Scan barcode
A review by gardnerhere
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
4.0
Wait...what? She was twenty-f'n-three when she wrote this? C'mon.
I was all ready to write this thoughtful review explaining why this full-hearted but ultimately miserable novel is an almost-classic (replete with careful consideration of its several faults) which is all well and good and it's a novel that deserves such a treatment and so on and such and such AND SHE WAS TWENTY-F'N-THREE?
Given that, it's easier to forgive this novel its stridency, its tendency to slip into (personal and global) political rant thinly disguised as dialogue, its brash presumptuousness. This would have been a damn-fine mid-career effort for an important novelist (which is precisely what I presumed it was), and she was just a kid.
Holy hell.
Okay then, so this bleak, bleak book is a heart-wrencher to many. For me, the characters were a little too desperate, a little too monomaniacal, a little too self-involved (even when they claim to be devoted to others) to be entirely sympathetic. They all need so desperately, and it all makes much more sense as a first novel. The yearning, revolted, desperate heart so patently behind every page now seems not strained but natural, not an effect striven for but a truth impossible to conceal. McCullers bled on these pages as only a young'n can--earnestly and without pause--and the resulting novel sits so close to what [a:Jon Krakauer|1235|Jon Krakauer|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1199903308p2/1235.jpg] calls the raw throb of existence that it's almost too much to take. Twenty-f'n-three. You gotta be kidding me.
I was all ready to write this thoughtful review explaining why this full-hearted but ultimately miserable novel is an almost-classic (replete with careful consideration of its several faults) which is all well and good and it's a novel that deserves such a treatment and so on and such and such AND SHE WAS TWENTY-F'N-THREE?
Given that, it's easier to forgive this novel its stridency, its tendency to slip into (personal and global) political rant thinly disguised as dialogue, its brash presumptuousness. This would have been a damn-fine mid-career effort for an important novelist (which is precisely what I presumed it was), and she was just a kid.
Holy hell.
Okay then, so this bleak, bleak book is a heart-wrencher to many. For me, the characters were a little too desperate, a little too monomaniacal, a little too self-involved (even when they claim to be devoted to others) to be entirely sympathetic. They all need so desperately, and it all makes much more sense as a first novel. The yearning, revolted, desperate heart so patently behind every page now seems not strained but natural, not an effect striven for but a truth impossible to conceal. McCullers bled on these pages as only a young'n can--earnestly and without pause--and the resulting novel sits so close to what [a:Jon Krakauer|1235|Jon Krakauer|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1199903308p2/1235.jpg] calls the raw throb of existence that it's almost too much to take. Twenty-f'n-three. You gotta be kidding me.