The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter audiobook

ROCK AND ROLLIt turns out that Miss McCullers did most of her great writing - most of her entire writing - before she was 30. Rock and roll! After 30 she was too busy having ghastly illnesses and marrying the same guy three or four times, and dodging invitations to a suicide pact from the guy she married all those times. So when she was 22 - I ask you! - she wrote this first novel which is a stone American classic. I had heretofore thought that absorbing a ton of influences and developing a unique voice all by the age of 22 had only been done by Lennon/McCartney, Bob Dylan and Aubrey Beardsley, but Miss McCullers performs this remarkable feat too. Her surefootedness and precision are fantastic. I'm so much in awe that I feel sick to my stomach.METAPHORS FOR GOD WHICH IS A METAPHOR ALREADY Onto the book itself. The inexorable gravitational pull of the metaphor in all our verbal dealings is something I have mentioned before, so that even someone like Raymond Carver's ironed-flat tell-it-like-it-is bargain-basement prose still spins in stories like So Much Water So Close to Home or A Small Good Thing brilliant metaphorical explorations of the various uncomfortable truths he shoves our way (the ignored corpse, the tasteless birthday cake). Perhaps we no longer love overly obvious metaphors (Little Red Riding Hood) - then again, perhaps we do (The Titanic). But they're very useful when you try to talk about God - in fact it's impossible to talk about God non-metaphorically insofar as God is Himself a metaphor. Fictionmakers love God metaphors - last year we had Ron Currie's disappointing "God is Dead", a few years back we had the smart Jim Carey movie "The Truman Show", further back we have other movies like "Whistle Down the Wind" and "Theorem". In "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" John Singer, the deaf mute, the blank slate, the man who everyone talks to but who talks to nobody, stands for God. People pour out their dreams, fears & hopes onto him and he scribbles the odd bland sentence in reply and they think he understands all and knows all. In fact - and here's Miss McCullers' audacious vicious twist - John Singer is himself completely obsessed with another deaf mute who he thinks of as almost Godlike but who in fact is a fat greedy imbecile confined to a mental asylum. If we follow the metaphor along, not too fancifully I think, we find that Antonapoulos the idiot therefore represents the human race, with which God/Singer is fatally, poignantly, uselessly obsessed - Antonapoulos will never get well and was a sad mistake to begin with - so what does that say about the rest of us chickens? Not much.BRIEF ACTS OF APPALLING VIOLENCE Miss McCullers doesn't belabour this central conceit too much and she also throws in a ton of local knowledge but without smacking you upside the head every time like Annie Proulx does. And although this is a slow old read at times, a lot of doing nothing punctuated by brief acts of appalling violence (is this what the American South is like?), her sad sweet song of humanity is as beautiful a tune as I've heard all year.

I simply cannot get this book out of my head.    Like most everyone else I am astounded that Carson McCullers was only 23 years old when she wrote this.  Such wisdom and insight from someone so young is truly remarkable.  And there are so many great reviews out there, I just could not stop reading them.  A great many of them, as one might expect discuss the greater themes of this book and there can be no doubt that I too fell to pondering these many  things as I thought about the world today.I mean just think about it:Racial inequality and discriminationEconomic division of the classesSubjugation and objectification of women and minoritiesSocial InjusticeWarStill I would like to talk for just a minute or two about another constant thread within this story and perhaps the best way to begin is to tell you about something that happened to me.  Way too many years ago when I was still  in the early stages of my career I got a promotion, one that I had worked hard to be considered for.  It was an important advancement for me.  No longer was I only responsible for my own contribution but also for the output of others.  As much as I wanted the opportunity to lead, once I actually got it, I was a nervous wreck.  I’m sure my new boss sensed just how jangled I was and called me aside to have a little pow wow in his office.  It was a good meeting and he quickly reviewed some of the tools that he believed would help me achieve my objectives, but mostly he stressed that he wanted me to focus on one skill that his observations told him I already possessed.  The skill of which he spoke was listening.  He went on to add that far too many people forgot how to do it.  That people got so wrapped up in determining just how they were going to respond to someone or a given situation that they actually stopped hearing what was being said to them.   If you want to succeed he said do not fall into this trap.  Listen carefully and not just with your ears he said, but employ all of your faculties.  If you can do this he assured me, everything else would fall into place.  Well that particular job really did not work out so well for me and I soon moved on to a new opportunity with a different firm, but I never forgot that first pep talk.  Over the years that came and went I thought about it frequently and reminded myself often to focus more on what others had to say than on my own words.  And not just professionally either, but at home and in other social situations.  Wise words,  that despite floundering on more than one occasion, have served me well these many years. It is also what our five main characters in this novel yearn for.  Someone to listen to them .  For Mick, Jake, Biff and Dr. Copeland, that person was John Singer.  Despite the fact that he was deaf and mute they all believed that he understood them and for Mick he even provided a way for her to listen to her beloved music.  John Singer however, had lost his only audience when they took Antonapoulos away and even though he was never really sure how much of what he signed Antonapoulos actually understood, it did not matter.  He too needed to be heard.  There are so many layers to this story but through them all lay this need to be heard and to be understood.How ominous is it that I find myself reflecting on the art of listening  just one week before Donald Trump becomes the President of the most powerful democratic nation in the world.The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is timeless, profound and a thing of rare beauty.

What a terribly sad book, and yet, so insightful about loneliness, despair and alienation that it’s impossible not to love it, somehow.In a small town in Georgia during WWII, four very different people find solace in talking to Mr. Singer, a deaf and mute man who eats at the New York Café every day. The café’s owner, a young tomboyish girl, an alcoholic communist and a black doctor desperate to affect change, are, each in their own way, all alone in the world. They operate at a slightly different level of vibration than the people around them, they feel hopelessly out of step and can’t seem to adjust and fall in line with the rest of the world. But talking to Mr. Singer, who reads their words on their lips, shares food or plays chess with them soothes them in ways nothing else can.“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” follows the characters over the course of about a year, where their lives will take strange and unexpected turns and send them far from where they started. It doesn’t sound like much, and in some ways it isn’t, but the tiny, quiet and intimate events are often the ones with the biggest impacts on our lives, and McCullers does an amazing job of opening up her characters, making them achingly real, flawed yet sympathetic and as mentioned above, terribly sad. I’m just repeating what many people have said before, but it boggles the mind that she could have written with such poignancy at 23.I sighed and wished for a better life for these characters, even if I had a feeling where they would end up. A good writer makes you want to hug the characters they create, and I wanted to bake all of them cookies. Well done, Carson McCullers; I’ll be getting more books by this brilliant lady.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCuller's Portrait of the Faces Behind the MasksThe Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was chosen as a group read by On The Southern Literary Trail for January, 2017. This is the third time McCuller's novel has been selected as a group read by "The Trail," making it the most read novel by members of the group which was founded in February, 2012.Thanks to a former goodreads friend, I've learned I am only gently mad. It was a relief to discover that. Because my self-analysis has been that I'm excessively obsessive when it comes to the love of books. After having taken his recommendation to read A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes, my soul is somewhat rested.However, there remains the fact I have, excuse me, had four copies of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I absolve myself for the first, it was a Bantam paperback picked up at the now defunct college bookstore, Malones. That paperback cost me lunch that day, even though at the time Krystal Hamburgers were only 25 cents apiece. For those not familiar with Krystals, they are much akin to White Castle. They are little, square, and served on a steamed bun, grilled onions,smashed down onto the little thin patty, and given a squirt of cheap yellow mustard. There are still days when I've got to have a Krystal. But they're not a quarter any more. My First Copy The paperback was read and re-read. Somewhere through the years, it vanished, perhaps the victim of a garage sale during a period I call my former life--BD, i.e. before divorce. I hope it least went for the cost of a Krystal, but I doubt it.Lonely Hunter was not the first McCullers I read. Professor O.B. Emerson, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, The University of Alabama introduced me to Ms. McCullers through The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories. That one cost me a sack of Krystals, too. That's all right. From my current waist line, it doesn't appear I missed too many meals.Dr. Emerson was a little banty rooster of a man, coal black hair, brilliantined to a shine that reflected the fluorescent lights of the class room. He considered McCullers essential to his curriculum in his Southern Literature course. From my first exposure to McCullers, I was hooked. The little man with the loud colored bow ties, outfitted in seersucker suits and a sporty straw hat made me a convert for life.After graduation, Professor Emerson and I would converse via telephone from time to time. He was gleeful to learn that The Execution of Private Slovikhad been made into a movie for television in 1974. I heard him click on his set and the ice cubes rattle in his Wild Turkey, his bourbon of choice. In my mind, I could see him with his books shelved floor to ceiling, all arranged, not alphabetically, but by coordinating colors of dust jackets. It was an aesthetic matter. I didn't understand it, and I took art. He was less impressed with the big screen adaptation of The Klansmanin 1974. Both were novels by Hartselle, Alabama author William Bradford Huie. Professor Emerson was a big Huie fan. He shared one thing in common with Huie. Both had received death threats from the Klan and had crosses burned in their yards--Huie, because of his novel, Emerson because he had Justice Thurgood Marshall over for dinner one night. It was Professor Emerson's proudest moment in life. He gloried in telling the tale.Since Professor Emerson introduced me to Carson McCullers, this review is for him. He died while I was out of town, some years ago. I missed his memorial service. I don't even know where he is buried. But I owe him much, because he imprinted me with a love of Southern literature. In some ways, I picture his life as one of loneliness, not unlike the characters you frequently encounter in the works of McCullers.But, I digress. I was supposed to be telling you about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I'm getting there. We Southerners are prone to digression. It's a manner of story telling in these parts.My next copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the edition pictured. The jacket features one of my favorite photographs of McCullers. My Second Copy The second copy was justified by love. Love justifies a lot. I just gave that edition away out of love for two of whom I call my honorary children, William and Nancy Roane. William is the director of a short film called "Old Photograph." It should premiere this spring. I play a hard shell Baptist type preacher in charge of a home for wayward girls. The screenplay was a collaboration between William and his younger sister, Nancy. I think they are two of the most brilliant and engaging kids I've met. He's going through the Fulbright rounds, a senior at Oberlin, and she's in her first year at Oberlin.Nancy is a natural writer. Her story, "Everyone knew Ruby," has been published. I've read it. It's good. Everyone only thought they knew Ruby. They found out they didn't when she committed suicide. It is William's next film project.I asked if either of them had read McCullers. Neither had. The central theme in Nancy's story echoes that in McCuller's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. While celebrating Christmas and New Year's with them at a lunch, a few days ago, I presented them with my copy, inscribed with two quotes from the novel. “The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.” The other was, “All we can do is go around telling the truth.” Then I encouraged the Roane siblings to give the Coen Brothers a run for their money. I think they can.My third copy of Hunter is a beautiful slip-cased reproduction of the first edition from the former First Editions Library. I understand that Easton bought the company and that as copies in the series are sold, they will not be reprinted. Find this one, if you can. It's just a beautiful book to hold in your hands. The Third Copy Finally, I had to have the complete McCullers. I highly recommend Carson McCullers: Complete Novels: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter / Reflections in a Golden Eye / The Ballad of the Sad Cafe / The Member of the Wedding / Clock Without Hands The Fourth Volume of McCullers on my Library Shelf Although biographical influence is often scorned as a means to literary criticism, I don't think it is possible to fully explore some works without some knowledge of the life of the author. That's definitely true of Hunter. Carson McCullerswas born February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of Lamar and Marguerite Waters Smith. Her birth name was Lula Carson Smith. She dropped the Lula around 1930. Her life was relatively short. Having a bout of rheumatic fever during her high school years affected her health until her death caused by a cerebral hemorrhage on September 29, 1967. Her life was spent in fits of creativity marred by acute episodes of depression. A good portion of her life was spent in a wheel chair.It does not come as a surprise, when you become familiar with McCuller's life that her literary works were filled with the unloved, the outcasts, and misfits. Nor is it any surprise that her works revolve around desperate attempts to form loving relationships and those relationships in which the lover's pursuit is one that remains unrequited.Carson began taking piano lessons at an early age. Her original plan was to become a concert pianist. You can find this experience as the basis for her story, Wunderkind.McCullers was a wunderkind until struck with rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen. She gamely continued through school to graduate at age seventeen. She intended to go to Juliard. She never made it there. She began taking creative writing classes at Columbia while working menial jobs.While in New York she met Reese McCullers whom she fell in love with too quickly and they married. Divorced once. Married twice. He was an alcoholic, prone to depression and ultimately committed suicide, wanting Carson to die with him. She refused, although she had attempted to commit suicide on an earlier occasion, alone.Shortly after their first marriage, the McCullers traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Reese found work. There, McCullers wrote Hunter. It was published in 1940. McCullers was twenty-three. She was a literary wunderkind. The book was an instant best seller, hitting the top of the market in sales. Critical reception was mixed.McCuller's title comes from Fiona MacLeodin her poem "The Lonely Hunter," found in From The Hills of Dream Threnodies Songs and Later Poems. MacLeod wrote:"O never a green leaf whispers, where the green-gold branches swing:O never a song I hear now, where one was wont to sing.Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill." It is 1931. The setting is a small mill town in Georgia.McCuller's initially entitled the novel, "The Mute," as the central character is John Singer, a deaf mute, who can truly only communicate with his room mate, a Greek named Spiros Anastopolous. They have been companions for ten years, Singer working as a silver engraver in a jewelry store, and Anastopolous working in his cousin's fruit stand. John and Spiros can communicate through signing. However, Spiros becomes sick, a changed man, engaging in irrational behavior. His cousin commits him to an insane asylum. Singer is left alone, unable to communicate with anyone.With his companion gone, Singer moves into the Kelly family's boarding house. Mick is a gawky adolescent, unable to recognize the changes occurring in her body, unable to recognize what adolescents haven't yet done, the initiation into sex. She wants to be a musician, she wants to play the piano. Essentially she wants anything that she doesn't believe she can achieve until she begins to compose her own songs. It is with Mick that McCullers addresses the universal awkwardness of the coming of age.Singer no longer makes his meals in his apartment. Now, he takes his meals at Biff's New York Cafe. Biff's wife Alice dies and he is now alone.Jake Blount is a customer at Biff's. He is a labor organizer, an agitator. He is a Marxist. Blount drinks to excess. After meeting Singer, he speaks to him at length, incapable of understanding that Singer can't talk back. After becoming too drunk to navigate his way home, Singer walks him back to his room for company and to give Blount a place to stay for the night.Dr. Copeland is a black physician, disappointed that his children have not become educated but have been satisfied to take the menial jobs available to blacks in the South at that time. He is angry at whites, with the exception of John Singer who had once offered him the kindness of lighting his cigarette. Singer is the only white man who has ever shown him courtesy of any kind.The novel shifts from point of view, character by character. But Singer is always the central figure in McCuller's novel. Biff, Jake, Copeland, and Mick, all begin to regularly come to Singer's room where they confide their deepest feelings to him. Each feels that he understands what they say and feel. But he does not, nor is he able to communicate his longing for his former companion.Each of the characters who rotate through Singer's room wear a mask, rarely disclosing what they feel to anyone. It is only to Singer that they reveal their true feelings. It is safe. Who can Singer tell? Singer is almost the priest in the confessional.While each of the four have found their confidant, Singer grows more alone as he visits Spiros in the asylum, only to find that his friend has become more seriously ill with each visit. Spiros' death will be Singer's unraveling.Oddly, as Singer unravels, the confessing quartet begin to turn to others and bring them into their lives. Biff turns to his wife's sister, Lucille. Blount and Copeland find a common cause in discussing issues of race, politics, and class struggle. Mick and a young Jewish boy, Harry Minowitz, find first love after a swim in a nearby pond.(view spoiler)[None understand that after Singer learns his friend Spiros has died in the asylum why Singer would ever commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest. Each thought they knew him so well and that he knew each of them. (hide spoiler)]In East of Eden,John Steinbeck wrote, "Perhaps the best conversationalist is the man who helps others to talk." John Singer did that very well.In the years since its debut, Hunter has steadily grown in stature for what is now recognized as its brilliance. The novel is number seventeen on The Modern Library's list of 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century. Time Magazine listed it on its 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.Richard Wright, in reviewing McCuller's first novel wrote:"Out of the tradition of Gertrude Stein's experiments in style and the clipped, stout prose of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway comes Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. With the depression as a murky backdrop, this first novel depicts the bleak landscape of the American consciousness below the Mason-Dixon line. Miss McCullers' picture of loneliness, death, accident, insanity, fear, mob violence and terror is perhaps the most desolate that has so far come from the South. Her quality of despair is unique and individual; and it seems to me more natural and authentic than that of Faulkner. Her groping characters live in a world more completely lost than any Sherwood Anderson ever dreamed of. And she recounts incidents of death and attitudes of stoicism in sentences whose neutrality makes Hemingway's terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison."So, Professor Emerson, this review is dedicated to you. I don't have any Wild Turkey, but forgive me as I lift this shot of Gentleman Jack in my toast to you. I miss you.Yet, as McCullers said,“There was neither beginning nor end to this sorrow. Nor understanding. How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?” Amen.EDIT: This novel was selected as a group read for the goodreads group "On the Southern Literary Trail" for April, 2012. It is shared for the benefit of the group, and, hopefully to draw interest to a novel that deserves to be read.Mike Sullivan,Founder and ModeratorReferences1. The Carson McCullers Project http://www.carson-mccullers.com/html/...2. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr3. The Lonely Hunter from From The Hills of Dream Threnodies Songs and Later Poems byFiona MacLeod4. A Review of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Richard Wright http://www.carson-mccullers.com/html/...5. A Timeline of the Life of Carson McCullers http://www.carson-mccullers.com/mccul...["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>

And here we are in the world full of probabilities, reasoning with the unreasoned existence, awestruck at the purposelessness of life, at actions with no consequences, at endings with no more re-beginnings, once we die, we die. Alone is our planet and so are we, some of us are more alone than the rest though, some of us choose to be so, for some it’s the only option. And it is the tale of chosen and of those who chose!A tale of love and of whom who seek love, of abandoned and espoused, of isolated and integrated, of alienated and assimilated, and of whom, who were left alone! Every soul who breaths life, seeks love, to love and be loved the vain and only desire of humans, we can’t help desiring so, we can’t help loving those who gave up on us, we can’t help hoping against hope, and the torment one endures is never justified with any word of any language, but that forsaken love never perishes…The very essence of platonic love, is seen in the figure of Singer, our main character, It is one of the characteristics of ideal romantic love, derived from Platonism, that it need not be reciprocal; the beloved, indeed, may even be unaware of the lover's existence or the existence of love, love never dies of indifference, never diminishes by ignorance, but the relation of singer with Antonapoulos is not entirely of this sort, it is, in view of the latter's limitations, an approximation of it. Singer's love does not require reciprocation but it does require an object, we may never be in our lives come to see our beloved, but we want him around us, the surety of sharing the same sky can appease much, the certainty of breathing in same air is of comfort immensely, because love needs not reward, or love in return, it’s not an act that expects to be re-acted, it’s the whole life as we keep living, we keep loving ,and when Antonopoulos dies, his own reason for living dies too.........As for other characters, each of the five main characters strives to break out of his or her isolated existence. The reasons each character is isolated are very different: the deaf-mute John Singer cannot communicate with most of the world because he cannot speak; Mick Kelly cannot communicate with anyone in her family because they do not share her intelligence and ambition; Biff Brannon is left alone when his wife dies; Dr. Copeland is alienated from his family and from other black people because of his education and viewpoints; Jake Blount is alone is his radical social viewpoints and in the fact that he is a newcomer in town.The fact that Carson was only twenty-three when she completed this heartbreaking tale, makes it sadder than before, and I can’t help thinking, was Carson in truth, trying to carve a home god of her own, who would play silent and listen to her bruised heart? and history says, she didn’t find any, instead died at fifty with a weighty heart. who had so much to say, but heart........…remained a lonely hunter!

I read this years ago -before being a member on Goodreads. (Just forgot to post any comments)--Thanks to 'Steve' for the inspiration of memory! "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" one of those books that leaves a lasting tattoo on your heart forever! Not only does it take place during the Great Depression -during times of racial injustice --not only do we 'see-feel-touch-experience' loneliness through a character so profound deeper than most have ever been written----but it was 'THIS' novel where I learned the full beauty of 'feeling' music through sign language.A Classic Best!!! 5 +++++ stars!!!

*10 out of 5 lonely, burning stars, light years apart, yet winking together in a shared cosmos.This is not a love-story! Not in the romantic sense, in any case. Somehow the title had always made me think it was a soppy love story about unrequited romantic love. There is love in the novel, but for the most part not of the romantic kind.Rather, it is a cry into the existential darkness that surrounds humankind, and in many respects it is a deeply political, even philosophical novel, which reminded me of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The existential futility of lives beating like waves upon rocks, reminded me of the poetry of T.S. Eliot.Alas!Our dried voices, when We whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassor rats' feet over broken glassIn our dry cellar...And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star....Between the ideaAnd the realityBetween the motion And the actFalls the Shadow...Between the conceptionAnd the creation Between the emotion And the responseFalls the Shadow...Between the desireAnd the spasm Between the potencyAnd the existenceBetween the essenceAnd the descentFalls the Shadow..."Falls the Shadow" ...the dividing line between striving and achievement, between longing and possession, between moving towards and reaching, between wanting and having, between potentiality and actuality....for in Heart, there is constant striving that falls just short of the Shadow, just short of reaching its goal. Blind striving, passionate striving, where helpless humans blindly beat at the bonds of their existence, only managing to escape the fetters of class and gender and biology and society in their minds, in their hearts, in their dreams; ...and for some, the dream, the desire to transcend, the desire for agency, the desire toward actualization, and ultimately, the desire for recognition and understanding, is snuffed out like a candle in a gale.In this, the novel is a tour de force of characterization and of apt psychological insight. The book can be read on various levels. For example, the Freudian implications in the unseen pivot around whom the novel secretly spins, the mute John Singer. In his relationship with Greek mute Antonapoulos, the latter seems too much of a caricature of Freud's concept of the Id, for me not to see the relationship between Singer and Antonapoulos, as analogous to the relationship between the Ego and the Id.Virginia Woolf is one of the most subtle literary composers, capable of the most intricate patterns in her literary structures that I have ever come across. This novel has qualities reminiscent of Woolf's genius for structure. Mc Cullers' technique is perhaps not quite as refined as that of a mature Woolf, but it is impressive nonetheless.Mc Cullers herself likened the composition of the novel to a Baroque fugue, in which each voice is introduced separately to later form powerful contrapuntal harmonies between various singing voices, with four main 'voices' or melodies revolving around the central duet.The thread of the opening leitmotif that forms the exposition of the fugue, the 'center', the eye of the storm, so to speak, the blind mirror, the inert heart of the novel, is introduced to us initially as a gentle melody that runs like a subtle, almost invisible theme through the development of the novel-fugue. Brilliantly, when this initial melody is echoed in the other four melodies or voices, it is reversed; a mirror. This initial theme that remains at the center, almost hidden, is present at the climax of the novel - in fact, the climax of the center sets in motion the climax of the entire novel and causes all of the separate peripheral melodies that had been brought in, one by one, like in a Bach or Händel fugue, to each reach climax and spiral away from the center, where the fugue ends as an adagio sung in one of the most subtle of the voices in the fugue-novel....but the book is much more than a metaphorical fugue or a Freudian analogy; it is also a Marxist critique of not only the race relations in the American South but also a bitter slap in the face of the Capitalist North:"'We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle--the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars--and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat. And here in these thirteen states the exploitation of human beings is so that--that it’s a thing you got to take in with your own eyes. In my life I seen things that would make a man go crazy. At least one third of all Southerners live and die no better off than the lowest peasant in any European Fascist state. [...] Everywhere there’s pellagra and hookworm and anemia. And just plain, pure starvation. [...] ‘But!’ he repeated. Those are only the evils you can see and touch. The other things are worse. I’m talking about the way that the truth has been hidden from the people. The things they have been told so they can’t see the truth. The poisonous lies. So they aren’t allowed to know.’...‘Who owns the South? Corporations in the North own three fourths of all the South. They say the old cow grazes all over--in the south, the west, the north, and the east. But she’s milked in just one place. Her old teats swing over just one spot when she’s full. She grazes everywhere and is milked in New York. Take our cotton mills, our pulp mills, our harness factories, our mattress factories. The North owns them. And what happens?’Absentee ownership. In the village is one huge brick mill and maybe four or five hundred shanties. The houses aren’t fit for human beings to live in. Moreover, the houses were built to be nothing but slums in the first place. ...-built with far less forethought than barns to house cattle. Built with far less attention to needs than sties for pigs. For under this system pigs are valuable and men are not. You can’t make pork chops and sausage out of skinny little mill kids. You can’t sell but half the people these days. But a pig--’...With three or four younguns they are held down the same as if they had on chains. That is the whole principle of serfdom. Yet here in America we call ourselves free. And the funny thing is that this has been drilled into the heads of sharecroppers and lintheads and all the rest so hard that they really believe it. But it’s taken a hell of a lot of lies to keep them from knowing.’ ...Less than a hundred corporations have swallowed all but a few leavings. These industries have already sucked the blood and softened the bones of the people. The old days of expansion are gone. The whole system of capitalistic democracy is rotten and corrupt. There remains only two roads ahead. One: Fascism. Two: reform of the most revolutionary and permanent kind.’...‘And the Negro. Do not forget the Negro. So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘The Nazis rob the Jews of their legal, economic, and cultural life. Here the Negro has always been deprived of these. And if wholesale and dramatic robbery of money and goods has not taken place here as in Germany, it is simply because the Negro has never been allowed to accrue wealth in the first place.’ ‘That’s the system,’ Jake said. "It is rather strange that a book so hostile to the political status quo had such a mellow reception upon publication, but maybe it is because of that uncomfortable hostility which made no bones about the economic, political, and ideological realities of the situation, that the candid commentary taking place in the novel was sidestepped by commentators upon the novel, so to speak. Possibly it was partly due to the fact that Mc Cullers was female. Maybe it is because she wove her narrative so masterfully, interweaving its multifarious threads and blending them in on many levels, as she said herself, like a fugue with interleaving voices and melodies. (Threnodies?) One is reminded that another female writer writing in more or less a similar time-frame, a much less talented writer writing in a shrill voice, a capitalist apologist in favor of supreme narcissism, writing under the pseudonym of Ayn Rand, received a much more marked response, both positive and negative....and speaking of female - not only does Mc Cullers utter a subdued feminist voice in the striving of young Mick, a 14-year old girl; not only does she subtly point out the fate of especially females from the poorer classes, but she manages to masterfully do a subtle sub-commentary on gender roles with her characters, especially with tom-boyish Mick, almost genderless Singer, and then a brilliantly done increasing fusion of genders in the leanings and yearnings of Biff Brannon, the dark-bearded tavern owner who starts to wear his wife's perfume and who is an adept needleman. (The male of needlewoman?) Biff Brannon, who does the most divine flower arrangements and who longs to nurture children.One wonders if the social commentary and political message of writers like Victor Hugo and Carson Mc Cullers sometimes goes almost unnoticed because there is so much emotive power, so much humanity, in their narratives. Both writers are masters at showing human pain in its various guises, but they are also masterful at showing us social injustice: the one showing a man effectively ending up serving almost a life sentence because he was poor and from the lowest classes and his family was hungry and desperately needed the bread he stole for them to eat; the other showing a man losing his legs because justice for white men and justice for black men are not the same kind of justice; the one showing a woman so desperate to keep her child alive that she ends up selling even her hair and her teeth ; the other showing a promising young girl who should have the world as her oyster, being forced to give up her dreams for the future because she was cheated by "the system".... but one almost cannot help feeling that Mc Cullers would have understood if and why her work was slighted. After all, a great part of the novel is about people trying to get messages across, and failing, because their audience is not ready to hear that message.I like to think that she felt like Dylan Thomas about the matter:In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their armsI labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.Not for the proud man apartFrom the raging moon I writeOn these spindrift pagesNor for the towering deadWith their nightingales and psalmsBut for the lovers [love of the common people], their armsRound the griefs of the ages,Who pay no praise or wagesNor heed my craft or art. Because you, Carson, wrote for the love of the people .And it shows.

By the time Mozart was 5, he was composing his own music and performing for royalty. John Stuart Mill had mastered Latin, Greek, Algebra and Euclidean Geometry by the time he was 8. Bobby Fischer won the US Chess Championship at the age of 14. When Orson Welles was 20, he directed his own adaptation of Macbeth as a WPA project with unemployed black performers in Harlem. Why I myself, if you’ll forgive me for crowing, memorized the batting averages of every member of the Cincinnati Reds’ starting lineup as a 12-year-old. So is it really all that impressive that Carson McCullers wrote this top 100 book* at the ripe old age of 23?! (Sorry, my humor never matured much beyond the days of Reds’ glory.)I have to confess that it was almost a distraction to read this knowing how young McCullers was to have written something so insightful, polished and world-weary. She managed to get deep inside the heads of five very different characters in a mill town in Georgia just prior to WWII and give voice to their many valid concerns. In the case of John Singer, the voice was purely an inner one. He was a deaf mute. In a way, he was the central island in the archipelago to which the others hoped to connect. Singer was a good listener (reading lips) and had understanding eyes, but there was a bit of Chauncey Gardiner about him, too, in that people assumed more of a Christ-like, simpatico alliance than was possible from their confidant. They didn’t realize how sad and lonely he was himself when his only friend, another deaf man, had been sent to the asylum. Singer’s hands (used for signing) became silent.Among the other characters, the adolescent tomboy, Mick Kelly, was most prominent. She’s said to be a semiautobiographical construct, which is easy to believe given her lanky appearance, her artistic sensitivity, and her advanced intellect. To me, she was a more human (read flawed, troubled and nuanced) version of Harper Lee’s Scout. She was written so powerfully – it was easy to ache alongside her as she craved more music (her big love in life) and peace of mind (that family circumstances would not allow).Doctor Copeland was another memorable character. As a highly educated black physician, he had few peers, but he had a vision for lifting his people and combating racial injustice. The lack of progress was brought home convincingly as McCullers did an excellent job personalizing it through him and his family. She was evidently ahead of her time, casting a critical, clear-sighted eye on the relations of the day. The two other POV characters were Jake Blount, a hard-drinking carnie mechanic with a Marxist bent, and Biff Brannon, a café/bar owner with a generous, aesthetic spirit struggling against alienation. They, too, bared their souls to John Singer as a part of an empathetic hub and spoke model.We get to know a handful of other characters, too, valuable for advancing the plot and populating the communal landscape. The Jewish boy growing up with Mick who fears the news out of Europe, Dr. Copeland’s son who finds himself on the wrong (black) side of the (white) law, Mick’s little brother George whose impulsive actions led to dramatic changes (most profoundly in himself) – they all had important parts to play.Things happen in this book, but I wouldn’t call it plot-driven. It’s mostly profiles of the people and reactions to the times. There was precious little cheer to go around. Faced with that fact, McCullers never did flinch. As one of the chaps in Spinal Tap once said, standing at Elvis’s grave, it was almost “too much bloody perspective.” Sugar must have been scarce in the Depression-era South – scant amounts to coat the world that she saw. But there seemed to be hope for sweeter days ahead. Even if I’m wrong about those hopes, this is an important and authentically observed book, well worth the time.*In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter seventeenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. (Copied from Wikipedia)

This is a novel of the American South in the decade or so preceding the Civil Rights Movement. The central character is a deaf mute of almost saintly demeanor, Singer. His story constitutes the narrative spine along which the stories of his fellow characters are strung. These include Mink Kelley, a 13 year old girl; Dr. Copeland, the unnamed town's "negro" doctor, who knows that civil rights for his people is in the offing but is frustrated and angry that his own efforts toward that end have been ineffective; the alcoholic, Jake Blount, a carney whose narrow ideological Communism leaves him frustrated and angry. Blount is in many ways the white counterpart of Dr. Copeland. Their thinking is similar on many levels, but their meeting of the minds is not a productive one. Biff Brannon is the owner of a local restaurant, the New York Cafe. He is probably gay, as may be Singer, whose mute roommate Antonapoulis is committed to an asylum in the early going because of anti-social behavior. There's a wonderful, almost unflagging narrative sweep here that is rare in my reading experience. McCullers wrote this when she was 21 and 22. I think her greatest gift as an author is her deep empathy for her characters. It is this empathy that gives the book its powerful emotional appeal. The novel is mostly rendered as straightforward chronology. There are a few flashbacks, but McCuller keeps these to a minimum. The action takes place in an unnamed southern mill town in what is perhaps Mississippi between two distinct historical events: British PM Chamberlain's appeasement of Nazi Germany at Munich (30 Sept. 1938) and Hitler's demand for Danzig from Poland (late August 1939). But these events are only meant to provide context, and the immediate threat they represent to the nation is not a major concern. It is the South. The hot, humid, muggy, buggy American South. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is a classic and I recommend it strongly.