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Jamie's review

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37380.The_Heart_Is_a_Lonely_Hunter?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168914678m/37380.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37380.The_Heart_Is_a_Lonely_Hunter?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3506.Carson_McCullers">Carson McCullers</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4261076?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>Arg.  This book is amazing.  I could never write this book.  Apparently it's heavily autobiographical and the character Mick is based off of McCullers own childhood.  She wrote this book when she was twenty-three (not to be self-oriented, but I'm twenty-five).  She was very interested in music and studied to be a concert pianist, which is why she composed The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in three parts, like a fuge or something piano-oriented (I forget because I'm not a pianist, either.)
<br/>Some how, in three-hundred and seventy-five pages a twenty-three year-old girl from Georgia (who could also play piano really well) managed to write a what I can only describe as the quintessential Southern novel, depicting themes of the grotesque and slightly gothic while touching on culturally relevent issues like World War II and racism, Facism and dictatorship, labor and wage wars, childhood and the disillusionment of adulthood, each man's individual struggle with lonliness and sense of "mute-ness" both realistic and figurative, oh yeah, and poverty in the south.  Right.  It's all there.  Want to have a crash course in Southern writing?  Read this book--this is it.  You could seriously stay afloat in any southern literature course by just referencing this book a lot.  Flannery O'Conner's Good Country People?  Compare it to this--you got yourself a hell of a paper.  Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools?  Contrast.  
<br/>I took Faulkner's Sanctuary off our bookshelves today.  It must be Moses' and I've already done some background reading--stream of conciousness--which gives me Virginia Woolf flash backs...not sure it's going to happen, as much as I love the South.
  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/219514?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Jamie's review
rating:
recommended for: EVERYONE IN THE WORLD

Arg. This book is amazing. I could never write this book. Apparently it's heavily autobiographical and the character Mick is based off of McCullers own childhood. She wrote this book when she was twenty-three (not to be self-oriented, but I'm twenty-five). She was very interested in music and studied to be a concert pianist, which is why she composed The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in three parts, like a fuge or something piano-oriented (I forget because I'm not a pianist, either.)
Some how, in three-hundred and seventy-five pages a twenty-three year-old girl from Georgia (who could also play piano really well) managed to write a what I can only describe as the quintessential Southern novel, depicting themes of the grotesque and slightly gothic while touching on culturally relevent issues like World War II and racism, Facism and dictatorship, labor and wage wars, childhood and the disillusionment of adulthood, each man's individual struggle with lonliness and sense of "mute-nes...more

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message 1: by Nick

01/09/2008 06:35PM

i highly recommend February House if you're interested in carson mccullers and that whole zeitgeist. completely fun and eye-opening.