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Feb 20, 2011

Paul rated it:

THE INTRO

It often seems that novelists have taken it upon themselves to compile a comprehensive catalogue of all of the thousand and one ways human beings can contrive to be unpleasant to one another.

This novel is one such. Although you may say it’s more about how God contrives to be unpleasant to human beings.

Right at the beginning it’s like going to a big gig – I’m in the audience and we’re all so stoked up that even when we know the band won’t be out for a More...

19 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Bryce rated it:

Everyone should read Flannery O'Connor, but I wouldn't start with this novel. First read some short stories--my favorite is Good Country People. But this novel is well written and very her. I love her bizzareness and the Southernness that just pervades everything she writes. Her characters are so amazingly real and yet completely unreal at the same time. She makes the unbelievable believable without seeming to try.

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2010

Proctodeal rated it:

I read this book after finishing her collected short stories and Wise Blood, her first novel. None of her other work prepared me for this, her cynical, paranoid mind fuck of a novel. Her prose, as always, is clear and excellent, and she once again explores faith and its absence in a way that allows for no easy solutions, no pat answers. But Christ on a crutch is this a difficult book. One of the things I love about her work is the wry sense of humor laced through it, balancing out the dark theme More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 26, 2010

Jesse rated it:

Strange, beautiful, difficult book. The overwhelming religiosity or the book's message is hard to take, but it couldn't exist without it. I appreciated its darkness and subtle brutality, the bleakness of its existential outlook, but I just found myself agreeing with the angry atheist character. It's too O'Connor's credit that she lets each character speak as he needs to, rather than as she wants him to, and they all say what they should in keeping with who they are, rather than what would be mos More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Mar 13, 2009

Charlaralotte rated it:

I first read this in college for a course on Southern Women Writers. Due to the frenetic pace at which I had to ingest the books on the syllabus, I retained nothing about this story except for when the kid comes out of the field and gets into the truck.

Well, a hell of a lot more happens in the book than that. Pretty incredible portrait of three generations ruined by religious fundamentalism. Scary as hell. Each man deals with his "burden" in different ways, and each one in More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 18, 2010

Skylar rated it:

I was struck by this book, but I feel I have not yet understood it. As I read this, I kept thinking of O'Connor's remark in an interview that the south, if not exactly Christ-centered, is "Christ haunted." This is a disturbing, difficult book, and I was left wondering, "What does it all mean?" O’Connor reminds me of another Catholic author, Graham Greene, in her depiction of the Christian religious person as sinful, dark, violent, passionate, vibrantly alive, touched and cons More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 22, 2010

Eddie rated it:

I know virtually nothing about Flannery O’Connor’s life and outlook on life. I know that she was a Catholic and that she raised peacocks and that she died too young, of lupus. That’s about it. She also inherited, either through blood or Southern literary tradition, a fire-and-brimstone vision of life and human passions, and more than even Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away is an expression of this vision.

Seems the only characters that really matter to O’Connor are the extremists, More...

6 comments like (20 people liked it)

Jul 29, 2008

James rated it:

When it comes to religion, I find O'Connor much like Dostoevsky in that she is able to present a series of characters and situations that to me very forcefully illustrate the non-existence of God, while I'm certain she creates them to argue the complete opposite.

So, spoiler alert I guess. Francis Marion Tarwater, a fourteen year old sociopathic (and possibly schizophrenic) murderer with delusions of biblical grandeur is not reached whatsoever by the secular-minded uncle who attempts More...

1 comment like (7 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2009

Ed rated it:

Ancestor of Child of God, the Orchard Keeper, etc. As HST once wrote: "Not another one of these goddam Southern gothic sots!" But I happen to like sots, and Southerners...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Sep 27, 2009

Daniel rated it:

I was told "If you ever have time for a life changing novel...." Thank you Emily. O'Conner should get a posthumous nobel prize for literature just for this book, but more importantly, she should get a nobel prize for experimental physics. When I read her I feel like she is showing me, no pulling on me, with a force of nature.

I just reread this and it got even better. I love the line about Rayber that goes something like "He felt it as an undertow in his blood tha More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 13, 2011

Jane rated it:

Старый религиозный фанатик и шизофреник Мейсон Таруотер, возомнивший себя пророком, похищает своего внучатого племянника, чтобы вырастить его вдали от людей и их пагубного влияния и сделать мальчика таким же пророком. Спустя четырнадцать лет, после смерти деда, мальчик Фрэнсис Марион Таруотер сжигает дом деда вместе с его телом и отправляется на поиски своего дяди Рейбера, учителя, у которого когда-то давно дед его и забрал. Но мальчик не верит теперь ни россказням деда, ни уверениям дяди, что э More...

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Oct 28, 2010

Darryl rated it:

The Violent Bear it Away, O'Connor's second novel, begins with the death of Mason Tarwater, a devoutly and fiercely religious old man who lives deep in the woods outside of a moderate sized town in Tennessee in the mid 20th century. His only surviving "heir" is his great-nephew Francis, a 14 year old boy who prefers to be called Tarwater. Mason kidnapped Tarwater as an infant from his nephew Rayber, the boy's uncle and a schoolteacher who lives in town, in order to baptize and educate More...

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Sep 19, 2010

Rowland rated it:

WALK AWAY IN HELL WITH ME

The Violent Bear It Away, published in New York in 1960, is Flannery O'Connor's darkly humorous Gothic novel about a Southern boy's spiritual awakening. It charts the spiritual and physical journey of fourteen-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater, raised by his great-uncle in the backwoods of Alabama to be a prophet. Tarwater travels to the city, where he struggles against the need to deny his spiritual inheritance and the call of God. O'Connor paints a macabre p More...

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Jan 17, 2010

Boris rated it:

The born again Protestants do not come out looking too good in this tense and scary novel. Its main character, Francis Tarwater, a fourteen year old boy orphaned at birth when his parents were killed in a car wreck, was kidnapped by his great uncle and brought up on a farm in the deep woods of Tennessee. Think of Heidi except the Grandfather is a crazed religious fanatic who feels it his destiny to prophesy about Jesus and baptize as many people as he can get his hands on. When he dies sittin More...

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Jan 19, 2009

Judy rated it:

If you ever wondered why there’s no humor in the Bible or death, Flannery O'Connor found plenty. Masterful writing. Every sentence constructed like a precision instrument.

During his adolescent expectancy of bombastic biblical beckoning and reckoning, young Tarwater veers wildly between the mad extremes of seduction and dissent. He waits for a sign...maybe a burning bush, thunderous voice, or being swallowed and vomited by a whale.

Hilarious examination of religious symboli More...

2 comments like

May 24, 2010

Heather rated it:

Reading Flannery O'Conner for the first time (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away) has allowed me to come to the conclusion that she was truly one of the South's greatest writers. You often hear about Faulkner as being sort of the official bearer of that title (perhaps I am wrong here; if so, I apologize), however, in my opinion, Flannery blows Faulkner out of the water.

The Violent is a book by an author who once wrote about the "protestant haunted South." A Roman Cath More...

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Oct 10, 2010

Ryan rated it:

I certainly liked this more than her first novel, Wise Blood, but it still doesn’t come close to her short stories. All her work centers around religious themes, symbolism, and overall message; but whereas her short stories seem to be universal enough to encompass all ways of living, expose hypocrisy, and present a more satisfying awakening for the characters, I think that her novels present more of a “bash-you-over-the-head” format with characters names, plot devices, and overall narratives lea More...

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Nov 03, 2007

Jesse rated it:

When I read Wise Blood and found myself let down by (and making premature assumptions about) O'Connor-the-novelist, I didn't realize that her two longer works were separated by eight years. On the Flannery O'Connor timeline, that's practically a lifetime. In The Violent Bear It Away, O'Connor treats similar themes and characters to those that were so static and lifeless in Wise Blood and, in her advanced wisdom, gives them actual blood.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 09, 2010

Michael rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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May 11, 2010

Luke rated it:

I love Flannery O'Connor's affection for misanthropes and her unsentimental view of children; her dark sense of humor; her clear-eyed, uncompromising vision. And the blunt, elegant force of her prose? To put it plainly, I can't think of anyone whose writing style I admire more. It's not surprising, then, that on just about every page of The Violent Bear It Away there's a sentence or two that I wish I had written myself.

Like this one: "The Lord out of dust had created him, had ma More...

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Nov 21, 2010

Donnie rated it:

This book made me think a whole lot. Primarily about the ongoing civil war in our country between urban culture and rural culture.

Whereas, many authors seem to come down hard on one side of this war, O'Connor rides the neutral territory between the two in her effort to depict a clash between men: 1 poindexter scientific-like teacher and one deranged bear of a man who is deluded enough to fancy himself a prophet. They have a historical struggle over the fate of a child. The teacher More...

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Sep 06, 2011

Rachel rated it:

This is the kind of book one can devour in a sitting. I've read almost every one of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, but to be honest, I liked this novel better than any of her stories. I felt it was stronger. The scene toward the end when Tarwater is attacked by the seemingly flamboyant gay man (this is coming from me, noticing the detail O'Connor gave to his appearance), didn't work for me at first. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was the breaking point for T More...

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Jun 15, 2011

John rated it:

A well written, very honest illustration of what true, religious faith entails, at least in my own, and apparently O'Connor's perspective. She was a devout Catholic and as an ex-devout Catholic myself, this book struck a strong chord in me (not to assume that all Catholics would feel the same, but personally, my reading of this would have been completely different without my ex-Catholicism).

On a creepy note, I'm pretty sure that if I had read this earlier in life, it would have most ce More...

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Sep 25, 2011

Adam rated it:

Flannery O’Connor’s novels are not the place to start; you must begin with her short stories. That said, however, this novel contains much to delight the Flannery devotee. Some of her usual themes get a fuller treatment, though with markedly less impact than in the stories. She addresses the DIY brand of hellfire Protestantism that emphasizes the Old Testament over the New. And here she even seems to suggest that some of our modern secular thinking, our intellectual nihilism, is the offsprin More...

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Jul 08, 2009

Joseph rated it:

This could have so easily just been a simple allegory of the conflict between faith and reason, but O'Connor does a wonderful job of subverting expectations while simultaneously broaching a number of other issues that spring organically from her characterization of the people who populate her strange little world.

The Violent Bear it Away is a serious work, but I think that what makes her such a great writer is her innate comic sensibilities. Even when she's not being funny, she has More...

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Apr 28, 2009

Anina rated it:

I think I am about to embark on a wild love affair with Flannery O'Connor, although I think she does not have a lot of other books...

This book is about religon and destruction. The main character, a 15 year old boy named Marion, has been raised in the 1930's in extremely rural Tennesee by a religous kook Uncle who keeps him out of school and raises him to believe he will be a prophet. Paralell to this story is that of a schoolteacher with a handicapped son from whom Marion was stol More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 05, 2009

chris rated it:

After reading all of O'connor's short stories, reading a novel by her makes me a bit impatient. She is so brilliant and disturbing, but in a novel, there's more of a waiting for something to happen, where as in her stories, they were immediately present. However, by the time I was at the last third of this book, there was enough horror and brilliance to go around, and the writing throughout made it less tedious than when other authors have the same sort of slow build. O'Connor's beliefs about More...

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Jul 06, 2011

Danielle rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Mar 14, 2011

Paul rated it:

i think of this much in the way i think of pedro the lion - it is an honest, "non-devout" look at the struggles of faith and devotion. tarwater, his uncle rayber, and his great-uncle mason all struggle deeply with a longing inside them of "something else." and through the lives and choices of these men, it is apparent that the issue is not simply acceptance or rejection of some outside ideal. the meaning is only found in making the choice. there is a gentle balance between ta More...

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Aug 05, 2008

Jenn rated it:

I decided that these hot summer days called for some good Southern literature. Ms. O'Connor sure was a crazy ol' thing, but in my opinion, that's what makes her so great.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

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