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Loading... The Heart is A Lonely Hunterby Carson McCullers
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Novel of life in a small southern town with both white and black characters. Not much plot, good character development, kind of depressing - no happy endings! - reading was extremely well done with range of voices for characters. ( )Yearning, melancholy, loving and sad: the more McCullers I read, the more I realize her genius for her gentle understanding of the lonely, the freakish and the isolated. McCullers understands the panicky void that gapes around those who are alone, who cannot express the complications of their minds. Each character here, floating alone through life in a miserable southern mill town, each one shares two things in common. One: their inner life is impossible to express to those around them. Two: a messiah-like reverence for deaf-mute John Singer, who is for all of them an apotheosis, a summation of everything they need him to be. There is a lot of aching and yearning here. A profound understanding of humanity. A gripping story. Tragedies, a moment caught like a fragile insect of history. Beautiful. It's amazing to think this book was written by a young white girl of 23. It paints a vivid picture of life in a poor mill town in the south following the Depression. She shows such a breadth of understanding - both genders, all age groups, black and white. Given the prejudices prevailing at that time her tolerance, compassion and humanity are all the more remarkable. The story focuses on five main characters. All are underdogs, oddballs or battlers. Each has a dream, but each finds themselves frustrated, and sadly these dreams turn to ashes - and in some cases death. well...nice..not bad... read this book for a recent book group and although it made for an excellent discussion, three out of four of us did not enjoy it. We found it a struggle to get through and I, personally would not have finished it if I'd felt I had the choice. The plot is slow, tediously so at times and I couldn't help but wonder what the point was to all these aimless people wandering in and out of Springer's room. I do understand what the book is about and I'm very pleased that we were able to flush it out during subsequent discussion, that alone made the whole exercise worth while, but I require a higher level of reading pleasure during the process. My apologies to those who thought the book was wonderful, I'll stick to my more modern literature :) 0.057 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0618526412, Paperback)With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the NEW YORK TIMES. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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