James's review
Wise Blood: A Novel
by Flannery O'Connor
James's review
Wise Blood: A Novel by Flannery O'Connor
James's review
rating:
bookshelves:
fiction
Despite the inherent pleasure in reading descriptions of Jesus chasing the protaganist, hopping from tree to tree, and other imagerly like...well...certain mummified things being thrown out windows accidentally, this book was disappointing. Of her writing Flannery O'Connor says this,
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”
I've always been more from a different camp, something closer to this poem by Emily Dickinson:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---
In the...more
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”
I've always been more from a different camp, something closer to this poem by Emily Dickinson:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---
In the...more
