(hb; 1941)
From the inside flap:
"... the story advances through the tangle of the emotional life of a Southern army post. The characters are strong and varied. Each is met in a revelatory moment: a captain safe only in impersonality; his golden, cruel wife; and a private mutely in love with her, watching the moonlight on her face as she sleeps, unaware of his presence."
Review:
The plot: An army Captain (cuckolded kleptomaniac Weldon Penderton), his wife ("feeble-minded" sensual Lenora), and their neighbors (Major Morris Langdon, Lenora's lover, and his sickly wife, Alison) are living in the social fishbowl of a military outpost, when a possibly-psychotic intensely-Xian Private L.G. Williams begins to stalk Lenora. In doing so, he helps bring about events that will ultimately shatter the fragile social structure that defines and restricts them all.
Bizarre, compact study of perversity, pettiness and antiseptic-toned cruelty, this: this is one of the most unique novels I've ever read; stylistically, it's incredibly different than McCullers's earlier novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which was a warm, rambly affair. It's difficult to believe that these tone- and theme-divergent novels sprang from the same mind.
This is also one of the most unsettling books I've read in a long while. Its brutality lies in taut-threatening-to-snap smiles, hissed comments and sudden, shocking acts of aggression.
The violent ending is flat and uninspired, after the creative displays of intimate cruelties that precede it. That said, Reflections in a Golden Eye a literary masterpiece, albeit a disturbing one.
Reflection in a Golden Eye, the film, was released stateside on October 13, 1967. Elizabeth Taylor played Lenora Penderton. Marlon Brando played Major Weldon Penderton. Brian Keith played Lt. Col. Morris Langdon. Julie Harris played Alison Langdon. Robert Forster played Pvt. L.G. Williams.
John Huston directed, from a script by Gladys Hill and Chapman Mortimer.
Showing posts with label Carson McCullers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carson McCullers. Show all posts
Friday, August 03, 2007
Thursday, March 30, 2006
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
(hb; 1940)
Review:
Loneliness, racism and the inability to communicate with one’s neighbors dominate this emotional, melancholic landmark novel, which charts a few years in a small American town (ending in 1939). McCullers’s writing is steady and engrossing, though her prose occasionally gets awkward (when describing certain characters’s drunken, entangled thoughts). To McCuller’s credit, though, not many writers could’ve written this novel the way she did, so occasional awkwardness is forgivable – and skimmable.
The characters are wonderfully rendered. The central character is a deaf mute, John Singer, whose mentally sick friend, Spiro Antonapoulos, goes away to a hospital. Shortly after that, Singer finds himself the silent, tolerant, often bewildered depository of his neighbors’s dreams, namely: Mick Kelly, the tomboyish teenage girl who secretly dreams of making music, like the stuff she hears on radio; Biff Brannon, a kindly diner owner whose marriage disintegrated long before his wife’s death; Benedict Mady Copeland, a black doctor whose angry politics are based in race theories, and disappointment in his socially complacent children; Jake Blount, a Marxist alcoholic whose rants favor the labor movement.
Readers seeking an action-oriented, swift-burn-of-a-novel should avoid this; the same goes for those looking for happy escapism, because while there are moments of kindness, unspoken intentions, frustration, poverty and gloom prevail here. That said, I’m glad I read this, because much of what McCullers writes about politics, racism and the “human condition” applies to today’s world.
The ending, consistently melancholic, rambles and disappoints, though McCullers is clearly striving to strike a balancing tone that wraps things up. She fails, but again, it’s a small failing in a novel that has few inked peers.
Effective, if depressing, work.
#
The film, was released stateside on July 31, 1968.
Alan Arkin played John Singer. Sondra Locke played Mick Kelly. Stacy Keach, billed as Stacy Keach Jr., played Jake Blount. Chuck McCann played Spiro Antonapoulos. Percy Rodriguez played Dr. Copeland.
Robert Ellis Miller directed, from a script by Thomas C. Ryan.
Review:
Loneliness, racism and the inability to communicate with one’s neighbors dominate this emotional, melancholic landmark novel, which charts a few years in a small American town (ending in 1939). McCullers’s writing is steady and engrossing, though her prose occasionally gets awkward (when describing certain characters’s drunken, entangled thoughts). To McCuller’s credit, though, not many writers could’ve written this novel the way she did, so occasional awkwardness is forgivable – and skimmable.
The characters are wonderfully rendered. The central character is a deaf mute, John Singer, whose mentally sick friend, Spiro Antonapoulos, goes away to a hospital. Shortly after that, Singer finds himself the silent, tolerant, often bewildered depository of his neighbors’s dreams, namely: Mick Kelly, the tomboyish teenage girl who secretly dreams of making music, like the stuff she hears on radio; Biff Brannon, a kindly diner owner whose marriage disintegrated long before his wife’s death; Benedict Mady Copeland, a black doctor whose angry politics are based in race theories, and disappointment in his socially complacent children; Jake Blount, a Marxist alcoholic whose rants favor the labor movement.
Readers seeking an action-oriented, swift-burn-of-a-novel should avoid this; the same goes for those looking for happy escapism, because while there are moments of kindness, unspoken intentions, frustration, poverty and gloom prevail here. That said, I’m glad I read this, because much of what McCullers writes about politics, racism and the “human condition” applies to today’s world.
The ending, consistently melancholic, rambles and disappoints, though McCullers is clearly striving to strike a balancing tone that wraps things up. She fails, but again, it’s a small failing in a novel that has few inked peers.
Effective, if depressing, work.
#
The film, was released stateside on July 31, 1968.
Alan Arkin played John Singer. Sondra Locke played Mick Kelly. Stacy Keach, billed as Stacy Keach Jr., played Jake Blount. Chuck McCann played Spiro Antonapoulos. Percy Rodriguez played Dr. Copeland.
Robert Ellis Miller directed, from a script by Thomas C. Ryan.
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