Synopsis
World War II veteran Hazel Motes meets up with a street preacher named Asa Hawks and his daughter, Lily. Revelling in his own unbelief, Hazel creates his own rival church, the "Church of Christ Without Christ," and travels the South preaching his anti-gospel. Eventually, after various instances of self-mutilation and torture, including blindness and a beating by the police, he destroys himself in atonement for some obscure sin. O'Connor's strange and powerful novel is a masterly creation of a ludicrous but tragic figure, and a stunning evocation of the postwar South.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1996-08-01 | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 8.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
A classic of 20th-century literature, "Wise Blood" is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate 15-year-old daughter, Lily Sabbath. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds the Church of Christ Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child, and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most consuming characters in modern fiction.
Industry Reviews
"[T]his first novel...introduces its author as a writer of power. There is in Flannery O'Connor a fierceness of literary gesture, an angriness of observation, a facility for catching, as an animal eye in a wilderness, cunningly and at one sharp glance, the shape and detail and animal intention of enemy and foe. The world of 'Wise Blood' is one of clashing in a wilderness....Miss O'Connor's style is tight to choking and as direct and uncompounded as the order to a firing squad to shoot a man against a wall....One cannot take this book lightly or lightly turn away from it, because it is inflicted upon one in the same way its people take their lives--like an indefensible blow delivered in the dark."
Goyen
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