The life and writing of Flannery O’Connor could only happen in the United States of America. One gets the chicken skin and shivers along the spine: the story of just a woman who could write, without any remarkable fuss about. I am just starting to read her but the aura of her devastating writing is transcendent from the beginning. My expectations are high. She and her style –it looks like- prompts the memory of Raymond Carver, a unique genius in telling stories concerning the depths and abyss of the human condition. Flannery was a born Southerner and that adds something to her to my subjective scale of values _I have come to love the South; and its people and landscapes enjoys by principle a mythological and superior condition, bestowed by my loving and biased predisposition to them.
Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925. The place is today, along with Panama City and Pensacola, the favorite destination of College students for debauchery during the Spring break. 39 years after, she died from lupus, the same disease that took her father’s life when she was 16, in Milledgeville (Regina O’Connor, her mother, had to survive both losses!). She moved up North to study at the State University of Iowa and, apart from those years, she was a Southerner and lived in the South –in a farm from 1952 onwards (one of remote access, one might think, as it is almost everything genuine in the South). Her first complete novel appeared that year, when she already knew about her fatal disease.
Flannery seems to have accepted her fatality: she “began to plan her life in the light of reality”, as her friend Sally Fitzgerald wrote. It is touchy to me: during those years she wrote and re-wrote tirelessly her work and found content by raising peacocks, pheasants, geese and became an amateur painter. Her isolation, composure and quietness of life are what touch me the most.
And I am ready to let this woman touch me, handless and magical.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
No comments:
Post a Comment