The Mortgaged Heart

This collection is collated and introduced by Carson's sister and is mostly short stories. However, it also includes articles, poems, brief notes about writing and a detailed outline of her most famous novel, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/23324262).

A few pieces are more relevant if you are familiar with her subject (THiaLH, Dostoyevsky, Isak Dinesen), but most are accessible to all and the short stories are a good introduction to her distinctive, lyrical style. I also learned that Anne Frank's father asked Carson to write a play of Anne's diary, but Carson found the book too upsetting to do so.

She very quickly captures the mood and essence of characters and their situation and her musical training show more and her empathy with people isolated by difference and at turning points in their lives shine through. (She won a place at the Julliard, to study piano, but lost her fees on the subway, so enrolled on a creative writing course instead!)

The topics include people struggling with drink, failure, loss, poor health, changing relationships, uncertainty etc.

* In Wunderkind (also included in Ballad of the Sad Café), the trials of adolescence seem to ruin musicality
* In Like That, a tomboy resists growing up and becoming more feminine
* Court in the West Eighties is surely an inspiration for Rear Window.
* The stand out story for me is The Haunted Boy, which is about a boy's overwhelming fear that something bad has happened to his mother. It takes a lot to make me cry, but it was so believable and the unspoken (and eventually, spoken) fear so awful, that this story did. show less

A collection of mostly previously uncollected/unpublished works by McCullers intended to showcase the author's literary maturation, it is a fascinating record of her interest in the solitary and the lonely, and of how her early music training has affected and complemented her literary compositions. The first half of the book contains her early stories while the second half contains four later stories as well as some nonfiction essays and poems she penned, which have remained unread by me (and therefore not part of the final rating) as I find myself more interested in her fiction.

Some of the stories were specifically wrote for Sylvia Chatfield Bates' writing workshops and I quite enjoyed the postscripted critiques Mccullers received from show more Bates. Since my own appreciation of fiction has depended quite arbitrarily on gut instincts rather than some refined knowledge of writing theory - e.g. what is a picture story, I've never thought much about the structure of a scene and how the author can effectively use specific ones for their particular goals - , I very much appreciated these professional critiques on the art of fiction and the art of writing.

Favourites: of the Early Stories, Court in the West Eighties is beautiful; of the Later Stories, The Haunted Boy is outstanding.

Worth a read for the McCullers fan: her story plan outline for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

As well as Bates' aforementioned name, two other writers whose names I will henceforth keep an eye out for: Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Edith Sitwell. show less

See the review on my blog

> Esprit, No. 3 (3) (Mars 1977), pp. 504-506 : https://esprit.presse.fr/article/le-vot-andre/f-scott-et-zelda-fitzgerald-eclats...
> Voir aussi : http://www.moncelon.fr/carson.htm
> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/McCullers-Le-Coeur-hypotheque/241113

> Collin Françoise. Carson Mccullers, Le cœur hypothéqué, Stock.
In: Les Cahiers du GRIF, n°16, 1977. Leur crise nos luttes. p. 108. … ; (en ligne),
URL : http://www.persee.fr/doc/grif_0770-6081_1977_num_16_1_1173_t1_0108_0000_7