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Sarah gordon is a professor of English at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia. She has chaired her university's internationally renowned symposia on O'Connor and has been editor of "The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin" since 1983. Gordon is also editor of the book "Flannery mostra altro O'Connor: In Celebration of Genius." (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno

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I am writing this review first simply because the book is due back at the library today. Since I recently moved to the beautiful state of Georgia, I am wanting to learn more about the state's history and about the people. My reading this particular book came about through a serendipitous chain of events. Paul had recently read and reviewed a book of Flannery O'Connor's short stories: A Good Man is Hard to Find. I had never read anything by this author, and thought that she might be a good one to add to my list. Later that day I went to the library just down the road from us that had newly opened. In searching through their non-fiction in order to find something to check out about Georgia history, what should I see but this gorgeous book! I did not know that Flannery O'Connor was from Georgia! I will confess that having read the delightful Finding George Orwell in Burma last year, I was hoping that this book would be on par with that one. It is not. Although I gave both books four star ratings, they received the stars for different reasons. Finding George Orwell in Burma is a beautifully written travel memoir where the author (Emma Larkin) is retracing Orwell's steps through his time in Burma and tying the steps of the journey in with his writings. It is delightful and full of insights that will have you picking up Orwell's books as soon as you have finished. A Literary Guide to Flannery O'Connor's Georgia is very different. It does give a good overview of O'Connor's life and some insights into her writing, and the pictures are absolutely gorgeous, and there are a lot of them, which is what boosted this book's star rating for me. The writing is where it suffers - dry in places and sometimes tedious, the narrative lacks warmth and flow. The best section by far is the chapter entitled Andalusia, which is the name of the farm where O'Connor spent her final years and did much of her writing. This chapter shines, providing insight and depth into O'Connor's writing legacy.

"Flannery O'Connor's use of the land is not like that of William Faulkner, for whom the South's complicated and tragic history is inextricably tied to the envy and greed of the propertyless for property, for land, with all the bizarre comedy and violence entailed by the age-old conflict. To be sure, O'Connor saw humanity as fallen and always subject to envy and greed, among other sins; her vision, however, belongs to Christian prophecy, wherein the rural landscape, with its inevitable long line of trees, serves as the setting, at times almost ritualistic, for the individual's confrontation with evil and with the possibility of God's redemptive grace. O'Connor, unlike Faulkner, is not concerned with the actual history of the South or with any kind of collective white guilt; her fiction is centered on the individual search for salvation."

I guess I was expecting more of that kind of analysis and thought in a book thats title starts with "A Literary Guide..." Still, there is much to be learned from this book, and it provides a nice background for those who, like me, are unfamiliar with Flannery O'Connor. It is a good place to start, and certainly if you want to see the buildings and places that had such an impact on her life, then this is an excellent choice as the photographs are stunning. Certainly worth your time if the subject interests you.
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Crazymamie | Feb 18, 2013 |
There is a photograph in Flannery O’Connor: In Celebration of Genius which, I think, defines the author of the Southern gothic novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. In the picture, a 13-year-old Flannery is standing next to three other girls at a birthday party. The other young debutantes are dressed in simple cotton dresses of the late 1930s; they peer shyly into the camera; one has her hands clasped in front of her. Flannery, however, looks older than her age—as if she’s already filling up with wise blood. She is distracted, staring grumpily off to the left, as if she sees something out-of-place with the world.

Flannery brought that same “the world is tilting toward Hell and I think you’re all a pack of foolsâ€? vision to her writing. In story after story (like “Greenleaf,â€? “Good Country Peopleâ€? and—my favorite—“The Enduring Chillâ€?), she skewered organized religion, racism, hypocrisy, modern psychology and higher education. On the tip of her pen, society turned like cured meat on a spit.

But damned if her writing wasn’t some of the most delicious Southern barbecue ever slapped between two covers!

In celebration of her life (O’Connor would have turned 75 this year if she hadn’t died of complications from lupus in 1964), Hill Street Press has published this wonderful collection of essays, poems and one remarkable piece of fiction (a short story by Greg Johnson in which Miz O’Connor herself has a visit from a boy straight out of one of her fictions).

Flannery O’Connor: In Celebration of Genius (edited by longtime O’Connor scholar Sarah Gordon) is indeed a celebration—but it’s less a birthday party than it is a funeral eulogy. Yet, not a dirge, but more like one of those New Orleans processions where the weeping and wailing breaks into the Dixieland blare of trumpets and there is dancing, yes, always dancing.

Like the best of eulogies, this collection captures the quick and wonderful spirit of the dear departed. Contributors include Doris Betts, Fred Chappell, Maxine Kumin, Bret Lott and Lee Smith, among many others. Some of the selections are a bit dry and drawn-out, but the best of them more than make up for the heavy-handed lit crit.

My favorites include an anecdote from poet Miller Williams (father of singer Lucinda Williams, by the way), which opens the book. In the mid-1950s, Williams was a traveling textbook salesman and a struggling poet who sought out Flannery’s company and spent afternoons on her porch out in rural Georgia, sipping iced tea and watching her peacocks. Williams writes:

Sometimes she would give me one or two books of poetry that had been sent to her, sometimes by the poet, saying that she didn’t know how to read poems. She read mine, though, and commented on them sensibly and helpfully. I suspected that the real reason she passed the books along was that she didn’t have room for them on her shelves and knew that I couldn’t have afforded them.

“You know how to read poems,â€? I insisted. “You write poems. You just call them stories.â€?

“You write stories,â€? she countered, grinning. “They just look like poems.â€?

From the moment she turned my remark around and handed it back to me, my attitude toward my work was never the same.

Of course, I’m insanely jealous of Williams. What I wouldn’t give to be sitting there on that porch, sipping Flannery’s tea and talking above the screech of her beloved flock of peacocks. I could have learned much at the feet of this woman.

Many of the writers here feel the same way and most struggle to describe the ways her writings have affected their own novels and poems.

When I read that famous last line of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,â€? I realized that nothing was wrapped up here, writes Lee Smith. Instead, a whole world opened out before my astonished eyes, a world as wild and scary as life itself….A story does not have to be resolved in the end, I realized. It is enough to glimpse something, momentarily, before it slips back into the dark woods.

Poetry is also nicely woven throughout the book—some of it dealing directly with Flannery herself, some of it just reverberating with echoes of that (as one writer put it) “phalanx of tartly precise detail, that perfect-pitch reporting of dialogue.â€? One poem in particular—“On Visiting Flannery O’Connor’s Grave,â€? by Kumin—ends with this cymbal-crash:

Flannery lies unadorned except by name
who breathed in fire and fed us on the flame.

Thirty-six years after her all-too-soon death, O’Connor’s fire-and-brimstone continues to burn across the pages. If you have even the least interest in the 20th century’s sharpest writer, then you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this collection of tributes. It is truly a revelation that is good to find.
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davidabrams | May 19, 2006 |

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