My introduction to the fiction of Carson McCullers is her debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It should be a spoiler that this was published in 1940 because as a recent selection from Oprah's Book Club, I would've believed it came out in 2010. Rather than plodding through antiquity, the storytelling is as intimate as a contemporary novel. Even as the book settles into a series of vignettes, the vivid prose held my attention while the dilemmas faced by the characters had me talking to them like they were real people.

Set in an unnamed mill town in the U.S. South in a time Hitler and fascism are in the news, characters are introduced as they struggle to provide for themselves, be it with food, shelter or clothing in a country bit with poverty, or with human contact. The happiest-go-lucky may be John Singer, a deaf mute who engraves silver in a jewelry shop. Singer's best friend is a mute named Spiros Antonapoulos whom he's lived with for ten years and who works for his cousin's corner store. Unlike his increasingly punchy Greek friend, Singer is personable and the most popular man in town due to his ability to be whatever others see and to let them talk.

Biff Brannon is the owner of the twenty-four hour New York Café. Thoughtful and quiet, he lives upstairs with his unpleasant, bible studying wife Alice who does not cotton to her husband extending credit to customers. One of these is Jake Blount, a stranger in town who goes on a bender and finds the only man willing to listen to his radical philosophies is deaf. The mutes are boarders in the Kelly house. Of the family’s six children, their youngest daughter is Mick Kelly, a tempestuous, music composing teenager tasked with caring for her baby brothers, George (Bubber) and Ralph. Mick has great expectations and little means to accomplish them.

She stood in the middle of the empty room and stared at what she had done. The chalk was still in her hands and she did not feel really satisfied. She was trying to think of the name of this fellow who had written this music she heard over the radio last winter. She had asked a girl at school who owned a piano and took music lessons about him, and the girl asked her teacher. It seemed this fellow was just a kid who had lived in some country in Europe a good while ago. But even if he was just a young kid he had made up all these beautiful pieces for the piano and for the violin and for a band or orchestra too. In her mind she could remember about six different tunes from the pieces of his she had heard. A few of them were kind of quick and tinkling, and another was like that smell in the springtime after a rain. But they all made her somehow sad and excited at the same time.

She hummed one of the tunes, and after a while in the hot, empty house by herself she felt the tears come in her eyes. Her throat got tight and rough and she couldn't sing any more. Quickly she wrote the fellow's name at the very top of the list--MOTSART.

Another lonely confidant of Singer's is a Black physician, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, father to four adult children, including the Kelly's housekeeper Portia and Biff's kitchen help Willie. A scholar devoted to the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, Dr. Copeland is bitter that none of his children became the doctors or lawyers or great thinkers he'd tried to raise. Portia makes an effort to visit him, maintaining that none of them can afford to quarrel. Dr. Copeland finds no wider audience for his socialist philosophies than Jake Blount does, but rather than become friends or engage each other in conversation, neither man can stand the ideologies of the other.

If more contemporary authors wrote like Carson McCullers, who was twenty-three when this novel was published, I'd attend book club more often (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is our February selection by virtue of the word "heart" in the title. Whatever it takes for a book club to pick a good book, I won't question it.) Rather than carve the narrative up into seven or eight different points of view in the hyperactive and derivative style of most contemporary authors, McCullers just switches out her sets and actors, sustaining her blithely eloquent voice throughout. There were times I wanted a less episodic narrative but the strength of the prose carried me through.

"Mick," Bubber said. "I come to believe we all gonna drown."

It was true that it like to never quit raining. Mrs. Wells rode them back and forth to school in her car, and every afternoon they had to stay on the front porch or in the house. She and Bubber played Parchessi and Old Maid and shot marbles on the living-room rug. It was nearing along toward Christmas time and Bubber began to talk about the Little Lord Jesus and the red bicycle he wanted Santa Claus to bring him. The rain was silver on the windowpanes and the sky was wet and cold and gray. The river rose so high that some of the factory people had to move out of their houses. Then when it looked like the rain would keep on and on forever it suddenly stopped. They woke up one morning and the bright sun was shining. By afternoon the weather was almost warm as summer. Mick came home late from school and Bubber and Ralph and Spareribs were on the front sidewalk. The kids looked hot and sticky and their winter clothes had a sour smell. Bubber had the slingshot and a pocketful of rocks. Ralph sat up in his wagon, his hat crooked on his head, and he was fretful. Spareribs had his new rifle with him. The sky was a wonderful blue.

Loneliness is such a universal experience that I'm amazed more authors don't write about it. All of these characters would benefit from analysis. For lack of one, a mute is promoted to the town's unofficial mental health practitioner. Singer is beloved because he allows people to talk about their favorite subject: themselves. That he can't hear them or reply is not considered a liability. That Singer seems to listen and understand is plenty. I was invested in the lives of McCullers's characters and anxious that poverty allowed them no mistakes, one of which will be enough to drop them in a well they won't have the resources to climb out of.

Two things I found astounding:
- this book was written in 1940
- the author was 20 years old when she wrote it.

The thing is, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores not only the universal themes of loneliness and human purpose, which are arguably eternal themes, but also political, social and economic themes: race, class, justice, gender and sexuality, police violence, etc. The things the characters face and talk about echo the modern conversations so much I couldn't believe this book was written 80 years ago!

The writing was brilliant. The characters felt so real and alive to me, so vivid, I couldn't believe so young an author could explore such wildly different people this deeply. All except Singer, that is. More on that later.

The 'town in the middle of the deep South' is populated by people whos experience is not clean-cut or limited by the single message of the novel. It's full of real LIFE. It's messy, strange, confusing. I felt like I was getting the real deal, not some distilled make-believe. The resulting jumble felt so deep to me, I think I can re-read this book 20 times and find new things every time. The author's voice is indistinguishable behind the voices of her characters, each of whom has very strong and passionate opinions.

The four main characters gravitate around the central figure of Singer, a deaf-mute man. They don't talk to him, mainly they talk at him, idealize him and ascribe to him the qualities that are important to them. His personality remains fairly obscure, I guess to further this purpose. I was infinitely curious about him and wished he would open up more. All we get is a glimpse at his inner life that prevents the reader from idealizing Singer: his relationship with Antonopoulos, his deaf-mute friend. With him Singer does the same the other characters do to him - has a monologue instead of a dialogue without noticing it, and ascribes character traits he wishes to see. Later I realized Singer was more of a thread that joins the whole novel together than a real person and stopped longing for more John-related plot.

Reading the book I kept thinking "but... WHY?", "... but what does it MEAN?" and after finishing it my main take away is "HUH?". I'm confused and feel like it'll take a long while to process it all. To me, that's a marker of a great book.

This is not light reading. And it's a lot of things, but it can hardly be called enjoyable. Some called the book depressing, to me, it didn't feel that way. Still, it took me a long time to finish and it wasn't easy.

القلب صياد وحيد...!! ألا يتراءى لك بأن العنوان ينطوي على خديعة ما ؟..
لطالما كان القلب فريسة يُنصب له الشراك فإذ به هاهنا صياد ولكن وحيد....
يترقب حذراً وينتظر ساكناً وحيداً...وقد ينتظر ما لن يأت أبداً....
قلب كل شخص هنا كان صياداً وحيداً...يقتنص الكلمات ..الكلمات فحسب لأن هذا ما كان باستطاعته ، فتتراكم بداخله وأقصى ما يمكنها أن ترتجف على شفاه أصحابها فيلتقطها شخص أصم وأبكم ...!!!
لا بأس ، فعلى الكلمات ان تفرغ حمولتها عن تلك الأرواح المحطمة والمنهزمة...
لقد كان ذاك الأصم الأبكم مُتشككاً في أنه قد فهم مقصد كل من تحدث اليه ولكن ما هو متيقناً منه أن الجميع يكررون أحاديثهم ويفترسهم وحش الوحدة المخاتل وقد سقطوا في خواء اليأس...
هنا مرثاة للانسانية ومع ذلك لن تقبل مواساة ولا عزاء...
أخيراً...كل قلب هنا قد ....
" انحدر إلى الأعماق ، إلى نهاية الهوة ، ولمس القعر الصلب لليأس وارتاح هناك ".....

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Oh, Mick Kelly. I’m pretty sure we are related.

This southern masterpiece feels a little like To Kill A Mockingbird, with hints of Faulkner, Welty, Mitchell and O’Connor. The southern themes and colloquial speech, where speech there was, reminded me of the Southern women who raised me. I grew very fond of the characters, John Singer and his Greek friend, Spiros Antonapoulos, Biff Brannon, Bubber/George, Mick, her whole family, even Baby Wilson and her stagestruck mother. Along with Doc Copeland, Willie, Harry, Jake, and others they all traverse through the hot summer days of a year - once mentioned – and a reader sees their life struggles against the backdrop of Mr. Singer and his friend’s deafness and mute conditions. Each have needs, loves and wants; they react, react, react. Listening to each other? Not much. That’s not an exclusively southern trait. . . .all of us do it all the time. BUT, with characters drawn true to type, and so well, we are clear about a few of the stereotypic aspects that drive them.

Significant life events occur to all these characters: loss of life, loss of virginity, loss of body parts, loss of companionship, loss of sanity, loss of job and wealth, loss of place and opportunity. How does a person, how should a person, properly process these life-shaking circumstances? Each of them reacts to their loss in way that is consistent with the raw, bright, shiny character the author has drawn for us.

If they had listened and heard each other. . . would a different result unfold? And here’s where I rerun the last moments of Gone with the Wind, one more time (“Frankly, my dear/Tomorrow’s another day!”). . . .so. . . is this really, at heart, simply a cautionary tale? I think it is, in part. But The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a cautionary tale that encourages forward action in the face of shattering crisis. Which is this: When the worst thing that can happen does happen, follow the example of Biff Brannon in the last scene. In this scene you are invited into the New York Café, having the benefit of Biff’s thoughts. You might realize as I did at this point, that this is a story which has as its moral to “keep on keeping on,” “to put one foot in front of the other,” “to move on.”

I loved it. It is amazing that the author was 23-years old when this was written and published. 5 stars for Carson McCullers, and a new favorite for me.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the debut novel by Carson McCullers, written when she was just 23.
This classic American novel, set in 1930’s Georgia, sees a disparate group of characters make their solitary way amid the teeming life of an unnamed mill town. A world of ten cent stores, crumbling tenements, gin soaked alleys, raucous fair grounds and cheap neighbourhood boarding houses.
This is a tale of the lonely, the dispossessed and those, who for various reasons feel like outsiders.
The main players are Biff, the sad and thoughtful owner of the local diner, Blount, an alcoholic drifter full of rage, Mick, a 13 year girl fast approaching womanhood and Copeland, a disillusioned doctor to the black community. At the centre of this group is Singer, a deaf mute - an intelligent and sympathetic receptacle for their hopes, anger and fears.
Singer is a wonderful character, a quiet urbane gent who when not tending to the spiritual needs of his friends, is visiting his lifelong soulmate in a mental institution.
This is a story primarily about ordinary, unremarkable people and their daily struggles, but it is also a book about bigger issues ............ grinding poverty, the great racial divide between the black and white communities and raw politics, as the hot seam of anger bubbles over in the minds of those who rail against the injustice that surrounds them. Anger that often deflates into a sense of hopelessness.
This is a melancholy, often heartbreaking novel but the narrative is full of incident, the characters fully realised and the writing enriched by the lyrical, painterly eye of the author.
An engrossing, classic read and very much recommended!

This is an odd little book. For such an established classic, it doesn't seem to have much in the way of grand pronouncements about humanity, technical innovations, an unusually eloquent voice, or even a particularly interesting plot. I was reminded of John Steinbeck, not just because both him and Mrs. McCullers are both middlebrow mid-century American writers who chronicle the common people with an earnestness that sometimes descends into hand-wringing, but also just because of the sound of her sentences and the feel of her writing. This book moves with a strange, uneven pace that never quite finds its rhythm, or maybe I just couldn't find it. There are individual moments of stark power, most of them dealing with Mick, who is by far the most interesting character (maybe the only interesting character) in the book's ensemble. Initially, I was perplexed, and, ultimately, I was left cold.

The heart is a stranger in a strange land

Set in a small town of the American South, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter examines the state of the heart of four different souls: an aging Black doctor frustrated with the racial relations in the American South, a young tomboy girl in love with music, a Marxist drunk with a revolution in his veins, a recently widowed restaurant owner. The silenced hearts of these four people find their attentive listener - a deaf-mute John Singer. Not only do they confess their problems and anxieties to him, they paint their hopes and expectations, finding a sort of relief.

Soon it becomes clear that their relationship with John Singer is not only that of friendship, there is some kind of semi-religious connection - in fact John Singer is similar to a Christ-like or Buddha-like figure. Like a god who doesn’t speak back, but who understands us. His inner life seems to them so full of tranquility, stability and resolution that there is almost something mystical and transcendental they read into their relationship with him.

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.

And this is very ironic and almost tragic as their projections might not necessarily be true. But as the reader might discover, John Singer’s inner life is as ordinarily lonely and frenetic as that of any other human being.

The heartbeat orchestra

But I will skip any further details about the plot and the characters and will dive straight into the heart of the matter, at least from my point of view.

Although the novel seems to be written in the third person omniscient point of view, it’s not constant or exclusive. Carson McCullers conducts the reader’s senses through different points of view and from different angles and distances. Why do I say senses? Normally I would say gaze, but even if some images in this novel are quite powerful, this time I perceived it as such a multisensory piece, almost as a musical piece.

But maybe the last part of the symphony was the music she loved the best - glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way. Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was the symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

Indeed, the way music and musical elements flow through the novel makes me wonder whether Carson McCullers was inspired by symphony or some kind of musical composition. The tomboy girl, who dreams about becoming a famous conductor and composer, is the character with the most obvious musical connection. Despite his inability to enjoy it, the deaf-mute John Singer owns a radio. John Singer’s name itself doesn’t seem random either. All the four characters who confess their inner life to him - want their voices to be known, understood and heard. Their points of view, their voices converge into a single being, a single moment, a single movement.



Pyramidal Variations by John Cage, performed by Sardinia Symphony Orchestra, EX/Q, Sassari, 2011

Into the heart of reading

Right from the start I was astonished by the effortlessness of Carson McCullers’s writing, yet at the same time it sounded so evocative and lyrical - I believe it takes a real talent to achieve this literary quality. There is a magical spark to all the ordinary details in the inner and outer lives of Carson McCullers’s characters. There are many mean, cruel and uncomfortable scenes, written in a very nuanced way. On the other hand, there are also moments of grace.

The author looks right into the face of the worst human fear - loneliness. And it is not just that a mere melancholy feeling - it is a state that can lead to profound sadness, suffering, pain and even violence.



Reading this novel reminded me of this Joy Division’s album design, and also Ian Curtis’s lyrics, art and life.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter can be simultaneously perceived as a portrayal of an era in a small town of Georgia with a backdrop of WWII preceding the Civil Rights Movement. Carson McCullers doesn’t shy away from examining some social issues such as racism, socioeconomic inequality, exploitation of labour.

There is a sense of longing and restlessness in this novel. Even if human beings are vulnerable and fallible - there is a feeling that this world, the current situation might be better.

What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.

Of course, one might say The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a very bleak book, yet for me it was such a cathartic experience - it put me on a train of thought about our human condition. It’s not just a mere eloquent description or a beautiful portrayal, it’s akin to an experience in a way that it moves something inside the reader and helps them to understand their own human experience - I believe this is what real art, real literature does.

I’ve already started to forget about some novels I’ve read this year, yet this is a novel I would like to take with me beyond time and space. I will never forget its resounding soul. Its singing heart.

The Painful Realities of Small Town Southern Life in 1930s

"Southerners are more lonely and estranged. I think because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just--when all along we knew it wasn't." Carson McCullers

"I am a lone lorn creatur...and everythink goes contrairy with me." Mrs. Gummidge, David Copperfield.

This veracious Southern Gothic novel, with its common gothic staples of disfigurement, disease, brutality and mortality present in a dull and mean small Southern town, makes for a compelling, albeit painful, study of isolation and loneliness in a Georgia milling town in the 1930s.

At the center is a deaf mute who lip-reads named John Singer. The beginning of the novel starts with Singer's longtime friend and roommate Spiros, a morbidly obese Greek deaf mute, losing his sanity and being committed to an asylum. Singer is left all alone in the small Georgia town, terribly missing his only true friend.

The remaining characters gravitate to Singer as fragments of steel to a magnet as they struggle mightily to escape loneliness and see some kind of meaning in their lives. Singer seems to listen and care but says nothing back (even though, as he only knows, he was taught how to speak). These widely diverging characters therefore see in Singer who they believe or imagine him to be, a looking glass of their wants.

Jake Blount is a frustrated and idealistic working man who stews in his brew and becomes violent at a hair trigger. He is a social reformer who aspires to stir the working masses to a revolt and sees Singer as his audience to speeches he'll never deliver to an audience more than one.

Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland is an African-American physician who suffers from tuberculosis. Dr. Copeland obsesses over his wish that his people be saved from docile submission. Unfortunately, his gruffness and aloofness turn off his people from hearing what he has to say. He believes (without any particular reason) that Singer is Jewish and thinks him the only compassionate white he has ever known and that Singer can identify with Copeland as both are members of an oppressed class.

Mick Kelly is a pubescent tomboy who loves music and dreams of playing a piano and composing symphonies one day. She believes that, though Singer is deaf, he can hear music in his head and she tells him of her wishes and dreams. She is soon forced to confront life in poverty in which she may be required to quit school and go to work.

Finally, Biff Brannon is a cafe' owner who observes much, but is trapped in a loveless, childless marriage. After his wife's death, he becomes awfully lonely and would like to connect with any of the other four characters. In a cruel irony, these characters all effectively rebuff Biff's efforts, thus rejecting the only person who accepts them and offer them a human connection.

I guess the moral is that we all need to connect with other people, but it is nearly impossible to do so in any significant way; and, perhaps, if we do connect, we'd best be unselfish and do all we can to keep the wire live.

4★
“Mick Kelly and Jake Blount and Doctor Copeland would come and talk in the silent room —for they felt that the mute would always understand whatever they wanted to say to him. And maybe even more than that.”

1930s. A small mill town in the US South, Georgia. John Singer is the mute, living in the dilapidated boarding house run by Mick (Margaret)’s parents. He is an engraver by trade, keeps himself neat and clean, and never speaks, though he did once learn. People looked at him so strangely that he gave up. He signs and lip-reads.

He and another deaf-mute become friends and spend time together every day after work. Singer does most of the “talking” while Antonapoulos loves eating and cooking.

“In the dusk the two mutes walked slowly home together. At home Singer was always talking to Antonapoulos. His hands shaped the words in a swift series of designs. His face was eager and his gray-green eyes sparkled brightly. With his thin, strong hands he told Antonapoulos all that had happened during the day.”

But when the Greek has to leave town, Singer sits with his hands in his pockets, missing his friend and sounding board. Instead, he becomes a sort of confessor to the three people mentioned above, plus a fourth, the café owner where Singer eats every day. They each come to visit him in his room regularly to talk, to unload, to complain, to brag, to share a drink. He listens, nods, and if, occasionally, a response is required, he takes out his silver pencil to write on his little notepad. But mostly he listens.

And because he listens, they all feel “heard”. He shows limitless patience, and he often makes a point of having someone’s favourite drink handy. But it’s all one way. He listens to the girl’s dreams of being a musician and even buys a radio she can come and listen to. Doctor Copeland is black and settles into his chair to make impassioned speeches to Singer about equality.

The writing is great, the descriptions a treat. We have met Blount, stumbling in the café in a drunken, filthy state. The owner sends him out to the kitchen to get a tub of hot water and soap and clean himself up. So we already suspect he’s a little odd.

“Blount was not a freak, although when you first saw him he gave you that impression. It was like something was deformed about him—but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be. Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.”

And sure enough, his passion is about the state of the world. He could be talking today.

“’But say a man does know. . . He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun — the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it.
. . .
I been all over this place. I walk around. I talk. I try to explain to them. But what good does it do? Lord God!'
. . .
'You're the only one,' he said dreamily. 'The only one.'”

Really, Singer is the only one who has the patience to just sit quietly and let the words and the tirades and the dreams and despair wash over him. Young Mick Kelly is the one with the dreams, scary at first and later hopeful. She’s an itchy, antsy young teen, trying to find her feet. Her artwork is dark.

“All the rest of her pictures were full of people. She had done some more ocean storms at first—one with an air- plane crashing down and people jumping out to save themselves, and another with a trans-Atlantic liner going down and all the people trying to push and crowd into one little lifeboat.”

But when she falls in love with Beethoven’s Third Symphony after hearing it on a neighbour’s radio, she knows she must must must have a piano.

The Depression is biting hard, and nobody has two cents to rub together, which makes a grim backdrop for this group of misfits, each with their struggles and fears and dreams about the future. Yet somehow, it isn’t grim itself. If anything, it’s a reminder that everyone needs - in fact, deserves - a chance to be heard.

The author was only 23 when she wrote what has now become a classic. I found myself wondering how much of her was in young Mick.

Music selection

No, I was never much of a dancer, but I know enough to know you gotta move, your idiot body around. And you can’t, can’t settle down until the idiot in your blood settles down. And you know your heart but it’s an idiot heart.

I hate to take on the topic of writing, given that I have only been ‘writing’ (if weeks of self-loathing followed by 4 hour sessions of obsessive scribbling could be called writing) for the past year and a half. And the only defense I can muster is that despite this short-burst style that I’ve muddled around with, I have managed to produce a fair amount of material, most of it dreadful, for any of you who have stumbled into my ‘creative ventures’ writing section. Nonetheless, I must make my mission statement as an aspiring writer. It seems extremely apt that I break my multi-month review silence with a review about writing but hey, there you go. I’ll give this my best shot.

I often find myself at odds with self-confidant people. Although my hypocrisy burns brightly in a few pockets of my life—work, arguments—don’t ask why; it may or may not be a developmental thing, my father owned a restaurant that I worked at from age 10 and upwards; I managed to cook food to order at age 13 and here we go, writing could be added to the list too. But as far as sociability goes, or demeanor I am nothing if rattled with neuroses guessing on the correct manner of speech and act, chastising myself at every turn, aping mannerisms to a tee, I suppose I’m okay at emulation*. How many times have I said ‘I don’t know what it means to be a person. How does one act? Why didn’t I get the manual on how to be a person? What the hell is this person thinking of me and why doesn’t he/she/it just tell me what’s going on and why do I have to guess all damn time?’—all legitimate questions, surely, all questions that everyone asks in the privacy of their own mind, quite lost in the seat of one’s own subjectivity, the convolution of contradicting thoughts, and to project anything of stabilized identity out of this interior mess baffles me—which most certainly could be my own doing, given the subject/object divide, we’re inevitably going to conceive of every person as a oneperson and not the splintered person and not the contradicted person they truly are. I’m still struck by the fact that some onepersons don’t let those voices drown themselves out. I have always felt as though the various attitudes, opinions, personality traits I let float around have done nothing but battle one another within my day to day experience, ping-ponging between various voices and ideas and feeling so damn lost.

The narrow-minded person is quite remarkable. And even though I’m laying my obvious biases bare here, I can’t understand how one could ever live a life of dogma (all the contradictions are springing in my mind, I’m still creating a identity out of the fact that I identity myself as a person without an identity, and I rally around the fact of my uncertainty—if atheism ever struck me as a position that required absolute certainty than I would immediately cease to be one, (a whole ‘nother Oprah, surely)—I can’t ever criticize the confident, for I think I’d feel even more lost without them). Well if you’ve made it this far through this tangled mess of thoughts, then I thank you. (I am acutely aware and self-conscious of all this alliteration.)

Rather than be dogmatist, I harbor their opinions inside of me, bringing those thoughts out at strategic times when I deem appropriate or, more often, when I think that it’ll get the party involved to like me (did I really expose some off-brand of deism only a few months ago? A truly sad and pathetic form of flirtation. People like people who are really capital p People because they harbor the fear that they are not a person and a person who is a capital p Person alleviates the anxiety and struggle to maintain the facade of being a person. (this is actually just an elaborate and neurotic way to justify why I’m still single)) I am apt to bring out any opinion, hand the mic to any voice, as means of social survival. It seems such a waste to let all this energy converge inward. It’s all brought to writing. The only way to let out this mess in any positive manner.

How I’ve written conversations of characters which hate one another, exposing diametrically opposed views and having me, the heavy-handed author peaking in, agreeing and believing both sides. This is maybe why I love David Mitchell, he is the literary chameleon, he has never written in his ‘own’ voice, always leeching onto the voices of others and creating worlds from what he’s observed or read in other literary greats by which I mean as no insult but expressing my ultimate feeling of solidarity. However, this is most definitely why I love Carson McCullers. There are scenes in the The Heart is a Lonely Hunter where characters are enwrapped in passionate arguments, cursing one another but I see their true intention. I see Carson McCullers behind a pen and paper, trying to work through all the contradictory opinions of bigots and blacks that never leave her to a peaceful night of sleep but instead rattle her awake with the horrifying feelings of uncertainty. I see a genius caught up in the midst of young adulthood (she was freakin’ 23 when this book was published) fighting with her opinions and attitudes about her social milieu in the only way that true geniuses do, casting five characters of differing race, social status and gender to tell her interweaving story. Carson McCullers was a beautiful person in every way I can think would make a person beautiful:



I wish I could have had coffee with her, on a southern summer day, 30 minutes before a late-afternoon rainstorm and we could watch the black clouds belch out of the sky while we talk about all those people with their damn opinions and all their damn thoughts about how the world really is.

*This review owes a serious debt to the lovely Mariel, one of my favorite gr reviewers.

Artistically formed constellations hold the promise of beauty and solidarity but Loneliness is that single star I once spotted on a dark moonless night. It shows the right way, they said. That caused a profound sadness in me for reasons unknown. Now I know. A little.

What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.

There are definitions galore for life and each one of them carries the trace of bittersweet truth which is hard to embrace and harder to relinquish when the hunt for some meaning in the sea of vagueness is the last resort in front of us. With every new book I read, I try to gather the fragile pieces of such eternal verities which ends up in taking me two steps ahead and one step backward en route to solving a nameless, cosmic riddle. May be I imagine it all and one day I’ll find myself at the starting point with all the curiosities and confusions intact but till such eventuality occur, I take solace in the stories of all those hunters who were lonely in their expedition; in the stories of all those who knew.

A cross between an exquisite dream and a harrowing nightmare, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter starts off like a simple tale celebrating the humdrum of everyday life, but as the pages of this novel treads the path of a new home, a different alley, a faraway Southern town and lives of four different characters, it excavates the treasure chest of voices buried in the reclusive hearts of those who were born and silenced during an inopportune time.

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

And yet this darkness brings out the moments of epiphany for youthful Mick Kelly. Music is her elixir of survival but she can’t hold it in her hands for an indefinite time. Darkness brings Dr. Copeland face to face with his relentless disappointments. His struggle against injustice, indifference and submissiveness is in a dire need for a guardian angel. Darkness evokes the horrific illusions for Jake Blount. He surrenders himself to work and alcohol to change the vision of a dreaded future and try to retain the scattered shreds of hope residing in his beloved books by Marx and Veblen. Darkness opens the tacit eyes of Biff Brannon who is able to see and observe more clearly the fogged image of confessional souls coming and going through his ever welcoming diner door.

There was no noise or conversation, for each person seemed to be alone. The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.

This rampant distrust and loneliness makes other enter through a different but familiar door. The door leading to John Singer’s room. He becomes the pacifier to shun that ominous feeling of estrangement. A deaf-mute who is assumed to be there for everyone. His silence offer the much awaited consolation for the desperate sounds. He’s a supposed messiah of happy times and a listener of the forlorn. A sort of mythical mirror which reflects everything one wants to see and successively turns everyone blind to its truth.

In the end, it all culminates into an unforeseen tragedy where one almost wishes to rewrite everything to save everyone from their ill-fate. If only such things are possible in life and literature. And this is where a reader comes into the picture. This is where a reader needs to stop and mull over the futilities and capabilities of their existence. This is where a reader realizes that being a person of solitary disposition is not always a matter of choice but sometimes ensues from an ironic stroke of time and destiny. This is where yours truly understood that Loneliness doesn’t go away by receiving few moments of compassion but quietly stay somewhere as a faithful companion and emerges when the weakness of human nature results into fateful accidents.

This is what McCullers showed me and this is what I know at the risk of being slightly right but not entirely wrong. As for Ms. Carson’s writing, all I want to say that her prose touched the rustic chords of my anxious heart and composed an extraordinarily moving symphony which is still resonating in my ears and proved it once again that there is no dearth of noise in this world but only few things are worth listening to. There is no dearth of words in books but only few are worth reading.

In this (she) knew a certain strong and holy gladness.

Sing for the South, the Nation, the World Entire, for they know not what they do.

Sing for the man with the matted suit and pearl-rimmed tongue, the rustic know how and the fine edged intellectual gait, the words, the words, always the words. He walks with his heart bound in a lexicon and pinned upon his mouth, and where he walks he sees the terrible secret and cannot keep silent. Long ago he stripped from himself his measure of complacent comfort, and now he wanders in a naked anger, ever seeking those who would understand. He is a creature of self-efficient worlds, bound on the edge of drunken madness on one and a host of academic truths on the other, a jester screaming out the obscene reality to their blind and mulish audience.

Sing for him, one who lives on a crust of a dream and pays the daily horror of a price for dreaming.

Sing for the girl with the sulky dress and responsive love, the family blood and the soul-lined melody, the notes, the notes, always the notes. There is a stamp of genius on the muddled obscurity of her thoughts, and where she listens she hears the world and cannot contain it all on her own. In the beginning her time was her own, but now she must sell out the insides of her self for the keeping of kith and kin, all for a broken back, a broken brother, a broken skull. She is a victim of the monetary exchange, bled by chance of birth and circumstance of her gorgeous instinct, a self-made muse without the tools for flight.

Sing for her, one who would offer life untold bounties and wondrous insight, if only it would let her.

Sing for the doctor with the cultured plan and possessed ideals, the living symbol and the lived out potential, the means, the means, always the means. He would cure far more than the broken bones and congested lungs of his people, lead them to a higher ground born of wisdom and of faith bred on his affirming standards. His effort has been unceasing, both the gains and the gaps, the bridges built to sophistication on the burning sacrifice of those once stretched towards empathy, and always, always the enemy above and his beloved ones below. He is a priest of a creed that kills and cures in equal measure, and the promised land crawls with the vipers of inherited skin.

Sing for him, one who grasped for the light with every breath in his body and found it only when it ran him through.

Sing for the bearded one with the open door and contemplative eye, the mindful heart and quiet aesthetic. He out of all of these souls has found the safest harbor, and with this truth in his essence seeks to parcel this refuge out in any form acceptable. And thus there is about them an aura of a society spread enigma, as strange and mixed a creature as his own sensibilities of the gendered division, but one that he cannot for all his sympathetic overtures solve to the level of comfort he has found in solitude. He understands as fully as is possible, and doles out from his position of privilege the small pieces of acceptance to a world that bewilders him with its lack of his hard won kindness.

Sing for him, a lighthouse in the dark neither fully submerged nor fully transcendent, and the pinpoint of bright bringing a few of the oceans of teeming wretches home.

Do not sing for the deaf-mute. Say, and say, and weep, for talk is cheap to those blessed with easy spending, as cheap as the breath enters the blood and as vital for the ones oublietted by their different drums, and as heartbreakingly necessary. Say, and say, and pray that it will be enough.

Sing for this land of ground out lives and barbed wire mentalities, the twenty-three year old woman who seventy three years ago saw and saw and wrote to stave off the seeing, the seventy three years that have passed with both so little and so much to show for it, the history that rhymes. Sing for the social organism of humanity and those who have been spliced off through no fault of their own, doomed to the rest of their days in the land of the free and the home of the insidiously amputated existence.

n  And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.n

Sing for those locked in by life, for they know not what they do, less of what they speak. But if they listen, and learn to add their voices to the chorus of the common good and human soul, oh. There may be hope yet.