Rating: 
Summary: The Hound of Heaven
Review: "Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?" - Walker Percy in The Last GentlemanI've never really grasped what Walker Percy meant by that one until I read Wise Blood, but that's what happens. The opposite of love isn't hate. Rather, it's indifference, and hate is some form of love. In Wise Blood, Hazel does hate Christ, but that hate is emblematic of the belief (and unwanted love) he actually holds for Him. Wise Blood is Hazel's dark journey in a fallen world toward happening onto a bit of grace, painful but merciful at the same time. Wise Blood isn't a book to read if you want to end up with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Its setting is a grim, fallen world, and the characters aren't exactly likeable. Nevertheless, the truth O'Connor has to present through her dark humor is powerful and insightful. This is a wonderful book for intellectual Christians and for anyone else searching for truth in this mess of a world.
Rating:
Summary: The Hound of Heaven
Review: "Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?" - Walker Percy in The Last Gentleman I've never really grasped what Walker Percy meant by that one until I read Wise Blood, but that's what happens. The opposite of love isn't hate. Rather, it's indifference, and hate is some form of love. In Wise Blood, Hazel does hate Christ, but that hate is emblematic of the belief (and unwanted love) he actually holds for Him. Wise Blood is Hazel's dark journey in a fallen world toward happening onto a bit of grace, painful but merciful at the same time. Wise Blood isn't a book to read if you want to end up with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Its setting is a grim, fallen world, and the characters aren't exactly likeable. Nevertheless, the truth O'Connor has to present through her dark humor is powerful and insightful. This is a wonderful book for intellectual Christians and for anyone else searching for truth in this mess of a world.
Rating: 
Summary: Ponderous
Review: A strange and disconnected work full of apparent yet sometimes mysterious themes, Flannery O'Connor delivers less of a commentary on religion here than one on the human condition and its place within society and regarding itself. Hazel Motes, the protaonist, discovers his faith while attempting to shed it, while the enaging yet mysteriously motivated Enoch searches for his niche in less...appropriate manners. Altogether, Ms. O'Connor presents a work of extreme characters pressed together by distant circumstances and circularly obsessed with each others' lives. Each one's uest for their own meaning involves another, and even characters which do not emerge until the last chapter, such as Hazel's landlady, seem to take on a three-dimensional life-altering perspective as they encounter Hazel. The book raises as many questions as it seems to aspire to answer. Reading it the first time around will produce only puzzlement over the intended themes and coherency of the plot, but further analysis should produce the wonderful existential surprise Ms. O'Connor has hidden within this exteriorly nonsensical narrative.
Rating:
Summary: superior
Review: All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. -Flannery O'Connor Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's grotesque picaresque tale of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee; a young man who has come to the city of Taulkinham bringing with him an enormous resentment of Christianity and the clergy. He is in an open state of rebellion against the rigidity of his itinerant preacher grandfather and his strict mother. So when one of the first people he encounters is the blind street preacher Asa Hawks and Motes finds himself both attracted and repelled by Hawks' bewitching fifteen year old daughter Lily Sabbath, he reacts by establishing his own street ministry. He founds the "Church without Christ": Listen you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go. I'm going to preach it to whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar. As you can guess the church is singularly unsuccessful, although he does attract a couple of other crackpots: Enoch Emery a young man who works at the zoo and longs for a kind word from anybody; and Onnie Jay Holy, yet another rival preacher who believes Motes when he says he's found a "new jesus." While at first this cast of bizarre characters, ranging from merely repugnant to truly evil, and the scenes of physical, moral and spiritual degradation through which they pass all seem to be just a little too much, the reader is carried along by O'Connor's sure hand for dark comedy. The book is very funny. But as the story draws to a close, O'Connor's true mission is revealed; Motes loses his fight against faith and he achieves a kind of grace, becoming something like a Christian martyr to atone for his sins. O'Connor has something serious and important to say about the modern human condition and the emptiness of a life without faith. That she is able to disguise this message in such a ribald comic package is quite an achievement. Reading the book inevitably called to mind Carson McCullers' dreadful book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), which made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century list. It too is a Southern gothic, populated by dismal misanthropes. But it is devoid of humor and has nothing to say about the characters and the world they've created. Wise Blood is a superior novel in every sense and really deserves that spot on the list. GRADE: A+
Rating:
Summary: Here's true literature...
Review: Back in these days, books were published mainly for literary merit. They were published because they were good. And this is one of those books - a story that definitely stood the test of time and is deemed as a classic today. It mainly concerns a young man named Hazel Motes, a man questing for his own church - the church of christ without christ - and who blinds himself. I read it a few times and each time enjoyed it more and more, though I have yet to check out the movie. It is one of those books that stays with you for a really long time. I recommend it to anybody who wants to curl up for a few hours with a good, well-written story.
Rating: 
Summary: Powerful but unfulfilling
Review: Boldly weaves pathos and ethos into a compelling tangle! However, just as flawed as that sentence, does not rise to the Olympian heights is suggests it could.
Rating:
Summary: Grotesque, blackly funny, compelling
Review: Flannery O'Connor's first novel was this rather short book, _Wise Blood_. It is quite thoroughly strange, full of basically unattractive characters, acting in obsessive ways, coming to bad ends. Yet it is a remarkable, rather moving, strikingly written book that really sticks in the mind. Hazel Motes is a young man from rural Tennessee who has just got out of the Army. (The book, published in 1952, appears to be set immediately after the Second World War.) He's had no contact with his family, what's left of it, for 4 years, and when he comes home he finds his home abandoned and in decay, and everyone dead. We meet him on the train to the "city". He's an unpleasant man, baiting the black porter, pushing his lack of belief in Christ on all and sundry. In the city, he wanders somewhat aimlessly, encountering first a prostitute, then a blind preacher, Asa Hawks, and his "daughter" Sabbath, then another confused young man named Enoch Emery. Hazel (whose grandfather was a circuit-riding preacher) sets up as a preacher himself, preaching the "Church Without Christ", and advocating blasphemy and sin. He pursues and is pursued by Sabbath Hawks, and also Enoch Emery. Motes is continually unpleasant to all around him. After Hazel rebuffs a confidence man's attempt to cash in on his preaching, he finds himself confronted by a "twin", Solace Layfield, the false prophet, who preaches of "the Church of Christ Without Christ", and who wholly perverts Hazel's nihilistic "message". Meanwhile the pathetic Enoch is trying to steal a "new Jesus" for Hazel, while Sabbath, barely a teen, is successfully seducing Hazel. The end is grotesque and strange -- Hazel becomes a murderer, Enoch a thief, Sabbath is sent to a home, Asa runs off -- and the final two chapters show Hazel mortifying himself, apparently searching for redemption. Whether his redemption is real seems an open question to me, though O'Connor seemed to think it was. The novel is ostensibly a comedy, and I suppose it is, but a very black comedy. It's full of images and objects and actions heavily weighted with symbolism -- Hazel's decrepit Essex automobile, the gorilla suit Enoch steals, the mummy that is to be the "new Jesus", the blind preacher's eyes, and Hazel's eyes, and much more. The writing, as I said, is striking, with any number of quite memorable phrases, such as the woman whose hair looked like "ham gravy dripping down her head" -- descriptive, and accurate, and very Southern in feel to me. This is a strange and quite compelling novel.
Rating:
Summary: The Undermining Themes of Wise Blood
Review: Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood contains many reoccuring and undermining religious themes. Her main theme includes the redemption of man by Christ. She also depicts the grotesques in society through her use of her subject matter. O'Connor bluntly uses this religious theme to prove that redemption is difficult for her characters because of the distorted sense of moral purpose in her characters. Throughout her novel, a major emphasis is placed on materialsim and money. Through her use of imagery, symbols, and details, O'Connor produces the unbalanced prosperity of the society, which leaves little assurance to blissfulness in life. Her protagonist, Hazel Motes, becomes a fated preacher or even prophet; however, Hazel rejects any form of Christ in his life including the image of himself. Even though it is rejected, his fate dominates him throughout the novel, and via his rejection of Christ, Hazel preaches the Church without Christ. Hazel finds that his reason for existence is to form the Church without Christ. Eventually, Hazel sacrifices everything in his life so as to not accept Christ which eventually destroys him. It would have been much better to sacrifice everything he had to begin with in order to accept Christ and let Christ take over from there. This would have prevented Hazel's destruction rooted from his rejection of Christ. This proves O'Connor's purpose of showing a society full of people who cannot accept Christ and who are, at most times, destroyed in some way in their attempt to reject their religious side. O'Connor mocks evangelism and the all too popular "preachers for profits," who have no training in religion what so ever, in order to display her scorn for popularized anti-cerebral religion. Hazel, whose name is actually Hebrew for "he who sees God," ironically but purposefully covers himself with a figurative veil. This veil covers his soul and his senses from seeing Christ as He should be seen. His nickname, Haze, also proves his inability to see clearly. Throughout this novel, Hazel runs into several people who perform mysterious acts of goodness for him trying to help Hazel find Grace. This is also ironic condiering that most of Hazel's acquaintances are profiteer preachers. Some of these acquaintances include: Asa Hawks, an ex-evangelist, who pretends to blind himself for sympathy and profit as he "hawks" for money around the city; Enoch Emery, the boy with "wise blood," who cannot find his inner self and becomes Hazel's follower in the Church without Christ; and Hoover Shoats, another profiteer preacher, who pretends to agree with Hazel's beliefs just to gain profit from it. Haze's car is a major sumbol of the novel. This car becomes Hazel's "church." Hazel lives in his car and preaches from his car. His car becomes the "rock" which Hazel builds his church upon. He and his car become "one." After his car is destroyed, Hazel sees himself as destroyed. Hazel is weaned out of his fantasy/rejection world and into reality. He eventually forces himself to Christ as he sees he is "not clean." He begins his stage of repentance by blinding himself, stuffing his shoes with glass and rocks, and wrapping barbed wire around his chest. Inevitably, his destruction came. This book was very revealing and well-written. O'Connor selects certain audences with the books she wrote. This book contains a majority of religion. A person who perfers not to read about religion probably ought to but will not want to. The way O'Connor incorporated her hidden themes into her novel provided the reader several ways to interpret her implied religious beliefs.
Rating:
Summary: Quirky, brilliant read
Review: For some reason I always cast Flannery O' Connor aside in the prairie Willa Cather type reads. But then I saw John Huston's movie (which was very faithful to the book) and decided to give it a try. I soon realize how stupid my accusation was.
After reading Wise Blood, I'm sure that I will read other works by Flannery O' Connor. This book was fabulous. The plot and characters were so eccentric.
The story was about a preacher who decides to organize the church without christ. Hazel is confused. I think calling him a hypocrite is too mean as he is likable, as are the other characters in the book - the repressed homely teenager, the blind preacher, the zoo worker, who made me laugh the most because of his desperate following. The book kind of runs out of steam the last twenty pages but still I give it a full 5 since I haven't been entertained by a book in so long.
Rating:
Summary: An American Genius' Mystical First Effort
Review: Hazel Motes, protagonist of "Wise Blood," is an accidental prophet. Though the novel precedes the much better "The Violent Bear It Away," it can be read as a sort of sequel to that novel - what might have happened to young Tarwater if we were allowed to see his adventures in the city. Motes goes around the city in the evenings, preaching the Church Without Christ, a church in which the individual is free from the 'bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus' - freed from tradition, from dogma, from traditional notions of salvation. Motes preaches the coming of a new Jesus - a contemporary that modern (or post-modern) people can relate to. In his quest, Motes is pursued by two individuals, Sabbath Hawks, the daughter of a blind false prophet, and Enoch Emery, a wannabe disciple. Emery wants very badly to find that new Jesus and receive a revelation from him. Full of strange and compelling, if somewhat distant characters, including a small mummy and a gorilla suit, "Wise Blood" does not have the plot flow of "The Violent Bear It Away," and it is a little more haphazard, but it is a wonderful first glance into Flannery O'Connor's genius fictional mind, possessed with finding Christ in existentialism with or without Kierkegaard.
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