Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
Wise Blood is a comedy with a fierce, Old Testament soul. Flannery O'Connor has no truck with such newfangled notions as psychology. Driven by forces outside their control, her characters are as one-dimensional--and mysterious--as figures on a frieze. Hazel Motes, for instance, has the temperament of a martyr, even though he spends most of the book trying to get God to go away. As a child he's convinced that "the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin." When that doesn't work, and when he returns from Korea determined "to be converted to nothing instead of evil," he still can't go anywhere without being mistaken for a preacher. (Not that the hat and shiny glare-blue suit help.) No matter what Hazel does, Jesus moves "from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark..."
Adrift after four years in the service, Hazel takes a train to the city of Taulkinham, buys himself a "rat-colored car," and sets about preaching on street corners for the Church Without Christ, "where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way." Along the way he meets Enoch Emery, who's only 18 years old but already works for the city, as well the blind preacher Asa Hawks and his illegitimate daughter, Sabbath Lily. (Her letter to an advice column: "Dear Mary, I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as we all know, but I have this personality that makes boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not?") Subsequent events involve a desiccated, centuries-old dwarf--Gonga the Giant Jungle Monarch--and Hazel's nemesis, Hoover Shoats, who starts the rival Church of Christ Without Christ. If you think these events don't end happily, you might be right.
Wise Blood is a savage satire of America's secular, commercial culture, as well as the humanism it holds so dear ("Dear Sabbath," Mary Brittle writes back, "Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to re-examine your religious values to see if they meet your needs in Life.") But the book's ultimate purpose is Religious, with a capital R--no metaphors, no allusions, just the thing itself in all its fierce glory. When Hazel whispers "I'm not clean," for instance, O'Connor thinks he is perfectly right. For readers unaccustomed to holding low comedy and high seriousness in their heads at the same time, all this can come as something of a shock. Who else could offer an allegory about free will, redemption, and original sin right alongside the more elemental pleasure of witnessing Enoch Emery dress up in a gorilla suit? Nobody else, that's who. And that's OK. More than one Flannery O'Connor in this world might show us more truth than we could bear. --Mary Park
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Memorable and haunting
Customer Rating:
Wise Blood is a work for everyone. However, it is by no means meant to please everyone. It is hilarious and dreadful, hopeless and redemptive. It is essentially about a young man's inability to lose Christ. He is saved as a child and "soul hungry" Jesus will never let him go. It is a simple read but also rewards a willingness to look into it's deeper themes and symbolism. Ms. O'Connor said that it was written and should be read with zest, but those looking for a light beach-read should maybe look elsewhere. She did not write to give her audience a warm, fuzzy feeling of satisfaction. In fact, she expected them to be turned off. It is a short book and one that will stay with you long after you've finished. The night I finished reading it, the wind was cold and strong and caused tree branches to tap against my window. My initial reaction to the sound was not to worry. It's just the shrunken new Jesus, I thought. Then I realized that exactly why we should all be worried.
Current Favourite Novel
Customer Rating:
I'm a huge fan of Flannery O'Connor so when someone asked me to name my favourite novel I picked a little bit-of-a-book and said "Wise Blood".
Partly because the characters are, if not wholly understood, at least wholly familiar. Despite growing up around an assortment of Evangelicals and Foundation types I managed for the most part to maintain a pretty superficial view of them. Things like snake handling and female oppression were odd but ordinary and because of this ordinary I never spent too much time thinking about the misguided spirituality that a lot of it sat upon. Through a glass darkly, and all that.
Mostly, I'm moved to recommend Wise Blood again and again because it's such a brilliantly layered and grotesque comedy with powerful and appealing themes of integrity, the disaffected young and redemption. It's just one of those books you never really walk away from. Not really.
And that's a good thing.
"Stop one minute to listen to the truth because you may never hear it again."
Customer Rating:
I enjoy a lot of Irish writers and even though I have known the name Flannery O'Connor for a long time,this is the first time I have actually read this author. I ,like others ,assumed Flannery was a man and Irish.Before reading this novel,I checked the Amazon customer reviews and was completely surprised . Then, with some research on the net, that Flannery was a young woman of only 27 when she wrote this book,and rather than being Irish,was from an Old Deep South Catholic family,born in Savannah,Georgia. She was born in 1925,surrounded by poor whites in a Protestant area,left home at 18,graduated from college,wrote mainly Southern Gothic short stories,only 2 novels.She had a great interest in domestic birds,peacocks,pheasants,swans,geese,chickens and Moscovy Ducks. After college she lived on a family farm with her mother,outside Millidville Georgia.She was also a good painter. She was quite frail,never married,like her father,she contacted Lupus and died very young at only 39,in 1964. Her mother outlived her for many years. It is still possible to visit the farm in Millidville,Ga.She had a deep and knowledgeable faith. As I read this book ,I was continually reminded of other writers such as James Joyce,Erskine Caldwell,Faulkner,Erskine Caldwell,Steinbeck and even some of those bible -thumping movies such as Elmer Gantry. This is all about having or not having faith. O'Connor understands the difference between Faith and Religion and shows what a difficult thing it can be when someone lacks real faith and attempts to develop one's own through rationalization.Flannery does not make any attempt to preach or conince the reader one way or the other about faith,but she does an admiral job of showing how difficult and all encompassing it can be for some people who have doubts and try to resolve them. While Flannery's life was all too short ;and we are all the poorer for that;she is remembered by words like these;
"Everything that rises must converge."
"Grace changes us and change is painful."
Anyone Who Had a Heart
Customer Rating:
This novel combines startling images and an inscrutable Old Testament sensibility with funny scenes that will make you laugh out loud. It is the novel that helped cement Flannery O'Connor's literary reputation. She's a writer who will be part of the canon in a hundred years -- people will still be reading and discussing her. "Wise Blood" is the story of Hazel Motes, a man determine to strip Christ out of his life and out of the world, but, who, paradoxically, is also obsessed with Him. A walk through a haunted yet still good world filled with men who are made into monkeys, workaday street preachers, broke down autos, this is a kaleidoscope of sense, doubts, guilt, and humor: a must read tour de force.
Wiser to Not Read This Novel
Customer Rating:
I read a lot of books and am fond of many Southern authors, including the late Ms. O'Connor. I really enjoyed her wonderfully titled "A Hard Man is a Good Find" (Note: A fine birthday gift for my grumbling gorilla of a wife; inscription: "I told you so!") and I like the author's ability to make the grotesque humorous. Unfortunately, this novel is a complete failure with very little to laugh about. It's a pretty meaningless story with virtually no plot: nutty war veteran returns to empty home town, goes to another town, preaches nonsense, acts like the nutjob he is, meets some other worthless characters, does nutty things in an effort to find redemption (an idiot's path, mind you), etc. This supposedly funny novel with a point (often my very favorite genre) fails to elicit more than a single laugh (the scene with the Gonga the Gorilla was pretty darn funny--pointless, but funny) and the point about redemptive suffering (if that was even the point) struck this reader as ridiculously rendered. All the characters are lunatics and there's absolutely nothing driving this book to conclusion, other than the turn of the page. This novel has been highly recommended by people who tend to be trustworthy. Unfortunately, I put it on the short list of books I've actually finished that I wish I'd never started. Not her best effort and one of the worst novels I've ever read. HHD>.
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