Reviews

• Worth the wait.

  Excellent quality and service.

• A great collection of short stories

  It comes to mind that Flannery O'Connor is to American literature what Janis Joplin was to American music. Short but stellar performances, with a down home sometimes wicked edge. O'Connor is one of the finest American writers in my opinion. She deals up front and personal with issues of race, religious fanaticism, and poverty, making honest use of the vernacular of her time.

• White superiority and fragile tragic souls

  Fiction may we’ll be the most powerful way that humans learn and grow... And Flannery O’Connor, in her gift at creating characters, is a brilliant teacher. The weakness and desperation of white supremacy is powerfully revealed in the saturated wisdom of this extraordinary short story

• "It was an ugly mystery."

  That line is from one of the nine stories in Flannery O'Connor's posthumous collection of short stories. It comes close to summarizing how for me O'Connor presents life -- as "an ugly mystery". Since she was a devout Roman Catholic, she herself probably did not view life to be either ugly or a total mystery. But I do not grasp her theology, so much of what I am left with is the ugliness and the mystery. Still, her stories should be read -- for their power and for the distinctiveness of her voice. I came to O'Connor much too late in my reading career. I was staggered by her first collection of short stores, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", when I read it about four years ago. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is almost as good. It contains one story ("The Lame Shall Enter First") that strikes me as rough, much like a first draft (O'Connor wrote most of the stories in the book in her last years, when suffering from the Lupus that would kill her). But five of the stories are top shelf, as fine in my opinion as the best of Alice Munro, or James Joyce, or John Updike. The stories are set primarily in rural and small-town Georgia of the late 1950's and early 1960's. Most end with a twist and in apocalyptic fashion. Three themes dominate. One is the theological. The first three stories seem Old Testament in nature, while the latter six partake of the New Testament, especially the Holy Ghost. (I can see preachers using many of these stories as texts for what could be enthralling sermons.) Another theme has to do with what I will call domestic relations, particularly those between an older parent and an adult child. For the last twelve years of her life, O'Connor lived with her widowed mother, who supposedly provided O'Connor a supportive and tranquil environment as she struggled with Lupus. However, the strained and bitterly antagonistic parent-child relationships of many of these stories make me wonder whether O'Connor's last years with her mother were truly all that peaceful for her. The third theme has to do with the relationship between blacks and whites in what was then still very much Jim Crow Georgia. These stories are not P.C. (indeed, O'Connor would have mocked, trenchantly, the very notion of P.C.), and if you are offended by the "n-word" regardless of context (much like Mark Twain and "Huckleberry Finn") you will be offended repeatedly. But as several of the stories indicate, and as one character says when he proposes to drink from the same glass as one of his mother's Negro workers, "the world is changing." The book's title, by the way, is also the title of the first, and probably best, story. Towards the end of her life, O'Connor read a lot by the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In a piece called the "Omega Point", Teilhard wrote: "Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."

• Violent, Dark, Funny.... GREAT!

  There seems to be a theme in most of the stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge, and that is sudden violence... usually at the end. I'm not giving anything away, because the read is the important part. O'Connor creates very authentic southern characters, that are funny, disgusting, bigoted, warm and all around human. There seems to be a slight O'Henry in O'Connor in that she likes to surprise you... some may say suddenly end things, quite dramatically. But it is with this ease that her writing is that much more disturbing. On the surface, the south she portrays is gentle and simple. Yet with sudden ferocity, she turns it on its head. To read O'Connor is really enthralling. The intensity and description in which she writes makes each story in this collection seem like a novel. I read Wise Blood a few years ago and liked it, but I will have to read it again as well as her other works after the great fulfillment this collection gave me.

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