.jpeg){kind=small}
Overall a good collection, a mix of O'Connor's short stories, one novel, and several letters, speeches, and essays. I'd never really run across O'Connor before and felt this was a good introduction. I can see how she takes her place among the great American fiction writers, but honestly, her style isn't much for me. Her fiction strikes me as dull-meets-shocking, which is perhaps what she is going for, shaking her characters and her audience out of their funk. What really interested me was the non-fiction part of the collection. I gained an impression of O'Connor as an unusually perceptive, sardonic, and intelligent person, someone who was very strong indeed. From this, I would be more interested in reading more of her letters, speeches, and essays before I tracked down any more of her fiction. A good read nonetheless, and for those who thrive on her style of fiction, probably a very excellent one.
For me, some of the more memorable bits she offers:
"the operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug." (p 27)
"only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom." (p 33)
"At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily." (p 34)
"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally." (p 64)
"In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected...something has gone wrong in the process when, for so many students, the story becomes simply a problem to be solved, something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment." (p 67)
"She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn't have the brains to avoid evil without it. For people like herself, for people of gumption, it was a social occasion providing the opportunity to sing; but if she had ever given it much thought, she would have considered the devil the head of it and God the hanger-on." (p 85)
"The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory..." (p 375)
"An identity is not to be found on the surface; it is not accessible to the poll-taker; it is not something that canbecome a cliche. It is not made from the mean average or the typical, but from the hidden and often the most extreme. It is not made from what passes, but from those qualities that endure, regardless of what passes, because they are related to the truth." (p 377)
"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location." (p 378)
"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful...Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does." (p 400)