Wise Blood

by Flannery O'Connor

(This is an alternate-cover edition for ISBN 9780374530631)

The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom.

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.

This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Southern Gothic, Novels, Literature, Gothic, Southern

238 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 1952

About the author

Critics note novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and short stories, collected in such works as A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), of American writer Mary Flannery O'Connor for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style.

The Georgia state college for women educated O’Connor, who then studied writing at the Iowa writers' workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia.

O’Connor wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her powers.

Survivors published her essays were published in Mystery and Manners (1969). Her Complete Stories , published posthumously in 1972, won the national book award for that year. Survivors published her letters in The Habit of Being (1979). In 1988, the Library of America published Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor, the first so honored postwar writer.

People in an online poll in 2009 voted her Complete Stories as the best book to win the national book award in the six-decade history of the contest.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foolishness isn’t a vice… It is an attribute of human consciousness… Even after such timeless masterpieces as The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant and Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam the theme of foolishness remains far from being exhausted and it keeps disturbing our minds.
With her everlasting masterwork Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor managed to add to the fertile subject of idiocy the truckloads of new stuff… She is totally scornful and wittily murderous…
Wise Blood is a detailed and evocative treatise on the ambitions and pursuits of fools.
The protagonist is fraught with solid beliefs and his faith is of steel…

He had left home when he was eighteen years old because the army had called him. He had thought at first he would shoot his foot and not go. He was going to be a preacher like his grandfather and a preacher can always do without a foot. A preacher’s power is in his neck and tongue and arm.

He isn’t alone… He has a loyal brother in arms whose behavioral patterns are dictated from on high…

Sometimes he didn’t think, he only wondered; then before long he would find himself doing this or that, like a bird finds itself building a nest when it hasn’t actually been planning to.

When one hasn’t enough brains to think one starts using instincts of one’s wise blood…
Society needs its fools with all their foolish ways otherwise there would be no scapegoats.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading just a few pages of this book I kept thinking to myself Hazel Motes is doomed.



First of all he is the lead character in a Flannery O'Connor novel. The only thing that could be worst is if he were the lead character in a Jim Thompson novel. The poor bastard hasn't got a chance. For one thing he's got the wrong look to him. "His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression on his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded."

Haze decides that he is an atheist and to prove he is irreligious he sleeps with loose women. Not with any passion or conviction, but with the hope that he can finally reduce the pull of the church on his soul. Much to his irritation people take him for a preacher. People see piety in his hat and his jacket. He is quiet and odd, and people can almost smell the religious conviction boiling beneath the surface of his skin.

He starts his own religion I mean anti-religion. The church Without Christ. He preaches in the street from the bumper of his Essex car. He decides to seduce a fifteen year old girl, Sabbath Hawks daughter of a "blind" preacher, to prove again to himself what a bad, bad boy he is, but recoils from the prospect when he discovers she is a nymphomaniac.

A local con man, Hoover Shoats, feels that Haze is really mucking up the whole point of starting a new religion, making money, and first attempts to join up with Motes, but when he is rebuffed finds a Haze look-alike right down to the car he drives. Shoats starts up his own campaign to save the souls of the needy, and extract a few bills in the process. Haze is incensed and takes drastic action to eliminate the competition. "If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it'll hunt you down and kill you."

Haze's friend acquaintance, Enoch Emery believes he is guided by a spiritual power of his blood. "He had wise blood like his daddy. Enoch is convinced that Haze needs a new Jesus to make his religion complete. He steals a desiccated mummy from where he works, and gives it to Haze. Haze is of course disgusted by the creature and tears it to shreds. Enoch, a few cards short of a full deck, missed the point that it was the Church WITHOUT Christ.

When Haze discovers that Preacher Asa Hawks faked his own blindness I could swear I heard the last snaps of the ropes holding Motes's mind in place come loose. "He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him." Motes felt the loss of the "blind" preacher acutely, and decided there was only one recourse for him to achieve a new awareness. He becomes a martyr. He blinds himself with lye. He puts glass and rocks in his shoes and wraps barbed wire around his chest. As it turns out Haze, as suspected, is not an atheist, but actually has more in common with the most fanatical of the religious ranks, the Flagellants than he does with atheism.

This is a fast read, with more humor than what I expressed in this review. O'Connor pokes a stick at the twisted black parts of our minds, and lets them loose in her fiction. Like everything I've read by her I came away from the experience a little queasy, my convictions stirred up, and feeling the overpowering urge to go hug a puppy.

Like I said at the beginning it wasn't as if Hazel Motes had much of chance. He thrashed away at life trying desperately to escape, trying to see his way clear to a new existence, a higher calling, and freer life. He took away his vision, but to Haze, by doing so, he opened up more possibilities.

"Do you think, Mr. Motes," his landlady asked hoarsely, "that when you're dead you're blind?"
"I hope so," he said after a minute.
"Why?" she asked, staring at him.
After a while he said, "If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold more."

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[Adina ( back from Vacay…slowly recovering) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jesus! What a strange book. One guy who lost his faith starts the Church without Christ. The novel gathers some strange characters. The writing is sometimes in jest, other times surreal. I appreciated the novel more than I enjoyed it so I went for the middle rating.

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious cross between Charles Dickens and A Confederacy of Dunces

If you want a warm, highly predictable, reverent book with comfy, flat, one-dimensional characters, please put this one down, and we can find you something else to read.

Wise Blood is an intense yet thoughtful and humorous thrill ride. Hazel Motes is a wounded veteran who is traveling to a new city, zealously trying to forge his own identity and find his place in the world.

If you like imperfect characters, O’Connor has you covered. Often, when the characters are talking to each other, they aren’t really listening, intent on their own aims, which gives the book a very realistic feel.

O’Connor is a master of psychology when Hazel Motes constantly talks about how he is not a preacher so naturally all conversations turns towards that direction. And, she nailed my sentiments on living in the city with this quote, “Only objection I got to Taulkinham is there’s too many people on the streets, he said confidentially. “Look like all they want to do is knock you down.”

From the first chapter, O’Connor’s brilliance is on display—she doesn’t over explain things even though her characters have rich backstories.

Riotously unpredictable, teeming with gorgeous quotes, and filled with so much symbolism professors will be happy for generations. Begs for an immediate reread.

“The truth don’t matter to you.”

How much I spent:
Softcover text – $7.69 on Amazon
Audiobook – Free through Libby

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[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh Jesus! I feel compelled to cry out, thus involuntarily showing my cultural heritage that comes out in everyday language despite growing up and living among atheists without any relation to the creation myths of Christianity.

This book is horrible, and very, very well written. Describing the ugly reality of a young man, Hazel Motes, who is deeply tainted by the moral preaching of a church he tries to shake off, it offers a panorama of confused, scared, aggressive people. They all try to make their own ideas more valid by forcing them upon others, using the persuasive, abusive, violent vocabulary of missionary Christianity, as well as its notion that there is only one truth in the world, and they themselves are in possession of it and have every right to impose it on others and even commit crimes as long as they are within the realm of their conviction.

The intention of the novel evades me. Does the author want to show the hollow and and immoral essence of religion? Or of atheism? It is populated with people who are too narrow-minded to see more than two possibilities: Church of Christ, or Church Without Christ. In both scenarios, the definitions of sin, redemption, preaching and mission stay the same, as do the means to spread the (Anti-)Church’s messages. Hazel Motes is convinced to be an atheist, but he in fact creates an exact mirror of the religion within which he was growing up. Sadly, that means he is not free at all, but retains everything he rejects, in a negative affirmation.

When catastrophe occurs, it leaves me sad, seeing an eternal vicious circle of angry, righteous people continuing to pester each other with Christianity’s arrogant absolutism, or its antithesis. In a way, it reminded me of Marilynne Robinson’s Home, a novel written in beautiful prose, delivering realistic portraits of people who do not see that it is possible not only NOT to believe in Christianity’s dogma, but also to be quite happy, and free of guilt outside its limits. In Robinson’s as in O’Connor’s world, you can be an atheist, but you are a distinctly CHRISTIAN atheist committing the SIN of NON-BELIEF, and you stay within the boundaries of Christianity’s ancient morality and mythical foundations. There is an implication of ethical failure in atheism. You are surely marked by hell, even if you do not believe in it. In Home, the main character keeps apologising incessantly for not living up to the Christian values, and in "Wise Blood", Hazel Motes lives Christianity by challenging its teachings, like a two-year-old doing exactly what mummy told him not to do.

For me, it was hard to identify with that mindset, but I do acknowledge the irony and wit with which the author illustrated a quite common scenario within monolithic, monotheistic communities. No real detachment is possible from a religion that has immersed itself in every single facet of daily life and even in the language used to describe feelings.

I listened to an outstanding audio book version, and sometimes the aggressive shouting and yelling became almost unbearable, making the latent violence in the characters more evident still than if I had read it silently, skimming through the rants.

As for the comical effects: I could not enjoy them, having seen too much demagoguery and cheap propaganda work out beautifully in the past couple of years. Too dangerous at the moment to be funny. Maybe I will change my mind about that.

[Luís · Rating 5 out of 5]

The universe of Flannery O'Connor, born in the American South, is dark, prosaic, and supernatural. In this novel, written in 1952, the main character, Hazel Motes, is in his twenties and the son of a pastor who has returned from the Second World War. He discovers his village has been abandoned and becomes the church's preacher without Christ. His career puts him in touch with a simple-minded person who hides a great secret within him, a false blind man preaching the good word, and his daughter, Sabbath, prematurely corrupted by misery—still, the only novelist to endow with lucidity. Half crooks, half mystics, all these characters search for an absolute that stubbornly hides behind their horizon.
At the start of the reading, Flannery O'Connor's precise and colorful style uses humor and mockery of a dull everyday life to the point of desperation. But we gradually fall into a complex reality, a little crazy and disturbing, like the heavenly and miserable atmosphere where the poor whites bathe, abandoned to the dereliction of an unbridled religiosity, the implacable rigor of solitude, and destitution.
Yet their quest continues unabated until they are delivered. Will this fact continue to be found?
Flannery O'Connor, the Catholic author in a Protestant world, sculpts texts with astonishing freedom of metaphysical questioning. However, there is no doubt that Hazel Motes, despite his aggressive atheism, is not the staggering spokesperson.
She is undoubtedly one of the masters of American literature.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's first book and it is a beautiful, brutal work of art. We are introduced to Hazel Motes on a train with his army-issued duffel bag being annoying by the woman next to him on the train. He is completely dislocated, as we see in the first sentence:
"Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the end of the car."
He is on the border between this life and some other death:
"In his half sleep he though he was lying was like lying in a coffin."
We would probably nowadays recognize him as a victim of PTSD, but in this book, he just seems eternally lost. He refuses to communicate with the overly-talkative Mrs. Hitchcock in the train and instead gets obsessed with the black porter who claims to be from Chicago but whom Hazel believes is from his own hometown Eastrod. He had previously visited there and discovered that his house was destroyed, decayed, obliterated and his mother and any other family or earthly attachment simply gone.

He goes to "the city" which turns out to be a dead end small town called Taulkinham where he meets the other primary characters in the story: the blind preacher with his 15y old daughter Sabbath, the listless and probably retarded if not insane Enoch, and the shyster Hoover Shoats. He immediately sees through the blind preacher's lack of belief and starts the Church Without Christ after buying a "rat-colored" car completely unfit for the road.

The atmosphere in the novel is that of the religiously obsessive South and the language reminds one of O'Connor's primary influences: William Faulkner. Her unique style is quieter than Faulkner's, preferring to describe in detail the absurdities of life in the "city" and the completely erratic psyches of her characters. The narrative frame shifts from Hazel to Sabbath to Enoch back and forth before settling on his forlorn landlady, Mrs. Flood. Ultimately, none of the characters really achieves salvation or relief in the bleakness of their lives. One wonders however if Hazel gets some kind of enlightenment towards the end when he says, "If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold more."

I think that Ms. O'Connor was trying to show that in the insane acts of Hazel (which include murder) and his ultimate mimicry of the blind preacher, that truth cannot be obtained by looking for it in others (as both Enoch and Sabbath and Mrs. Flood do with their devotion to Hazel at various times in the book), but can only come from oneself. As Mrs. Flood observes at the end of the book,
She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn't begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, father and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light."
I read this book in high school and was blown away (having been myself raised in a Southern religious atmosphere to a degree, and found this second reading four decades later to be as illuminating and engrossing as I before. O'Connor sadly did not write very much, but what she did write contains a universe of sentiment and pain that is rarely evoked with such realism and as pitiless a gaze. Highly recommended.

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hapless Irony

Flannery O'Connor was a woman who knew her world. Not just the gentile facade of a world but the nits and grits and dirt under the finger nails world of poor black folk and edgy white trash, of the huckster and the street beggar, the good ole boy and the smug gossip, the person of faith and the person of lost faith, the arch prostitute and her bumbling client. They are misfits, defectives, near-psychotics, needy obsessives, fanatics.

O'Connor knew how these people act in this world, and how they speak, and, more important, what they are completely unaware and incapable of. They don't know how to act and speak in many circumstances. Not necessarily because they are uneducated or inexperienced but because the culture of which they are a part demands their role of ignorance and ineptitude. It's in their blood. They have a place and best stay put.

Call it the Old South for convenience or American Gothic for legitimacy. But this world is the one in which we all live. We might shiver a bit at the casual racism of a Hazel Motes, or chuckle at his use of a toilet wall in a public convenience as a local yellow pages. Nonetheless, our everyday language is equally thoughtless. And the evening television news is hardly any less gossip-ridden and tawdry than the scrawls in the average men's room. Enoch Emery's pointless attachment to Haze and his bizarre interpretation of what's needed to help him succeed are symptoms of an insanity equally evident in recent American political rallies.

The suspicion-laden, functionally autistic interactions we have every day - on public transport, walking down the street, in run of the mill commercial transactions - are essentially no different from those of O’Connor’s country bumpkins. But this is how she gets us to pay attention to them, by using the bumpkins and rubes to make her point fairly painlessly. But that point is no less clear as a consequence: no one escapes life undamaged; and the damage only gets repaired through other (damaged) folk.

Despite the apparent horror of the book, it is her underlying, soft, meticulously articulated irony that makes O'Connor so hypnotically attractive to me. A rusted iron glove filled with scented cotton rather than a fist. But oh what an after-effect. The blow comes after one stops reading. Understanding comes without an argument but through her so precise hints and suggestions. What unites us as human beings is not some abstract essence or capacity but a thorough-going and fateful haplessness. Through her we become conscious of being subject to the vagaries of our time and place. Paradoxically, it is an appreciation of this haplessness - not religious belief or its absence - that offers freedom.

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Road Trip 2020

Current location: Tennessee

“I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.”

I did a lot of babysitting, in the mid-80s. I was a young teen, not dating yet, and I was enamored with children. Families who wanted me as their sitter would frequently try and secure me for that coveted Saturday night date night by offering all types of perks. The family that finally earned my loyalty for that regular Saturday night commitment for several years was the one that offered two children who went to bed easily, a fresh box of my favorite type of Entenmann's doughnuts. . . and HBO.

To be honest, the doughnuts and the premium movie channel were all I wanted. I wasn't even interested in my hourly pay. As soon as those little darlings would rub their eyes and head to bed, I'd grab one perfectly formed chocolate glazed doughnut, then curl up in my favorite recliner and tune in to 2-4 hours of soft porn, inappropriate stand-up routines, and vulgar comedies. God, it was heaven.

It was there on that recliner that I first discovered Porky's, then Porky's Revenge!, The Last American Virgin, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (among others). Not to mention Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, and Richard Pryor. Then, one night, it was there on that recliner that I mistakenly discovered Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

I remember it all too well. I thought I had signed up for a fun evening of full-frontal nudity and some groovy disco moves, but instead I got. . . the end of the world as I knew it.

Innocence lost. . . forever. Poof!

I swear to you, I remember exactly how I was sitting up, rigid, on that brown recliner chair when my employers entered the room to drive me home.

I didn't talk to them, was unable to focus on the money they gave me, and I couldn't close my eyes to sleep properly for days. Before that movie, I hadn't known that life could be so cruel for some people, so violent or shocking. I hadn't known that a man could ever do to a woman what that man did to that woman in Goodbar (based on a true story, by the way).

It's devastating, but true. . . our society has sociopaths peppered throughout it. Some are just malcontents and misanthropes, but others are rapists and killers with zero conscience.

And, sorry to tell you folks, but most of these types are men.

Annie Proulx and Alice Walker write about these men, so they've either known more than their share or their experiences here on earth have influenced their vision.

But, who would have guessed that a young woman named Flannery O'Connor knew about these types of men, already, in 1949, and had the chops to write about them?

Damn it, Ms. O'Connor. Just thinking about you handing this to your editor at the age of 27, at the end of the 1940s makes me shake.

I could feel the power of the story from the first page and I could sense, intuitively, the influence that this 236 page book has had on both modern novel writing and filmmaking.

This is a startling and terrifying story filled with sociopaths, all, and only two missteps at the novel's end reduced it from a five to a four star read for me. But, truly, it is almost perfect.

I can not recommend it enough to all writers and riders of the edge.

[Jakob J. 🎃 · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are all in a strange and terrifying place inside our own minds. What is it we truly believe? Cognitive dissonance allows for us to hold as many disparate thoughts as there are bacteria in our guts. A reckoning with any of Flannery O’Connor’s work—but in particular Wise Blood—is to court potential insanity, like Hazel Motes meeting the gaze of a preacher he thought to be earnest and blind. I think the gods of chaos take pleasure in watching humans attempt to decipher it. The sheer magnitude of passages that cry for hermeneutical attention can lead one to arrive at a conclusion more obscure than before the interpreting began; that nothing means anything, or that everything means everything. Or perhaps even, why bother?

Despite O’Connor’s near-admonition of a particular reading that places Christ outside of the essential sphere, she acknowledges in this work that one does not believe simply what one thinks one believes, or wishes to believe, for one is, in fact, not one, but many. Of course, Christ haunts this tale, permeates it to such a degree as to become distracting. The numerological symbolism of the trinity and the three crosses represented by everything from the number of pictures hanging in Enoch’s room, to the number of times Haze reads the news clipping about Hawks allegedly blinding himself begins to feel as if a street preacher is waving a pamphlet in front of your face as you’re trying to read.

Hazel Motes is the anti-preacher, the anti-prophet, and literally anti-Christ, constructing a system of belief to which the concept of Jesus-as-fraud is its primary advertisement. But Haze is doomed to redemption by his stubborn resistance to grace. He denies his status as preacher. His insistence on his own cleanliness, his lack of belief in, as he maintains, anything, but Christ in particular, and his public displays of aggression proclaiming such things secure the failure of his endeavor until the false prophet Solace pilfers his anti-gospel—his truth that there is no truth—and Haze demands to know why this imposter seemingly identical to himself professes disbelief in what he is certain he actually believes.

Haze’s solace was in his longing for home, but he could not return there. He had no place to go, and so in on himself he went. Solace must be done away with so that Haze might admit that he is unclean, and thus that sin is real, and redemption required. Beyond the tangible, visible world lies redemption, perhaps, but if we’re also blind in death, As Mrs. Flood worries, and Haze hopes, then the incorporeal realm of existence is as much a place of darkness as the material world, and rendered even more mysterious, for how do our temporal, mortal bodies (with minds harboring the knowledge of said mortality) relate to our eternal souls? Sabbath’s observation of Haze’s eyes is crucial: “They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at, but they keep looking.” It may be said that there is a haze over Haze’s eyes, preventing him from seeing something, or anything. Who is really blind? Who really sees the world for what it is, and what is it? Does Haze, like Hulga in Good Country People, imagine that he sees through illusions, or does he look past what’s important, blinding him to the truth? Mrs. Hitchcock noticed at the beginning, that his eyes’ “settings were so deep that they seemed…almost like passages leading somewhere”, which was to be confirmed by Mrs. Flood in the end that “the deep burned eye sockets seemed to lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared.” Haze displayed no more volition in blinding himself or running down Solace than Enoch did in buying a ticket to the picture show or stealing the shriveled ‘new jesus’ which turned out to be the thing he was going to do, knowing only beforehand that he wasn’t going to want to do it. “For the time, he knew that what he didn’t know was what mattered.”

Enoch’s blood pulsed with intuition, leaving impressions in him that a transformation was imminent. He knew that his life was set for drastic change; that nothing would ever be the same, and the culmination of the retrospective foreboding in the form of Enoch’s conflicting feelings of antipathy and reverence towards animals saw him embracing his primordial tendencies against which he had been inexplicably raging. He didn’t always know what he thought, and sometimes only wondered instead of thought. His own mind and everything around him was enshrouded in mystery. Accompanied by this mystery was a profound sense of dread; “a terrible knowledge without any words to it.” Enoch knew not to nag his blood for information until it was ready, but the succession of events it led him through yielded such a reward that all of the mystery became moot; irrelevant in light of his newfound, albeit short-lived, happiness. Betrayed by his wise blood, Enoch’s dressing up as a gorilla was not the transformative moment of elation he knew was approaching, indicated by the solemn lowering of his arm after being treated with comparable disdain by two strangers as he hitherto showed towards the animals with which he came in contact, at which point his reward begins to resemble punishment, even doom. Whatever will become of him, he will have no say.

[Mark André · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most wonderful, disturbing stories ever told. I have never been so discombobulated by a book. Wild, audacious, bizarre, outrageous fun. Not for all audiences.

[Fabian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly the "Blue Velvet" in the literary realm, "Wise Blood" has an OVERWHELMING SIMPLICITY that seems truly out of this world. O'Connor expertly places all these annoying wind-up toys near each other--see them bump and grind and sometimes line up in a maniacal precision that repeats and repeats-- and what we get is a very complex nightmare, almost hitting the true nerve of (my personal champion of all literary categories) Southern Goth. It is true brethren to the Faulkner's masterpiece, "As I Lay Dying"--a true mesh of the best of Pynchon (the most iconographic that is), the silliest of Beckett, er, maybe Pinter, & (why not?) the most macabre of Hawthorne... but a true original by All rights.

P.S. The creepiness of the main, I would label, "monolith"--that is, the shriveled man in the MVSEVM--is in itself ingenious & I totally head-over-heels love it!!!!

[Mark André · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very strange book. Weird and disturbing. Not for everyone. Still a masterpiece.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fresh from a stint in the army, Hazel Motes starts a religion out of spite and gets entangled with a preacher named Asa Hawks and his teenage daughter, Sabbath.

I recently read the exquisite The Summer that Melted Everything and kept thinking of Flannery O'Connor. I already had this on my Kindle so I gave it a shot.

Wise Blood is the tale of Hazel Motes and his crisis of faith. Something happened during the war that shattered Hazel Motes' childhood dream of being a preacher and now he's taking it out on the rest of the world. While running around generally being an asshole, he encounters colorful characters like Enoch Emery, the boy with the Wise Blood of the title, Asa Hawks and his daughter, and Hoover Shoates, a con-man who knows a good thing when he sees it.

I'd say Wise Blood was the Rise and Fall of Hazel Motes but there wasn't much of a rise. Maybe The Continued Decline of Hazel Motes would be more appropriate. The book starts out bleak and just keeps getting bleaker. However, there were some laughs despite the bleakness, many of them at Enoch Emery's expense.

Flannery O'Connor writes some powerful stuff. Her writing reminds me of Jim Thompson's, whom she probably had angry sex with up against a dumpster behind a bar at some point.

Wise Blood's tale of religious obsession made me uncomfortable at times. However, I didn't think Wise Blood was nearly as good as her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Her short stories were much more focused and quicker to the punch. Three out of five stars.

[Mark André · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the true thrills of a reading lifetime!
Proceed unawares, be surprised.
It’ll kick your ass!
What fun! - )

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it was Jerry Lee Lewis who says you can be hot or you can be cold but if you are lukewarm the Lord God Jehovah will spew you from his mouth. If that is so Hazel Motes will be okay, he will be unspewed because there is pretty much no moment in Wise Blood when he is not white hot with rage and spouting fiery blasphemy

As for the Jesus who was reported to have been born at Bethlehem and crucified on Calvary for man’s sins, Haze said, He was too foul a notion for a sane person to carry in his head.

Hazel Motes came back from the war with a brain that wasn’t working properly but you could tell he wasn’t no Dietrich Bonhoeffer before he went. Now I know he got up on the bonnet of his car and yelled to the people about The Church of Christ Without Christ but fair play, I have found in my own life that it’s really quite easy to find yourself drifting into blasphemical speech without much intending to. It don’t take a lot of effort. Take my conversations with God for instance. Maybe I hadn’t mentioned this before but he visits me quite regularly to make sure Goodreads is still treating me okay. I say sure, the food’s still good and the view from here is spectacular. And really all they ask is a couple of reviews a week, it’s not much. The rest of the time here is my own. Some of the others, mind you, they complain a lot – that Manny, he never stops moaning, but God says it’s not them I worry about, it’s you. I say you don’t have to worry about me, he says well, you know that’s not really true, and I say can’t we please change the subject? And he says well, what do you want to talk about? And I always say come on, tell me about what it was like in the good old days, when you created the Universe. And he says it weren’t just one Universe, you know. No sir. No siree. And then he gets that faraway look and starts off reminiscing. You shoulda seen me in those days, he says, I was really on a roll. I was creating universes – whole ones, mind – just like – boom! There’s one – bam! – there’s another. So slick it would have made your eyes water. Before you could say Jack Robinson whamm! Another universe. And you know, all of them with completely different fundamental physical properties! And that ain’t easy. He loves to get technical. So why so many anyway? I ask. Oh I was young and excitable I suppose, I was trying new stuff. Now I think I’d struggle with the simplest thing. Probably fumble over every Hugo Boss particle! Did I crack that joke before? I tell him he always cracks that joke. He says, you know, you forget things. It’s kinda sad. So all these universes, a lot of them are getting rickety now, I can’t afford the maintenance. I do a bit of fixing up at the weekends, but man, I need my rest. I say, is that what you call entropy? Can’t keep up the maintenance? He says well, I’m trying to keep this conversation simple. Give me a break now. I asked him about Jesus. I said so did all of these universes get a Jesus? He says what? every single sentient race on every one a them damn planets got one. So many Jesuses, honest, I couldn't keep track. Jesuses all over the place. So to answer your question - yeah. I said so did all the Jesuses get crucified? He said can't we please change the subject?

Wise Blood is like a novel written by a person who wants to demonstrate that most people who lived in the southern states of the USA were borderline crazy or actual crazy and it’s quite okay to laugh at them till your sides ache. If I came from Tennessee or Georgia or Alabama I would not be having Flannery O’Connor over for dinner, no matter that she did die of something terrible at age 39. Also Wise Blood seems to be written by a person who thinks religion is for stupid people and it’s okay to have a laugh about that too. And this is confusing because I know Flannery was a very devout person. So whatever this novel is trying to tell me about religion went right over my head, whizz, gone. I have no idea what the point is. (I asked God and he said yeah, that Hazel Motes. What in hell was he on, huh?) But I love Wise Blood! It’s so funny. Nobody would dare write it now.

[Felice Laverne · Rating 3 out of 5]

"…that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption...there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar…”

Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes, a recently discharged twenty-something war vet who returns home to Tennessee to find the town abandoned and his childhood home dilapidated and deserted. So, he leaves the town behind and takes a train to Taulkinham, where he meets the crude, ignorant and possibly OCD/mentally ill Enoch Emery. Together, they encounter a blind preacher turned sometimes street beggar, Asa Hawks, and his 15-year-old daughter, Sabbath (her name in itself an ironic play on the themes of this novel). Motes becomes entangled with the Hawks’ as he embarks on the notion of atheism and—fully embracing it partially out of resistance to Asa Hawks’ idea that Motes needs to repent for his sins—starts his own church, the Church Without Christ. As he starts preaching his message of salvation through truth from the nose of his old car, he encounters a street-preaching swindler, Hoover Shoats, who steals Motes’ idea of the Church Without Christ and uses it to get rich, also preaching a varied version of that message on the streets, which effectively pushes Motes out of his own market and idea. When he finds out that Asa Hawks is also a crook, he takes up with his daughter, who proclaims of him: “I said look at those pee-can eyes and go crazy, girl! That innocent look don’t hide a thing, he’s just pure filthy right down to the guts, like me. The only difference is I like being that way and he don’t. Soon after, Motes’ disillusionment starts its descent into completeness, as a series of events pushes him to enraged murder and finally to self-mutilization and recluseness. Meanwhile, Enoch Emery’s story line branches off into him becoming enamored with, and then literally turning into, a gorilla, which came off as a little slapstick in its presentation and fell flat for me as a whole.

Wise Blood seemed to hit the ground running toward something definite and profound from the very first page. Rushing toward an abandoned home in Tennessee, then rushing toward Hazel Motes’ warped coming-of-age prophecy of atheism and a “new jesus” (yes, lowercase). O’Connor hit on salient, hard-hitting moments of ironic verity and outright cultural authenticity in true Southern Gothic fashion: Christianity versus atheism in the post-war South, Christian hypocrisy, redemption, isolation, and coming of age. In that way, it had its moments of dazzling literary insight. The characters were, for the most part, well realized, each offering a necessary ingredient to this Gothic tradition. And yet.

A little-known fact of this this novel is that it was originally not a novel at all but a collection of short stories (published in various publications). The first chapter of Wise Blood was an expanded version of Flannery O’Connor’s Master’s thesis, and several of the other chapters were reworked versions that she revised so that they could all fit together as a novel. Hence, Wise Blood was born, but the thing is, it didn’t work 100% as a fluid work of literature. For the most part, it did. For the most part, this novel read as a cohesive story with fully realized narrative arcs and satirical if not poignant realizations throughout. Yet, Enoch Emery’s character dragged down the latter part of the novel, because the short story that he derived from, "Enoch and the Gorilla," did not fit with the theme of the rest of the novel. It felt disparate, like it didn’t belong, which, of course, is true since it was originally a separate short story, but it should not have felt that way to the reader.

O’Connor’s use of vernacular was spectacular.

The sense of setting was complete.

And yet, though we make a habit of saying here in the South, “One monkey don’t stop no show,” in this case, it certainly did. 3.5 stars ***

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[Zoeytron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haze Motes.  Visionary or false prophet?  Look closer, he may simply be a tortured soul who has lost his faith.  He believes he is beyond redemption, and wouldn't care to have it anyway.     

Enoch Emery, he of the wise blood.  Taking chances on the meaning of things.  Mayhap he is the visionary, more probably he is just desperate for a friend.    

Having grown up hearing the country dialect used here, I will say it was pitch perfect.  Published in 1952, this novel is almost as old as I am.  Sadly, I was not able to sync up with it, and fear I may have missed the point of the whole exercise.  Interesting characters, though.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth. . .”

Wise Blood (1952) is the first novel of Flannery O’Connor, one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century. The Guardian said in 2000 that this was among the top 100 novels of the twentieth-century; I don’t know about that, but it has some great writing in it. It was created in part by mashing together four short stories O’Connor wrote while she was in the MFA program at Iowa, and to my mind, it doesn’t quite work as well as each individual story. But I still loved it and laughed aloud a few times at its colorful characters and dark humor.

I read this novel many years ago but decided to listen to it because it was read by Bronson Pinchot, whose audio work I know and love, and was not disappointed. He’s amazing. I was imagining what it might be like to read this book and have no experience whatsoever with religion or the US South, maybe especially in the middle of the twentieth century, and I thought, you would just think this is bizarre, crazy. All these people are insane, obsessed about religion! Flannery O’Connor is known for what is known as the Southern gothic, and the southern “grotesque;” she felt compelled in her introduction to the second edition of Wise Blood to disabuse all the secular critics of the book of the notion that everyone in this book is merely nuts:

“That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.”

They miss the point, O'Connor insists; while she acknowledges that the book is a comedy, she makes it clear that there has to be serious issues driving every comic work, and hers pertain to her belief that faith is not something you can just reject. Hazel Motes (as in someone who sees through haze, and has a mote in his eye) does everything he can to reject what is in his heart, that he actually underneath it all believes in Jesus.

" I knew when I first seen you you didn't have nobody nor nothing but Jesus"--Enoch Emery, to Hazel

To resist this perception Hazel decides to create the Church of Christ Without Christ:

“I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.”

But ultimately, O’Connor’s point is that “Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”

Or more pointedly, as she says in an essay,

“I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centred in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.”

So you can imagine her frustration to read again and again that non-religious reviewers for many years lumped Hazel with all the false prophets she makes fun of in this book. As she says somewhere, “If the Eucharist is just a symbol, then I say the Hell with it.”

Flannery O'Connor, who died in 1964 at the age of 39 from complications from Lupus, was the winner of the National Book Award for 1972 for her Collected Stories, and to my mind, she deserved it. The stories are bizarre and hilarious and exhilarating. And her metaphors and similes throughout

“It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.”

This novel, evolved out of one and then three more stories she was working on for her MFA at the University of Iowa, feature the deluded Hazel Motes and a lot of wild and equally deluded people, mostly false prophets--I thought of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry--such as Asa Hawks (and his fifteen-year-old daughter Sabbath Lily Hawks) and other weird characters such as zookeeper Enoch Emory. Asa is a false prophet who pretends that he has blinded himself in order to prove to people he can see The Truth. Lily is fifteen, is deserted by her father, and who wants to live with Motes. Emory introduces Motes to the concept of "wise blood," an idea that he has innate, worldly knowledge of what direction to take in life, and requires no spiritual or emotional guidance.

Hazel, along the way, meets Onnie Jay Holy, a local con artist, who forms his own ministry, the similarly named "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ," too. Competing street preachers! The conclusion has horror in it, but as O’Connor sees it, Motes, now blind, can actually “see” the truth. The notion of vision is central to this book.

I like the stories better, but I love her writing:

"Every fourth Saturday he had driven into Eastrod as if he were just in time to save them all from Hell."

"The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete."

"He got up and began to walk down the street as if he were led by a silent melody or one of those whistles that only dogs hear. "

“The highway was ragged with filling stations and trailer camps and roadhouses. After a while, there were stretches where red gulleys dropped off on either side of the road, and behind them there were patches of field buttoned together with 666 posts. The sky leaked over all of it, and then it began to leak into the car. The head of a string of pigs appeared snout-up over the ditch, and he had to screech to a stop and watch the rear of the last pig disappear shaking into the ditch on the other side. He started the car again and went on. He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.”

I saw the 1979 movie by John Huston, featuring Brad Dourif as Hazel, and I liked it. But in recommend you check out this bizarre novel, driven by comic Southern grotesque characters.

[Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

"People who haven't grown up in the South, in the Bible Belt particularly, have little understanding of how much a part of the fabric of Southern life religion is." Barry Moser

This novel, I don't mind saying, spooked me a bit. I couldn't finish it for the longest time. I'm sure there are deeper meanings that I can't get to due to the Southern-surreal grotesquery.

I attribute my reaction to either growing up in the South or seeing Hollywood's grotesque depictions of Southerners in general. In any case, such grotesque representations are a signature of Southern gothic novels such as this one as well as of O'Connor's short stories. Visualize, if you will, the killer from the Louisiana swamps in the first season of HBO's "True Detective."

With all frankness, I've gone places--always only once--where I walked among people, right out of O'Connor fiction, and heard them converse. I am pretty sure I'll have a bad dream tonight involving greasy, edentate, odorous, hirsute, ferret-eyed folks. Mind you, I'm not saying that I'm unique in experiencing these dueling-banjo people.

I can think of two types of places off the top of my head to find them, depending on which kind you wanna catch. First, and most obvious to Yankees, is a big tent revival. The other, as "spectators" at a deep sea fishing rodeo--fishing tourney-such as those held each summer along the gulf coast. As to the latter, they are attracted by dollar beer, boats they can't afford, smelly fish caught by people who own boats, and sway-stop bikini tops (or not) that strain reliantly against gravity. Walking upon the crowd is very much like sneaking into a long-abandoned wooden house at midnight, flipping on all the lights and watching the critters go.







Wise Blood was Flannery O'Connor's first novel, in 1952, and is relatively representative of her work in its use of humor, dialect and irony and stressing the grotesque. I might say it's a bolder than many of her short stories.

In it, Hazel Motes makes a religion, an obsession, out of denying the doctrine of Christianity. A war vet, he takes a bus to Taulkinham, Tennessee to preach his brand of antireligion, that later is made into the "Church of Christ Without Christ, where the blind stay blind, the lame stay lame, and them that's dead stays that way."

He gets a follower in a manic 18-year-old zookeeper, Enoch Emery, who introduces Motes to the idea of "wise blood," a self-reliance, anti-spiritual concept. Enoch eventually steals a mummified dwarf from the zoo's museum to give Motes for his ministry. Then, out on his own, Enoch steals a gorilla costume under surreal circumstances.

For a short time, Motes is drawn to a blind street preacher named Asa Hawks and his teen daughter Sabbath Lily Hawks. He wishes to defile Sabbath, but loses interest when he finds she is attracted to him.

It pretty much goes downhill for Motes from there. Upon the 10th anniversary publication in 1962, O'Connor wrote that the book is about freedom, free will, life and death and the inevitability of belief. As W.C. Fields quipped, "Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.”

It is bizarro, man.

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hazel Motes gets out of the army and arbitrarily goes to a generic southern city to play out his damage. He has lost his father and mother and grandfather. While traveling on a sleeper to the city he has a dream in which each in turn manage to spring out of their coffins, miraculously alive. Then he wakes up. He is in a fury at Jesus, presumably for failing him, though his specific anger on the matter is never addressed. A rage burns within him which he cannot satisfy, no matter what he does. Even when he begins the Church Without Christ and begins to "preach" from the hood of his old car. He reminds me of the inarticulate family Naipaul writes about in The Enigma of Arrival, who, because they lack language, can only act out their sufferings in violent ways. To say that Hazel Motes eventually addresses matters through recourse to violence gives nothing away. When reading the closing pages its seems all too, not predictable, but correct, from the standpoint of his character. O'Connor refers to him as Haze, a nickname that captures wonderfully his undirected nature. His last name is Motes, specks of dust in the air, seems an apt metaphor for his lack of direction as well. The book has amazing moments throughout and an adroitly handled suspense grips the reader. Be advised, this book makes liberal use in the early going of the n-word. At first my sense was that O'Connor knew how these people would speak and what words they would use, and these are the words she used. But this seems false when one considers that such persons realistically must have cursed a blue streak, too, yet none of those words made their way into the text. Highly recommended. As important to our southern literature as Faulkner and Welty.

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

UPDATED REVIEW... of the film!

John Huston's 1979 adaptation of O'Connor's cult novel was one of my favorite films growing up, which is probably more evidence of why I should not be wandering around in public. I just re-watched it this afternoon and am happy to report that the magic is mainly still there.

so demented Hazel Motes returns from the army, still haunted by memories of his demented preacher father. he moves to Taulkinham, where a demented young man named Enoch begins following him around. Enoch is obsessed with monkeys, apes, and apelike things. later, Enoch steals a gorilla suit and wanders around town trying to shake people's hand. Hazel moves in with a prostitute and then comes across a not-actually-blind preacher and his demented daughter; he becomes obsessed with them. Hazel starts his own anti-religion. Hazel moves into the same boarding house as the preacher and his daughter; he and the demented daughter begin a relationship of sorts. Hazel gets some competition from a shyster and a demented pseudo-preacher of anti-religion. Hazel murders someone and attempts to leave town. Hazel doesn't get out of town thanks to a demented cop. more demented antics ensue.

although the adaptation is basically a faithful one, Huston does take certain liberties here and there, rearranging and changing a few things in the narrative, but mainly messing with the tone of the story. the O'Connor book is archly (and darkly) comic; the Huston film is broadly comic. the result is that the story is rather less rich than the original material, flattened, turned into a parade of grotesqueries. the emphasis on casually and constantly dropping the n-bomb only amps up the unpleasant weirdness of the movie. and it still somehow works - if you can get into the perverse spirit of it. the only thing I found problematic was Alex North's bluegrass banjo score, which winks way too broadly and just way too much at the audience. well, subtlety has rarely been Huston's forte. check out Night of the Iguana, where Huston is at his least subtle but still manages to concoct an enjoyable film.

the direction itself is stolid. the film is shot in a rather ugly but realistic palette; the camerawork is unfussy and does not bring attention to itself; open spaces are frequently used to show the emptiness of the locale and to isolate the characters in their own little worlds. Huston keeps the visuals plain and distinctly depressing to match the plain and distinctly depressing cityscape. sadly, there are no real cinematic grace notes to make the film student in me want to rewind and ooh & aah. but that's not a real flaw as I can often do without those sorts of things. Huston can make a gorgeous film (e.g. Beat the Devil) but this is just not one of those films.

the movie and the book are concerned with one of my favorite themes: faith. too much of it, a lack of it, how it defines us, how it refines us, how it can be corrupted, how it can be pure. I love thinking on those sorts of matters. Huston's film doesn't seem to have its own perspective on the topic; it just trots out the various characters and leaves it entirely up to the audience to draw their own conclusions. I assume most viewers (and maybe Huston as well) chose to view this as that parade of grotesquerie, a bizarre but still straightforward experience - a freak show. I prefer looking at it in a different way: I see all of the stylized characters' grasping towards or away from faith as different false paths to and away from faith; paths that are false due to each character's particular insecurities and outlooks on life and how to live it. a cautionary tale for the faithful, with multiple cautions in the tale.

the most enjoyable aspect of the film is still the acting. it's a tasty smorgasbord. Huston knows how to direct actors! the performances are all juicy bits of awesomeness. a young and surprisingly attractive Brad Dourif plays the twisted Hazel - and because he is Brad Dourif, he makes that character even more twisted. Daniel Shor (star of the cult classic Strange Behavior) plays Enoch with a sadly pleading face and an off-kilter skip & hop to his stride. Harry Dean Stanton plays the not-blind preacher with a smug, sardonic slyness and an expression of I know what you really are, boy whenever he is paired with Dourif. character actress Amy Wright amps up the eeriness of the preacher's daughter. acting coach (and actor) William Hickey gives his pseudo-preacher an almost unbearably cringing pathos. Huston casts himself as Hazel's father in a couple unsettling flashbacks. my favorite character bit is Ned Beatty's shyster, who oozes a buttery, sugary but loud-mouthed southern charm whenever he appears. the scene where Beatty attempts to get money from a crowd while talking over Dourif is like a fun little acting duel. great scene. great film!

***

more of young mark monday's favorite films:

The Company of Wolves
Strange Behavior & Strange Invaders (same awesome director)
Vertigo
Johnny Guitar
Night of the Hunter
China 9, Liberty 37
Pennies from Heaven
The Last of Sheila
Underworld U.S.A.
Song of Bernadette
Bloody Mama
Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean
Repo Man
Tommy & The Devils & The Boy Friend (ah, Ken Russell)
Beat the Devil
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Marat/Sade (full title: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade)

__________


ORIGINAL REVIEW

Flannery cruelly dissects faith and society's outcasts and the intersection between the two. this is not a woman with a generous view of humanity, which makes it an enjoyable but often depressing experience. despite the modern-gothic subject matter and the occasionally ornate turn of phrase, a swift read. strangely affecting and open to interpretation on different levels. and funny!

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I need a “It’s not you, it’s me” shelf for books like this. You know, books you read and you know at the back of your mind that they are brilliant but you also can’t find it in yourself to like them?

This is a novel about horrible people being rather horrible to each other, and it’s written in an exquisite and evocative prose – but I still couldn’t wait to finish it so I could move on to the next novel in my pile. In a book about Buddhism I read recently, Brad Warner compares people who argue about religion to nerds who argue about their favorite sci-fi franchise and almost beat the crap out of each other because they disagree about some details, instead of simply bonding over a shared interest and enthusiasm – I thought about that a lot as I read “Wise Blood”…

This is a novel about Hazel Motes’ crisis of faith, and how he ends up sliding down into a downward spiral of broken dreams, disappointments and the impossibility to reconcile what he perceives as moral values and what he actually wants.

I'm sure that if I felt so inclined, I could dig at it a bit more and find interesting metaphorical elements to it (the whole theme of blindness for instance), but I can't say I am bothered. It might be as simple as the subject being unappealing to me, or perhaps the way the subject is explored, but that book left me scratching my head and I was glad to be done with it.

[Jenn(ifer) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say, there’s nothing more attractive than a man in a sharp suit.

Hello lovely:



However, Hazel Motes, I think you should fire your tailor. (Maybe you should take some of that money you keep throwing in the trash and buy a new suit. Just sayin’).




All joking aside, I’d like to take a moment to thank Ms. O’Connor for restoring my faith in female authors. Such a shame she died so young; one can only wonder what stories she left untold.

Wise Blood tells the tale of young Hazel Motes, who returns from military service to find he no longer has a place to call home. So he sets out to make a place for himself in the world and decides he wants to start a new religion, The Church Without Christ where he preaches that “the lame don't walk, the blind don't see, and the dead stay dead!” Trouble with Hazel is, to say he’s slightly off balance is like saying the Pope is slightly religious.

Hazel doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that he isn’t winning anyone over with his nightly sermons from the hood of his car. He keeps his faith in nothing and is determined to spread his word. That is until tragedy strikes and it becomes clear that Hazel isn’t so faithless. Seems he believes he could use a little redemption after all.

I haven’t spent much time in The South, and O’Connor’s depiction of it makes me want to stay away. Far away. Pennsylvania is bad enough. It’s made up of Philadelphia and Pittsburg on either end with Kentucky in the middle. The southerners we are introduced to are a band of sinister, nefarious yet strangely fascinating individuals. O’Connor can hold her own writing “creepy” as well as the best of ‘em.

Wise Blood is Flannery O’Connor’s debut novel, and although I thoroughly enjoyed it, it was obvious that she was still a novice. Characters are underdeveloped; plot lines are started and dropped inexplicably. It’s as if she slapped together a bunch of disparate stories and tried to tie them together in a nice little bow, but instead she made a knot. Rookie mistake. Still. More please.

p.s., I really enjoyed Mark's review of this here book. I reckon you'll like it too.

[Mark Porton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wise Blood The first book written by Flannery O’Connor is a book I decided to read without knowing anything about it. I have found it incredibly difficult to write any sort of review about this book and I have deliberately avoided reading the reviews of others so as not to be influenced. So here goes, for the umpteenth time…..

I wondered what this story was all about from the first page, all I knew was the characters all seemed to be unpleasant types and the image in my mind was all in Black and White for some reason. There were strong tones of racism in this book, ignorance and sexism – the way these people treated each other was abysmal. The setting is also obviously one of poverty populated by a strong religious streak.

The main character Hazel Mote was disturbing, it was like he existed in another world, perhaps he did. His sole focus was to promote his new church, the Church without Christ. Any ‘conversation’ he had with any of the other characters always seemed to be greeted by a criticism of Jesus Christ or him promoting his own faith in atheism.

Interestingly, Mote purchased a rat coloured car, who has ever heard of that? For one thing, it certainly made me stop and think. I reckon it’s brown.

Then there was Enoch Emery, a character so thirsty for external validation and recognition his need had to be insatiable. He also seemed to have delusions he had a calling and a purpose he needed to answer. I felt sorry for him, as he really wanted to befriend Motes, who was only interested in one thing – his memberless atheistic church. Enoch even went to extreme lengths to make him happy. Enter the Mummy, what?? – but that thing did give me some laughs, in a weird sort of way. Enoch also spent a considerable amount of his time, sitting in the bushes leering at women in the public swimming pool. Enough said.

I had this massive feeling of foreboding throughout this book, I was just waiting for unpleasant things to happen.

There were con-men, fake preachers, an ape, a bear, a mummy and a few women who seemed to take a liking to Hazel Motes, he must’ve looked like Richard Gere as he didn’t seem to offer much else.

I’ll leave you with a couple of Hazelisms:

Firstly, his view on redemption: “There’s no peace for the redeemed, and I preach peace, I preach the Church without Christ, the church peaceful and satisfied”.

Secondly, this little gem “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. ” I spent considerable time performing mental acrobatics trying to figure that one out.

I must apologise for this ‘review’. I wasn’t going to write one and started re-writing it several times. It is hard to write a review for a book like this, because it is so unusual. Perhaps I should leave books like this to be reviewed by the experts.

A book about hopeless people in hopeless situations. Interesting read though.

3.5 Stars, rounded up for shock, interest and dark comedy 4 Stars

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

It occurs to me that, in this short novel, Flannery O'Connor invented "white trash." To say this book is about low-life rabble in the South in the 1940's is an understatement. In fact, she was accused in literary circles of writing about "grotesques." Our main character, Hazel Motes, is so screwed up (although we never learn why) that he becomes an anti-preacher, teaching about the "Church of Christ without Christ." He eventually blinds himself. A father tries to pass off his underage daughter to any available man to be rid of her. Every preacher is a charlatan; every cop is a brutal sadist; every character leads a life of loud and violent desperation. And yet, a fascinating read.

[Karen· · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could we have a separate rating system please? One that is not concerned with whether we like a book or not? I was going to give this one five stars 'It was amazing' but amazing is not quite the word. Appalling. Perturbing. Perplexing, yes, but not amazing in the positive sense. And now I decide to give it only one star, to say no, I did not like this reading experience. I recognize that O'Connor is not writing to please, she makes no concessions to tired readers who want an uplifting story at the end of the working day, and I'm quite willing to engage with her book intellectually, I'm able to understand that she intends to keep us at arm's length emotionally, so she certainly has achieved what she probably set out to do. But her world view is a deeply distasteful one, at least to a humanist.

In her essay "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"
http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitp...
O'Connor argues that fiction in her time (1960) has become too much concerned with social, political, economic or psychological determinism, and sees her writing in the tradition of the Romance, pushing out into the mystery that lies beyond those factors, depicting experiences that the ordinary man will never have in ordinary life, "We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected. It is this kind of realism that I want to consider."
Now I can grasp that she is not concerned with social mores or psychological motivation, but the figures in this novel (and I have a deep reluctance to call them characters) are so dislocated from any kind of recognizable patterns of human behaviour that it is hard to acknowledge them as human beings at all. It seems to me that they are physical manifestations of souls in torment. They are, as O'Connor says, "Christ-haunted"; the fact that Hazel Motes no longer believes in Jesus, but in a world where the dead stay dead, does not in any way change his view that the world must be conceived of in terms of redemption and damnation. So although Jesus no longer is a redemptive figure for him, he cannot escape from the structures imposed by belief in the damned and the saved. Those structures still exist, but are blank, negated, turned upside down. In her note to the second edition O'Connor addresses such readers as myself, who would prefer to think the belief in Christ 'a matter of no great consequence', and assumes that such as me will discover Hazel Motes' integrity in 'his trying with such vigour to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind.' (the metaphor she uses for Christ). But I do not see Haze trying to get rid of that figure at all, he merely replaces it with the negative, the reverse of it.

The grotesque figure is normally defined as one that evokes both empathy and disgust. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for example, or Shakespeare's Caliban. Physically deformed, but with a humanity that we can feel. For me the figures in this novel are not grotesque in that sense, they are monsters that induce only a feeling of disgust. There is no detectable humanity here, at least none that speaks to my idea of human. That may be a failing on my part, an inability to empathize with the torment of a 'soul' that has lost religion, as, to me, these are empty concepts. So maybe my distaste is exactly what O'Connor would have liked, to push me into a place where I certainly feel uncomfortable. But what sort of a world is this? Religiosity has turned these people either into lunatics or at least into self-absorbed monsters who would place the responsibility for their lives into the hands of some mystery that they ill understand. Is O'Connor saying that this is religion misunderstood? Or is she saying that's what the religious view of the world does? There is an ambiguity at the centre of this novel that is probably essential to keep it alive.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose Flannery O'Connor must be considered a Christian writer, as she was a Catholic and Christian themes permeate her books, but her imagination was on fire and she knew how to get those flames into her words and that's really all that matters.

Wise Blood is like an upside-down inside-out book about salvation, where professed atheism is faith, blindness is seeing, and rottenness is goodness, and it's all spiced up with tersely vivid bizarre characterizations and situations in an enveloping atmosphere of pungent mystery. If your eyebrows don't go up and your eyes widen when a character finds his particular salvation by hijacking a Hollywood gorilla suit and burying his clothes in the woods and reemerging as a scary ape then maybe you should consider taking up scrapbooking rather than reading potent literature such as this.

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just couldn't do this. I sometimes find it difficult to overcome things that are obviously repulsive but part of the time in which the book is written, but I can do that when there is something there that overreaches that. This book showed no promise that that was true. Again, drunkenness and prostitution are subjects I can countenance if they contribute to some greater meaning in the story...didn't see it.

I am bailing, after having several trusted friends tell me there wasn't going to be any improvement. Can't win them all, although this month I have really been having a bad run. I was disappointed, because I have previously always found the substance in O'Connor to overcome the flaws.

[Molly Moran · Rating 1 out of 5]

Huh. I don't know what to say about this book at all. I tried reading some of the reviews to see if they helped clarify anything for me, but nobody said much of anything. Lots of people gave it 4 or 5 stars but then just said that it was weird and anti-religion. That doesn't inherently make something good. I'm still unsure what the point of this book was: what's the critique, what's driving it, what, if anything, am I to take away from it?

I've not read O'Connor before, and I don't think I'll be rushing out to get those supposedly fantastic short stories of hers. Hazel Motes is on that Book magazine list, and here's one more case of me not understanding why. This was a huge let-down. Huge, gigantic. Ugh.