false 1780763 32 5 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1188239831m/1780763.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1780763.The_Heart_Is_A_Lonely_Hunter 3506 Carson McCullers 15991 1661 0 2009-07-06T13:58:02-07:00 983010 307 2009-07-06T13:58:02-07:00 I love this book. I'm trying desperately to take my time with it. 0 2009-07-01T07:33:38-07:00 960608 151 2009-07-01T07:33:38-07:00 4 2009-06-29T10:22:41-07:00 951464 2009-06-29T15:54:36-07:00 86 2009-06-29T10:22:41-07:00 5 8 false Fri Jul 03 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Jun 24 09:23:13 -0700 2009 Fri Jul 10 13:41:18 -0700 2009
I am the first to admit that I have very little firsthand knowledge of the Southern United States. What I do know is informed through the media I consume and the history we were all taught in school (though, apparently, that history is subjective as well; see "The War of Northern Aggression"). In fact, I could honestly claim that I know more about other continents than I do about the South. As such, I don't feel too comfortable claiming that there is a darkness that seems to live in the land, seeping out to inspire random acts of cruelty or violence and spread waves of intangible dread among its inhabitants (notice that it didn't actually stop me from making said claim). Whether or not this darkness is inherent to the South or McCullers is just tapping into her own personal ennui, reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter often made me feel as though I were journeying upriver to listen to Kurtz exhort me to "exterminate all the brutes."

The book follows four different people and the dreams for a different/better life that they all hold close as a means of escaping the pervasive loneliness which always seems ready to swallow them whole. For Mick Kelly, a precocious young teen cut in the mold of To Kill A Mockingbird's Scout Finch, this dream is of being able to compose and play the music that infects her mind. For the wandering Jake Blount it is of inspiring the downtrodden workers to strike at the mills to improve their conditions. Cafe owner Biff Brannon is ashamed of his creative impulses and the maternal feelings he carries for the children of his patrons and Dr. Copeland is so consumed by his desire to inspire his fellow blacks to greatness that he refuses to take time off to treat the tuberculosis which is slowly killing him.

The lynchpin of all these dreamers is the enigmatic Mr. Singer. A deaf-mute in a city of speakers, Mr. Singer offers himself up as the perfect tabula rasa for the four dreamers. In the small room that he rents from Mick's parents, he sits as calm and quiet as the Buddha as each in their turn visit and pour out their dreams, desires and passions to him- the perfect opinionless tabula rasa. My heart ached for all of these characters as they struggled with realising their dreams and the compromises they all made as they ran into the hard wall of reality. Yet it was Mr. Singer that I cared for above all. Always receptive of others yet unable to share his own thoughts, his only confessor his former roommate who is now interred at an asylum. He is wrapped in a bubble of isolation and it is his loneliness that has stuck with me the hardest since finishing the book.

It's been five days since I finished this book yet I can't bring myself to put it back on my shelf, to really believe that my time with these achingly real people has come to an end. My copy is dog-eared now from me folding down the corners of pages to record a choice description or bit of dialogue and I keep referring back to it in order to make sure that I am not bastardizing McCullers' exquisite prose. It may not have been listed on the 1001 List (but 12 different Ian McEwan novels made the cut?!?) but this is absolutely a book that you must read before you die. Its beauty and its sorrow can't help but touch you.]]>