"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."
Virginia Woolf
Song Lyrics: Only a Fool Would Say That by Donald Fagen and Walter BeckerI heard it was youTalkin' 'bout a worldWhere all is freeIt just couldn't beAnd only a fool would say that
With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940.
At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.I really liked this book - although it came at the tail end of a 'Southern Angst" reading jag that included this as well as Light In August, The Moviegoer and To Kill a Mockingbird.
"Yet while I was surrounded by love, the journey through a harsh and unforgiving landscape of pain and disability was mine alone to make. That I lived, that I narrowly escaped the fate of so many others that day, is a humbling reminder of both the extreme fragility and the surprising courage that exist within all of us. What I know for certain is that there would be no story at all if I hadn't somehow held a deep faith in myself or understood the beauty and power of a simple word: commitment. Commitment to all that is worthwhile in life: to the people who are most important to us; to the endeavors that will yield the most good; to the acts of kindness or courage that reflect our deepest values. Commitment, I've learned, brings focus and direction, an innate sense that guides us from within, providing a compass for our lives. It also brings responsibility, most especially the requirement that we keep our word and always give our best."
Lauren Manning, 9/11 Survivor, from her book, Unmeasured Strength
"Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad, and nostalgic and familiar."
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929.Image: Road to the Sun by Birdies & Peppers.
I really, really enjoyed this book. I loved the female characters and it was so lovely to visit with these women. All were aging rapidly (the youngest, Teddy, is 74) but they were wild and funny and wise and they still wanted things.... which was so wonderful for me, the reader.Oscar Feldman, the "Great Man," was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject—the female nude. When he died in 2001, he left behind a wife, Abigail, an autistic son, and a sister, Maxine, herself a notable abstract painter—all duly noted in the New York Times obituary.
What no one knows is that Oscar Feldman led an entirely separate life in Brooklyn with his longtime mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and their twin daughters. As the incorrigibly bohemian Teddy puts it, "He couldn't live without a woman around. It was like water to a plant for him." Now two rival biographers, book contracts in hand, are circling around Feldman's life story, and each of these three women—Abigail, Maxine, and Teddy—will have a chance to tell the truth as they experienced it.
The Great Man is a scintillating comedy of life among the avant-garde—of the untidy truths, needy egos, and jostlings for position behind the glossy facade of artistic greatness. Not a pretty picture—but a provocative and entertaining one that incarnates the take-no-prisoners satirical spirit of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.
After Woolf published her breakthrough novel Mrs. Dalloway, she raised the stakes and broadened her focus. To the Lighthouse is a stately dance of time, hope and art, as performed by the Ramsay family and their immediate friends as they vacation at a house in the Hebrides. Mrs. Ramsay is a housewife and hostess; her husband is a cold, analytical philosopher; drawn in their wake are, among others, a struggling young painter named Lily Briscoe and their little son James, whose dearest wish is to take a boat ride to a nearby lighthouse. The novel begins as a poignant portrait of family dynamics, but Woolf sets the second half of the book a decade after the first, and that allows her to turn To the Lighthouse into a study of the damage that time and history inflict on the Ramsays' hopes and dreams, and a celebration of what endures.I am big Virginia Woolf fan and I loved "Three Guineas" and "A Room of One's Own", both non-fiction.
