The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Ratings85
Average rating3.7
I think it was the wrong book, or maybe the wrong time. But after 150 pages I'm out.
Come for the themes of isolation and desperation, stay for the multiple POV masterclass.
‘We read books to know we are not alone.'
-William Nicholson
I love this book and I love it's characters; a bunch of misfits in whom I glimpsed pieces of myself.
Beautifully written, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a story about alienation, about finding one's place in a world that seems to be made of a totally different material than one is made of, and about the longing for something, or someone, to make one feel listened to, feel seen, accepted, and loved.
It's a book you certainly have to come back to.
Carson McCullers is now on my radar and this will become one of my comfort books and one of my favourites.
Que livro!! Personagens complexos e bittersweet em seus mundos, a discussão sobre justiça e opressão, o preconceito e a autoridade, Willie e seus pés,Portia e suas pontes, dr Copeland e sua doença, Mick e seu sonho musical... e John Singer!!! Meu coração ficou partido.
A rather strange, and yet, enjoyable read. It is still spinning around in my mind, although I finished it earlier this afternoon.
Somehow, I had missed Ms. McCullers' works, although I've enjoyed other Southern gothic authors like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and the great Flannery O'Connor. Ms. McCullers comes relatively early in the 20th Century Southern gothic arch and seems to have been influenced by the realists like Hemingway, although I didn't find any support for that idea. Her prose is clean and deftly twists and turns the slang and syntax of different inhabitants of the novel's small mill town so you can practically hear the rich drawls.
She preferred to compare her work to the earlier Russians like Chekhov and Tolstoy, as opposed to being lumped into the Southern gothic melange. While there are some similarities to the Russians, like writing about poor people struggling against themselves, I do feel that her novel has the languid, Spanish moss sense of time and many of the characters are oddballs and outcasts that set it firmly into Southern gothic camp.
The five main characters of the novel are all lonely outcasts hunting for meaning, acceptance, and love, but are constrained by their own inability to decompartmentalize different parts of their lives and to properly communicate. In fact, all five characters worshipfully communicate with their chosen “deity” (for John Singer, Antonapoulas and for Mick Kelly, Dr. Copeland, Biff Brannon, and Jake Blount; John Singer), but never achieve or really seem to want a two-way street. In fact, all of the worshipers are delusional about their god and think that there's magic to just talking to that person.
And that ends up being each character's tragedy. John Singer and Antonapoulas may have had a homosexual relationship, although it is not clearly stated; it would provide an additional explanation for Antonapoulas' cousin committing him to a mental institution beyond increasingly erratic behaviors. Once Antonapoulas dies, Singer can no longer maintain his placid existence and bi-annual vacations to visit Antonapoulas, and ends up committing suicide. Jake Blount finds himself unable to control his violent impulses and flees town after killing a young black man when a fight breaks out at the carnival; he's not quite able to reconcile his wish for the proletariat to rise up and the demons of alcohol addiction. Biff Brannon is able to re-emerge a little after his wife's death and interestingly plays with expected gender roles, which would certainly have been a big deal in the South of the 1940s. Dr. Copeland is unable to achieve dreams that wouldn't be realized until the Civil Rights movement a quarter of a century later; at the same time, he carries a dark , violent side that occasionally leaks out, which turned both is wife and children against him. Only Mick Kelly really seems to have possibilities at the end of the novel, perhaps because she is a biographical nod to the author, who did go on to study piano. I love the chapters told from Mick's tomboy point of view as she travels over various potholes towards young adulthood. Although she's consigned to flames of department store clerkdom woe at the end of the novel, the reader is given the impression that she might find a way to access her “inner room” and reconnect with her love of music.
After each character loses their deity, they end up somewhat, if not a great deal, worse off than they were at the beginning of the story. I'm not sure whether she intended that a search for God in other humans is ultimately fruitless because each person is estranged, or whether she was disillusioned with the God.
Why do I feel like I just finished a 359 page novelization of a depressing Seinfeld episode?
If I had to describe this book, it would be To Kill a Mockingbird if Atticus Finch was a raging-alcoholic communist. I have no bones with the writing: nice, abrupt prose and skillful character sketches, if sometimes the pacing was a bit repetitious and slow.
But dear God, I finished the book and my only thought was how much time I'd wasted on it. The theme? Uh, don't try to be smart if you're poor and live in the South, I guess? Yeahhh, and that was about it.
I wanted to like the characters, like, any of them. But I couldn't. Horrible things happened to them and I didn't care. I WANTED TO! I PROMISE! I felt like McCullers tries to make them so three-dimensional that they ended up like caricatures. What could have been a strongly empathetic portrait of those looking for education in a backward society kept me at a distance where all I could see was how faintly ridiculous their pretensions were.
McCullers and Harper both looked at the small Southern town, but where McCullers only saw the grime and backwardness of the townspeople, Harper saw hope in the individuals.
I'm going to lead with: not really my type of book. I read this because it was the May pick for The Perks of Being a Bookworm group; what I like about book clubs is that they are introducing me to books I would never think of reading. Sometimes this is a success, this time it wasn't.I did not enjoy actually reading this book, in fact I was somewhat reading it; I didn't have to force myself to read it, but I didn't care if I read it, I had no ‘need' to know what happened. If it had not been a group read and reasonably short, I would have stopped reading before I got halfway. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't really care about any of the characters apart from Singer and Biff, partly because of their selfishness regarding Singer, projecting their need onto him without caring about him for his own sake. I don't think it was simply that because even unlikeable characters can be compelling to read about, but not these. I did like the writing; I got a sense of each of the characters fairly quickly, some more than others, Dr Copeland in particular. This style of story does not grab me; I suppose I need a ‘quest' or similar to drive the story for me, even if that is used for social commentary. I recently read [b:Post Office 51504 Post Office Charles Bukowski http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347432080s/51504.jpg 823130] by [a:Charles Bukowski 13275 Charles Bukowski http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1361445522p2/13275.jpg] and I was reminded of it whilst reading that; I didn't particularly enjoy it either (2 stars again).
Finally done with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and whoa, gotta think this one through a bit more. I love the whole “Have to face the new day” ending, and Biff's POV was the best to end with. But how did McCullers come up with this at 23? In the 1940s with Civil Rights barely beginning to boil? The spiels between Copeland and Jake Blount? Two characters that could not have been more different yet share the same ideology....I need to get my hands on more books like this, that make me contemplate human nature and its restrictions.
A-
Oh, what a novel. Really this is about as perfect as they come. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter has that blend of story, character, setting, lyricism, insight, pacing, and so forth and so on that makes a wonderful read. Throw all that under a title likeThe Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and what more could you ask for?
There were certainly echoes of other great American novels of the era, most notably To Kill a Mockingbird and Native Son. In fact, once I had it in my mind that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was a more mature, grown up version of TKaM I couldn't shake it, even if it was only partially true. Having made these comparisons, I was expecting quite the tragedy. Mix in this amazing cast of characters McCullers has assembled and there is guaranteed to be quite an explosion at the end. Perhaps I set my self up for failure, because, while this story is certainly tragic, in comparison with what I was expecting, it was quite mild.
McCullers, whose age is forever attached to his book (she was 23), handles this novel with such experience. Craft-wise, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is nearly a perfect novel. For starters, she expertly shows how shifting third person voice is done. She goes into the minds of these five unique, equally interesting characters, and captures their voices with skill. Clearly she empathizes with her characters. She understands their view of the world, though, aside from their feelings of anger and loneliness, they are as different from one another as can be expected for a novel of this time and setting. What else? Well, the word choice is exquisite, the story is well paced, and then there's that title. And come on, that scene between Mick and Harry in the woods—perfect! God I loved the way McCullers reveals nothing and yet everything in that scene. It's beautiful and heartbreaking, profound and yet simple. How did she do it?