Seth's review
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
Seth's review
rating:
recommended for: fans of: tom waits/raymond carver/ernest hemingway/william faulkner
status: Read in October, 2007
rating:
recommended for: fans of: tom waits/raymond carver/ernest hemingway/william faulkner
status: Read in October, 2007
o'connor runs a funny path in her stories. the themes are a sort of crypto-southern gothic with spartan sentence structure and diction. but that is what gives them a piercing sense, as well: with everything so barren, a two-sentence description of the sun setting over barren branches of trees in front of the house in the middle of nowhere can explode into meaning that might elsewhere take pages to build up. this may sound like someone overintellectualizing lazy writing, but read it yourself and i think you'll see what i mean. o'connor strikes me as the kind of person who could have thought of no greater pleasure than to turn over rocks in order to see the slimy things crawling underneath, and let the surprises come where they may.
