Wise Blood

Wise Blood follows Hazel Motes, a disillusioned war veteran. He returns to his hometown in the South and struggles with his beliefs. Rejecting his religious upbringing, Hazel becomes a preacher of the Church Without Christ.
 
This novel has many excellent reviews, many readers liked it. I appreciate the themes Flannery O'Connor has woven into this novel, but I struggled with this novel a lot. It just didn't grab me.

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Excerpt from the Book:

In his half-sleep he thought where he was lying was like a coffin. The first coffin he had seen with someone in it was his grandfather’s. They had left it propped open with a stick of kindling the night it had sat in the house with the old man in it, and Haze had watched from a distance, thinking: he ain’t going to let them shut it on him; when the time comes, his elbow is going to shoot into the crack. His grandfather had been a circuit preacher, a waspish old man who had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger. When it was time to bury him, they shut the top of his box down and he didn’t make a move.

Haze had had two younger brothers; one died in infancy and was put in a small box. The other fell in front of a mowing machine when he was seven. His box was about half the size of an ordinary one, and when they shut it, Haze ran and opened it up again. They said it was because he was heartbroken to part with his brother, but it was not; it was because he had thought, what if he had been in it and they had shut it on him.

Details:

• author: Flannery O'Connor
• full title: Wise Blood
  
• genre: literary fiction
  
• format/type: bookfiction
• country: USA
  
• topics: #religion, #southerngothic
  
• publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
  
• publish date: March 6, 2007
  
• pages: 256
  

My Rating of the Book:

• content: 💙💙💙

About the Author:  

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, the only child of Catholic parents. In 1945 she enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women. After earning her degree she continued her studies on the University of Iowa's writing program, and her first published story, 'The Geranium', was written while she was still a student. Her writing is best-known for its explorations of religious themes and southern racial issues, and for combining the comic with the tragic. After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. In 1952 she learned that she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Millidgeville, Georgia. For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She was a good amateur painter. She died in the summer of 1964.