BOOKS
From Issue #3
What
James Iha Is Reading
James Iha of The Smashing Pumpkins recommends
The
Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.
The
Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
This
richly detailed work is set in the south and explores the lives
of four lonely individuals who collect about a single deaf-mute
with whom they share their deepest secrets.
"When
she was only twenty-three this, Carson McCuller's first novel,
created a literary sensation. She is very special, one of America's
superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible
as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths
of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition.
This
novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring
masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young teenager, Mick Kelly.
The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and
eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected.
Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some
with alcohol, and some -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely
personal search for beauty." (1981 Bantam paperback.)
John
Singer, the deaf-mute, comes to symbolize the person whom all
human beings yearn for, someone who will listen, understand without
condemnation, to whom we can unburden our hearts of its deepest
fears and longings. There is no plot as such, but the characters
throb with life, and a deep sense of compassion and empathy for
the underprivileged and the social misfits shimmers throughout
the novel.
