Well written and probably deep, but just too depressing and boring for me to try and unpack all its meaning. I don’t think short stories are my cup of tea.

C’est une expérience quasiment douloureuse que de lire Flannery O’Connor. Dans chacune des nouvelles de Everything That Rises Must Converge, elle nous enferme dans la tête de personnages dont les pensées & le monde sont étroits, gangrenés de préjugés coriaces, emmaillotés dans des couches impossibles de mauvaise foi, de naïveté & de nostalgie. C’est étouffant. C’est lourd. &, quand ça éclate, le soulagement qu’on en ressent est délicieusement malsain.

Nous sommes dans le Sud des États-Unis, toujours, dans ses petites villes & les espaces ruraux qui les entourent. Nous sommes aussi quelque part au début des années cinquante, quelques années après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, alors même le Sud commence à changer. Les revers de fortune s’accumulent ; l’ascension sociale de certains défie les vieilles conventions ; la ségrégation meurt tranquillement de sa belle mort. On assiste, dans les histoires d’O’Connor, à la fin progressive d’un mode de vie, qui donne l’impression d’avoir cuit lentement au soleil, jusqu’à en être devenu friable sous les talons de bottes.

J’ai surtout aimé toutes les histoires de familles qui déçoivent & de fossés qui se creusent entre les générations – le motif récurrent du fils qui veut se détacher d’une mère dont les valeurs & les façons de faire lui semblent rouillées & pathétiquement petites ; la mère qui, de son côté, s’est saignée à blanc pour donner a good college education à ses enfants, pour les voir se détourner d’elle & de son milieu une fois adultes.

When people think they are smart — even when they are smart — there is nothing anybody else can say to make them see straight, and with Asbury, the trouble was that in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament. She did not know where he had got it from because his father, who was a lawyer and businessman and farmer and politician all rolled into one, had certainly had his feet on the ground; and she had certainly always had hers on it. She had managed after he died to get the two of them through college and beyond; but she had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything. (The Enduring Chill, p. 87)

L’humour y est sec, rarement tendre mais savoureux. La fin des nouvelles est souvent extrêmement, presque exagérément tragique ; la justice qui s’y dessine est tordue mais cathartique. Il y a une religiosité très forte qui m’est restée coincée dans la gorge, & une lourdeur à laquelle on n’échappe pas – mais les histoires réussissent à parler de tellement de choses en même temps, de tellement de bouleversements sociaux & de petitesses humaines, que c’est difficile de ne pas avoir envie de tout lire trop vite. Quitte à s’en tirer, après, avec quelques heures de découragement existentiel.

Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them — not above, just away from — were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered white-face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven. (Revelation, p. 196)

Flannery writes so well, but be prepared for a parade of unpleasant characters and situations. It's a gloomy, wretched life in her world. After reading these stories I feel a need to wash their dismal harshness out of my mind with a cool, refreshing dose of Capote. Yet- they are completely worth it.

My favorite story was the first one "everything that rises must converge." Mercer others that I really loved that I liked all of them. Her ability to talk about race in the south from a white perspective is candid and remarkable. She is a master at building character, even characters with similar falls were vastly different from previous ones. Without any physical description I could see all of the characters. She's a great mastery of language tone and mood.

Hard to describe how awesome this was. I have a weird relationship with the South and this encapsulated a lot it. I love this in the same way I loved True Detective, it's gross and grotesque but beautiful in a grimy kind of way. SO MUCH LOVE.

A superb collection of Flannery O'Connor's dark Southern Gothic stories. O'Connor is one of my favorite authors and everything that made her great is on display in these nine stories, which are among the most grim you'll find in her modest oeuvre. Similar to her other collections, the stories are somewhat uneven and reminiscent of Borges late works like The Book of Sand which contained some of his best and worst efforts. Still worth a space on your reading list and essential for any O'Connor fan.

What is there to say about Flannery O'Connor that hasn't already been said by people smarter and more eloquent than me? I was fascinated by her ability to render such excruciatingly real characters that I immediately made a plan to draw a comic for every short story (then immediately abandoned said plan in a fit of laziness). Her writing is like the kind of people I prefer to hang out with: funny, graceful, full of sharp judgements.

I knock of one star because this book constantly depressed me. O'Connor's characters are deeply flawed, in a disturbing period of American history, and mostly meet dramatic and painful ends. And maybe they are a little bit too relatable. This is also a terribly uncomfortable book for 21st century white folks to read -- the racial divide is stated so matter-of-fact. We're used to just sweeping these things under the rug.

A running flaw for many of her characters is that they categorize people, some as worthwhile, others not so much. Are you a Fortune or a Pitts? Are you Black or White? Are you "good" white or "white trash"? Are you an educated city person or a country bumpkin? The categories that matter may change with time and geography but oh, what a deep and common character flaw across humanity!

The downfall of these people who label some people as worthy and others as not so worthy is really well contrasted against the naiveté or self-centeredness of the characters who try to prove that they do care about the "less fortunate". They really just turn out to be deeply flawed as well.

Throughout all of these stories, she deftly takes us on a tour around the many reasons for how we treat others, who we think worthy of our kindness, and who we think worthy of our hate.

After writing this review I'm going to go and put that last star back.

Put down what you're doing and go read some Flannery O'Connor.