[XIH]≡ PDF Everything That Rises Must Converge Stories FSG Classics Flannery O'Connor Robert Fitzgerald 9780374504649 Books

Everything That Rises Must Converge Stories FSG Classics Flannery O'Connor Robert Fitzgerald 9780374504649 Books

Download As PDF : Everything That Rises Must Converge Stories FSG Classics Flannery O'Connor Robert Fitzgerald 9780374504649 Books

Everything That Rises Must Converge Stories FSG Classics Flannery O'Connor Robert Fitzgerald 9780374504649 Books

That line is from one of the nine stories in Flannery O'Connor's posthumous collection of short stories. It comes close to summarizing how for me O'Connor presents life -- as "an ugly mystery". Since she was a devout Roman Catholic, she herself probably did not view life to be either ugly or a total mystery. But I do not grasp her theology, so much of what I am left with is the ugliness and the mystery.

Still, her stories should be read -- for their power and for the distinctiveness of her voice. I came to O'Connor much too late in my reading career. I was staggered by her first collection of short stores, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", when I read it about four years ago. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is almost as good. It contains one story ("The Lame Shall Enter First") that strikes me as rough, much like a first draft (O'Connor wrote most of the stories in the book in her last years, when suffering from the Lupus that would kill her). But five of the stories are top shelf, as fine in my opinion as the best of Alice Munro, or James Joyce, or John Updike.

The stories are set primarily in rural and small-town Georgia of the late 1950's and early 1960's. Most end with a twist and in apocalyptic fashion. Three themes dominate. One is the theological. The first three stories seem Old Testament in nature, while the latter six partake of the New Testament, especially the Holy Ghost. (I can see preachers using many of these stories as texts for what could be enthralling sermons.) Another theme has to do with what I will call domestic relations, particularly those between an older parent and an adult child. For the last twelve years of her life, O'Connor lived with her widowed mother, who supposedly provided O'Connor a supportive and tranquil environment as she struggled with Lupus. However, the strained and bitterly antagonistic parent-child relationships of many of these stories make me wonder whether O'Connor's last years with her mother were truly all that peaceful for her. The third theme has to do with the relationship between blacks and whites in what was then still very much Jim Crow Georgia. These stories are not P.C. (indeed, O'Connor would have mocked, trenchantly, the very notion of P.C.), and if you are offended by the "n-word" regardless of context (much like Mark Twain and "Huckleberry Finn") you will be offended repeatedly. But as several of the stories indicate, and as one character says when he proposes to drink from the same glass as one of his mother's Negro workers, "the world is changing."

The book's title, by the way, is also the title of the first, and probably best, story. Towards the end of her life, O'Connor read a lot by the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In a piece called the "Omega Point", Teilhard wrote: "Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."


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Everything That Rises Must Converge Stories FSG Classics Flannery O'Connor Robert Fitzgerald 9780374504649 Books Reviews

It comes to mind that Flannery O'Connor is to American literature what Janis Joplin was to American music. Short but stellar performances, with a down home sometimes wicked edge. O'Connor is one of the finest American writers in my opinion. She deals up front and personal with issues of race, religious fanaticism, and poverty, making honest use of the vernacular of her time.
Who doesn't love Flannery O'Connor? My great aunt is buried a few graves away from hers in Milledgeville, Georgia and on the last trip I took there to visit my relative, I was touched to see a rosary draped across Ms. O'Connor's stone. Such is the enduring power of her prose.

Often uncomfortable and disconcerting, Everything That Rises Must Converge offers glimpses into the darker aspects of ordinary folks. The grotesque, the hypocrisy, and the venal are described with clear eyed and beautiful language.

Such a poet, was our Ms. O'Connor, and what a treasure is this collection.
I'm a huge Flannery O'Connor fan. This is my favorite collection of short stories and I've re-read it over many years. Finally got a version of it so I can carry it with me.

Just a warning Use of the "N" word throughout, as most of these stories were written in the 30s, 40s and 50s. The characters are brutally honest. If you can't handle a Catholic woman making statements about Christian spirituality via very flawed characters and protestant practices, these stories are not for you.
I have always thought Hemingway was our best short story writer.Faulkner,Caldwell,Capote,Wright,Singer,Salter. They pale in comparison.Then as an old,I mean older, man I discovered Flannery O'Connor.Can I say it? Can I say it? I think so. She is as good as Hemingway, maybe better.Don't look in Everything That Rises for literary tricks like stream of consciousness or indefinite pronouns to keep the reader confused.She uses only one technique-brilliant and haunting sentences.This is the way the English language should be written.I don't know much about Flannery O'Connor,except that she suffered from a debilitating illness and died young.There is a picture of her in this book. She looks intelligent,studious,shy.Maybe your high school librarian or the girl who was never asked to dance.I really don't know.But I do know one thing.Her life was just like her stories,short and brilliant.
I always think that after an author dies, and the work doesn't die with them, my opinion of the work is irrelevant. But, for the record, Flannery O'Connor was one of the best "Southern Gothic" writers. She was Catholic and deeply religious and seems to have imagined that her fiction was an exemplary presentation of Catholic dogma. I was raised a Catholic but dropped religion, all religion, like a rock as soon as I left home for the Air Force in 1962. I look in her work in vain for anything that resembles the Catholicism that the nuns tried to drum into me. O'Connor seems to have a good feel for just how close normal southern life is to violence. Sudden explosions of violence are common in her work, as is love, often expressed bizarrely, and what looks to me like irrational behavior. Her people live in a magical world and their being God-drunk doesn't help them reach a peaceful place where kindness might be discovered.
That line is from one of the nine stories in Flannery O'Connor's posthumous collection of short stories. It comes close to summarizing how for me O'Connor presents life -- as "an ugly mystery". Since she was a devout Roman Catholic, she herself probably did not view life to be either ugly or a total mystery. But I do not grasp her theology, so much of what I am left with is the ugliness and the mystery.

Still, her stories should be read -- for their power and for the distinctiveness of her voice. I came to O'Connor much too late in my reading career. I was staggered by her first collection of short stores, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", when I read it about four years ago. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is almost as good. It contains one story ("The Lame Shall Enter First") that strikes me as rough, much like a first draft (O'Connor wrote most of the stories in the book in her last years, when suffering from the Lupus that would kill her). But five of the stories are top shelf, as fine in my opinion as the best of Alice Munro, or James Joyce, or John Updike.

The stories are set primarily in rural and small-town Georgia of the late 1950's and early 1960's. Most end with a twist and in apocalyptic fashion. Three themes dominate. One is the theological. The first three stories seem Old Testament in nature, while the latter six partake of the New Testament, especially the Holy Ghost. (I can see preachers using many of these stories as texts for what could be enthralling sermons.) Another theme has to do with what I will call domestic relations, particularly those between an older parent and an adult child. For the last twelve years of her life, O'Connor lived with her widowed mother, who supposedly provided O'Connor a supportive and tranquil environment as she struggled with Lupus. However, the strained and bitterly antagonistic parent-child relationships of many of these stories make me wonder whether O'Connor's last years with her mother were truly all that peaceful for her. The third theme has to do with the relationship between blacks and whites in what was then still very much Jim Crow Georgia. These stories are not P.C. (indeed, O'Connor would have mocked, trenchantly, the very notion of P.C.), and if you are offended by the "n-word" regardless of context (much like Mark Twain and "Huckleberry Finn") you will be offended repeatedly. But as several of the stories indicate, and as one character says when he proposes to drink from the same glass as one of his mother's Negro workers, "the world is changing."

The book's title, by the way, is also the title of the first, and probably best, story. Towards the end of her life, O'Connor read a lot by the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In a piece called the "Omega Point", Teilhard wrote "Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."