We’d be lucky to do as well at 50 as she did at age 23. One of the people I mentor at a not-for-profit gave me a gift of Carson McCuller’s “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” and said it was one of the best novels she had ever read. A first book for the then-23-year old Ms. McCullers when published in 1940, this American masterpiece swept to the top of the bestseller lists that year, was chosen in 2004 for the Oprah Book Club a full 64 years after it first appeared, and in the next year, 2005, was listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Best English Language Novels written in the preceding 80 years. If anything, Time Magazine understated how good Ms. McCullers’ creation really is! Before starting to read “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter”, I first had to finish “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) published in 1826. “The Last of the Mohicans” is itself a major American classic and a must read, but fair warning: Cooper’s early 19th century writing style makes George Eliot’s Middlemarch come across as light, easy-to-read frolicking text. Eventually, with “Mohicans” finished, the time arrived for me to pick up “Hunter”, and so my voyage through this remarkable novel began. Suffice it to say that I am stunned, happily so, by this book and its quiet elegance. Am is the right word, too, because I still am, even these weeks after finishing it. Along with so many others, I believe that “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “Gone With the Wind” are two of the ten top 20th century American novels, not only for the unique sagas recounted by their respective authors Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell, but also for these two story-tellers’ unmatched insight into the often brutal rolling and roiling historical tides of American social change. In so many respects, “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” leaves those two great books in the dust. “Hunter” is both a sober and very strange tale, one that carries the reader much closer to home, no matter where his or her own home, region and history may be. For, McCullers uniquely captured the harsh pulling and tugging of truly unimaginable moments in five peoples’ lives … as well as the lives of all Americans on the eve of World War II. And at the ripe old age of just 23 years – yes, only 23 years old – she did all that in a compelling, best-selling one-of-a-kind historical-fiction-novel written decades before most of us even knew what that “historical fiction” moniker could really mean in the way of fascinating reading. For, the remarkable fabric McCullers weaves to enrobe her main protagonists is surely both a story of what happened back in the late 1930s in so many American cities and towns … and what is happening right now, today in those very same places and also right where you live. And, as you will discover for yourself if you know much of the history of Martin Luther King and the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960’s, McCullers was eerily prescient in nailing the hows and whys of a historic, seminal future event that unfolded more than 23 years after she wrote “Hunter”. I won’t say which one but will ask, much as you will: “How Did She Know This Would Actually Happen?” What does happen to Mick and Mr. Singer? Spiros? Jake Blount? Dr. Copeland? Biff Brannon? Portia? Willy? Where do their sometimes quiet, sometimes volcanic emotions, passions and desires carry them? I dare not tell you. For, once you begin reading “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter”, you will be at a total loss to describe WHY you will dearly want to know what happens to them. But for sure, you WILL want to know what happens, and to every last one of them! Good reading! bit.ly/1r8zBAB
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 19:18:57 +0000
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