزرگ شده، و پدربزرگش یک مُبلغ مذهبی بوده، ولی «هیزل» اکنون یک بی دین است و تصمیم میگیرد دینی بدون مسیح را پرآوازه کند و…؛
داستانی به سبک «گوتیک نو»، و با فضاهای ناباورانه و شوم است؛ فضای «گوتیک» به هیچوجه برای ایجاد هیجان، یا هراس آفریده نشده است؛ نویسنده خوانشگر را، آگاهانه به فضاهای خنده دار، و جنون آمیز میکشاند، تا بینش خویش را، درباره ی پیش پا افتادگی جامعه ی شهری، و بی بند و باری، و بیخیالی، و گمگشتگی مردمان را، به خوانشگرش بنمایاند؛ این رمان در اصل با نگرش فلسفی و عرفانی نگارش شده است؛ قهرمان رمان، دچار آشتی ناپذیری اندیشه ی خویش، درباره ی «مسیحیت» است؛ تضادی که همانند موجودی سمج، در ژرفای ذهن او، نهفته شده است، و لحظه ای او را، آرام نمیگذارد؛ «هیزل موتس» قهرمان داستان، آغاز به فاشگویی دیدگاه خویش، در میان مردمان میکند، در حالیکه خود، همچنان سردرگم و پریشان است؛ نویسنده ی کتاب، اصالت قهرمان خود را، در تلاش وی، برای رهایی از آشفتگی فکری میدانند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 22/02/1400هجری خورشیدی، 20/12/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
Hapless IronyFlannery O'Connor was a woman who knew her world. Not just the gentile facade of a world but the nits and grits and dirt under the finger nails world of poor black folk and edgy white trash, of the huckster and the street beggar, the good ole boy and the smug gossip, the person of faith and the person of lost faith, the arch prostitute and her bumbling client. They are misfits, defectives, near-psychotics, needy obsessives, fanatics.
O'Connor knew how these people act in this world, and how they speak, and, more important, what they are completely unaware and incapable of. They don't know how to act and speak in many circumstances. Not necessarily because they are uneducated or inexperienced but because the culture of which they are a part demands their role of ignorance and ineptitude. It's in their blood. They have a place and best stay put.
Call it the Old South for convenience or American Gothic for legitimacy. But this world is the one in which we all live. We might shiver a bit at the casual racism of a Hazel Motes, or chuckle at his use of a toilet wall in a public convenience as a local yellow pages. Nonetheless, our everyday language is equally thoughtless. And the evening television news is hardly any less gossip-ridden and tawdry than the scrawls in the average men's room. Enoch Emery's pointless attachment to Haze and his bizarre interpretation of what's needed to help him succeed are symptoms of an insanity equally evident in recent American political rallies.
The suspicion-laden, functionally autistic interactions we have every day - on public transport, walking down the street, in run of the mill commercial transactions - are essentially no different from those of O’Connor’s country bumpkins. But this is how she gets us to pay attention to them, by using the bumpkins and rubes to make her point fairly painlessly. But that point is no less clear as a consequence: no one escapes life undamaged; and the damage only gets repaired through other (damaged) folk.
Despite the apparent horror of the book, it is her underlying, soft, meticulously articulated irony that makes O'Connor so hypnotically attractive to me. A rusted iron glove filled with scented cotton rather than a fist. But oh what an after-effect. The blow comes after one stops reading. Understanding comes without an argument but through her so precise hints and suggestions. What unites us as human beings is not some abstract essence or capacity but a thorough-going and fateful haplessness. Through her we become conscious of being subject to the vagaries of our time and place. Paradoxically, it is an appreciation of this haplessness - not religious belief or its absence - that offers freedom.
Rating: really liked it
Ever since
The Ship of Fools by
Sebastian Brant and
Praise of Folly by
Erasmus the human foolishness keeps disturbing our minds.
“The only way to the truth is through blasphemy, but do you care?”
With her everlasting masterpiece
Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor managed to add to this fertile theme truckloads of new stuff.
Wise Blood is a detailed story of fools’ misadventures and misfortunes.
He had left it when he was eighteen years old because the army had called him. He had thought at first he would shoot his foot and not go. He was going to be a preacher like his grandfather and a preacher can always do without a foot. A preacher’s power is in his neck and tongue and arm.
These are solid beliefs of the protagonist.
Sometimes he didn’t think, he only wondered; then before long he would find himself doing this or that, like a bird finds itself building a nest when it hasn’t actually been planning to.
And these are behaviour patterns of his loyal satellite.
When one hasn’t enough intellect to think one starts using instincts of one’s wise blood…
Flannery O'Connor stays completely unsympathetic and wittily murderous all the way through the novel.
Society needs its fools with all their foolish ways otherwise there would be no scapegoats.
Rating: really liked it
Reading Road Trip 2020Current location:
Tennessee“I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.”I did a
lot of babysitting, in the mid-80s. I was a young teen, not dating yet, and I was enamored with children. Families who wanted me as their sitter would frequently try and secure me for that coveted Saturday night date night by offering all types of perks. The family that finally earned my loyalty for that regular Saturday night commitment for several years was the one that offered two children who went to bed easily, a fresh box of my favorite type of Entenmann's doughnuts. . . and HBO.
To be honest, the doughnuts and the premium movie channel were all I wanted. I wasn't even interested in my hourly pay. As soon as those little darlings would rub their eyes and head to bed, I'd grab one perfectly formed chocolate glazed doughnut, then curl up in my favorite recliner and tune in to 2-4 hours of soft porn, inappropriate stand-up routines, and vulgar comedies. God, it was heaven.
It was there on that recliner that I first discovered
Porky's, then
Porky's Revenge!,
The Last American Virgin, and
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (among others). Not to mention Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, and Richard Pryor. Then, one night, it was there on that recliner that I mistakenly discovered
Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
I remember it all too well. I thought I had signed up for a fun evening of full-frontal nudity and some groovy disco moves, but instead I got. . . the end of the world as I knew it.
Innocence lost. . . forever. Poof!
I swear to you, I remember exactly how I was sitting up, rigid, on that brown recliner chair when my employers entered the room to drive me home.
I didn't talk to them, was unable to focus on the money they gave me, and I couldn't close my eyes to sleep properly for days. Before that movie, I hadn't known that life could be so cruel for some people, so violent or shocking. I hadn't known that a man could ever do to a woman what that man did to that woman in
Goodbar (based on a true story, by the way).
It's devastating, but true. . . our society has sociopaths peppered throughout it. Some are just malcontents and misanthropes, but others are rapists and killers with zero conscience.
And, sorry to tell you folks, but most of these types are men.
Annie Proulx and Alice Walker write about these men, so they've either known more than their share or their experiences here on earth have influenced their vision.
But, who would have guessed that a young woman named Flannery O'Connor knew about these types of men, already, in 1949, and had the chops to write about them?
Damn it, Ms. O'Connor. Just thinking about you handing this to your editor at the age of 27, at the end of the 1940s makes me shake.
I could feel the power of the story from the first page and I could sense, intuitively, the influence that this 236 page book has had on both modern novel writing and filmmaking.
This is a startling and terrifying story filled with sociopaths, all, and only two missteps at the novel's end reduced it from a five to a four star read for me. But, truly, it is
almost perfect.
I can not recommend it enough to all writers and riders of the edge.
Rating: really liked it
The universe of Flannery O'Connor, born in the South of the United States, is dark, prosaic, and supernatural. In this novel, written in 1952, the main character, Hazel Motes, in his twenties and the son of a pastor, returns from the Second World War. He discovers that his village has been abandoned and becomes the church's preacher without Christ. His career puts him in touch with a simple-minded person who hides a great secret within him, a false blind man preaching the good word and his daughter, Sabbath, prematurely corrupted by misery. Still, the only novelist to be endowed with lucidity. Half crooks, half mystics, all these characters search for an absolute that stubbornly hides behind their horizon.
At the start of the reading, the precise and colourful style of Flannery O'Connor used humour and mockery of a dull everyday life, to the point of being desperate. But we gradually fall into a complex reality, a little crazy and disturbing, like the heavenly and miserable atmosphere in which the poor whites bathe, abandoned to the dereliction of an unbridled religiosity and the implacable rigour of solitude. And destitution.
Yet their quest continues unabated until deliverance. Will this fact be continued to find?
Flannery O'Connor, the Catholic author in a Protestant world, sculpts texts with astonishing freedom of metaphysical questioning. However, there is no doubt that Hazel Motes, despite his aggressive atheism, is not the staggering spokesperson.
She is undoubtedly one of the masters of American literature.
Rating: really liked it
A very strange book. Weird and disturbing. Not for everyone. Still a masterpiece.
Rating: really liked it
One of the most wonderful, disturbing stories ever told. I have never been so discombobulated by a book. Wild, audacious, bizarre, outrageous fun. Not for all audiences.
Rating: really liked it
Certainly the "Blue Velvet" in the literary realm, "Wise Blood" has an OVERWHELMING SIMPLICITY that seems truly out of this world. O'Connor expertly places all these annoying wind-up toys near each other--see them bump and grind and sometimes line up in a maniacal precision that repeats and repeats-- and what we get is a very complex nightmare, almost hitting the true nerve of (my personal champion of all literary categories) Southern Goth. It is true brethren to the Faulkner's masterpiece, "As I Lay Dying"--a true mesh of the best of Pynchon (the most iconographic that is), the silliest of Beckett, er, maybe Pinter, & (why not?) the most macabre of Hawthorne... but a true original by All rights.
P.S. The creepiness of the main, I would label, "monolith"--that is, the shriveled man in the MVSEVM--is in itself ingenious & I totally head-over-heels love it!!!!
Rating: really liked it
Fresh from a stint in the army, Hazel Motes starts a religion out of spite and gets entangled with a preacher named Asa Hawks and his teenage daughter, Sabbath.
I recently read the exquisite The Summer that Melted Everything and kept thinking of Flannery O'Connor. I already had this on my Kindle so I gave it a shot.
Wise Blood is the tale of Hazel Motes and his crisis of faith. Something happened during the war that shattered Hazel Motes' childhood dream of being a preacher and now he's taking it out on the rest of the world. While running around generally being an asshole, he encounters colorful characters like Enoch Emery, the boy with the Wise Blood of the title, Asa Hawks and his daughter, and Hoover Shoates, a con-man who knows a good thing when he sees it.
I'd say Wise Blood was the Rise and Fall of Hazel Motes but there wasn't much of a rise. Maybe The Continued Decline of Hazel Motes would be more appropriate. The book starts out bleak and just keeps getting bleaker. However, there were some laughs despite the bleakness, many of them at Enoch Emery's expense.
Flannery O'Connor writes some powerful stuff. Her writing reminds me of Jim Thompson's, whom she probably had angry sex with up against a dumpster behind a bar at some point.
Wise Blood's tale of religious obsession made me uncomfortable at times. However, I didn't think Wise Blood was nearly as good as her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Her short stories were much more focused and quicker to the punch. Three out of five stars.
Rating: really liked it
Haze Motes. Visionary or false prophet? Look closer, he may simply be a tortured soul who has lost his faith. He believes he is beyond redemption, and wouldn't care to have it anyway.
Enoch Emery, he of the wise blood. Taking chances on the meaning of things. Mayhap
he is the visionary, more probably he is just desperate for a friend.
Having grown up hearing the country dialect used here, I will say it was pitch perfect. Published in 1952, this novel is almost as old as I am. Sadly, I was not able to sync up with it, and fear I may have missed the point of the whole exercise. Interesting characters, though.
Rating: really liked it
"…that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption...there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar…”Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes, a recently discharged twenty-something war vet who returns home to Tennessee to find the town abandoned and his childhood home dilapidated and deserted. So, he leaves the town behind and takes a train to Taulkinham, where he meets the crude, ignorant and possibly OCD/mentally ill Enoch Emery. Together, they encounter a blind preacher turned sometimes street beggar, Asa Hawks, and his 15-year-old daughter, Sabbath (her name in itself an ironic play on the themes of this novel). Motes becomes entangled with the Hawks’ as he embarks on the notion of atheism and—fully embracing it partially out of resistance to Asa Hawks’ idea that Motes needs to repent for his sins—starts his own church, the Church Without Christ. As he starts preaching his message of salvation through truth from the nose of his old car, he encounters a street-preaching swindler, Hoover Shoats, who steals Motes’ idea of the Church Without Christ and uses it to get rich, also preaching a varied version of that message on the streets, which effectively pushes Motes out of his own market and idea. When he finds out that Asa Hawks is also a crook, he takes up with his daughter, who proclaims of him:
“I said look at those pee-can eyes and go crazy, girl! That innocent look don’t hide a thing, he’s just pure filthy right down to the guts, like me. The only difference is I like being that way and he don’t. Soon after, Motes’ disillusionment starts its descent into completeness, as a series of events pushes him to enraged murder and finally to self-mutilization and recluseness. Meanwhile, Enoch Emery’s story line branches off into him becoming enamored with, and then literally turning into, a gorilla, which came off as a little slapstick in its presentation and fell flat for me as a whole.
Wise Blood seemed to hit the ground running toward something definite and profound from the very first page. Rushing toward an abandoned home in Tennessee, then rushing toward Hazel Motes’ warped coming-of-age prophecy of atheism and a “new jesus” (yes, lowercase). O’Connor hit on salient, hard-hitting moments of ironic verity and outright cultural authenticity in true Southern Gothic fashion: Christianity versus atheism in the post-war South, Christian hypocrisy, redemption, isolation, and coming of age. In that way, it had its moments of dazzling literary insight. The characters were, for the most part, well realized, each offering a necessary ingredient to this Gothic tradition. And yet.
A little-known fact of this this novel is that it was originally not a novel at all but a collection of short stories (published in various publications). The first chapter of
Wise Blood was an expanded version of Flannery O’Connor’s Master’s thesis, and several of the other chapters were reworked versions that she revised so that they could all fit together as a novel. Hence,
Wise Blood was born, but the thing is, it didn’t work 100% as a fluid work of literature. For the most part, it did. For the most part, this novel read as a cohesive story with fully realized narrative arcs and satirical if not poignant realizations throughout. Yet, Enoch Emery’s character dragged down the latter part of the novel, because the short story that he derived from, "Enoch and the Gorilla," did not fit with the theme of the rest of the novel. It felt disparate, like it didn’t belong, which, of course, is true since it was originally a separate short story, but it should not have felt that way to the reader.
O’Connor’s use of vernacular was spectacular.
The sense of setting was complete.
And yet, though we make a habit of saying here in the South, “One monkey don’t stop no show,” in this case, it certainly did. 3.5 stars ***
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