The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Rating:
Summary: reread this as an adult
Review: I am always amazed how books, such as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, improve with age. I first read it in high school and was bored. Now I have reread this book as an adult. It touches my heart and soul.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is so well titled. It encompasses lonely souls who cluster around John Singer, a deaf mute. Singer losses his deaf mute roommate and companion, Antonapolous, when he is committed to an asylum. He is now alone… isolated. This change operates as a catalyst for the rest of the story.

Published in 1940 before the creation of political correctness, its characters explore fascism, communism, racism, and poverty. They are misfits, isolated even when together in the same room. After his friend is committed to the asylum, John Singer takes a room with the Kelly family. The various characters that populate the novel visit John Singer in his room. They talk to John Singer, who can understand them through lip reading. Each character finds in John Singer what he/she needs to find… a sympathetic heart. But none of the characters understands or knows John Singer. He has no one to talk to; no one who to understand him; no one to help fend off his own loneliness. For John Singer, there is no sympathetic heart.

For vacation, he visits Antonapolous is the asylum, where his insane friend cannot care about him. Singer responds to Antonapolous in the same way as the visitors to his room respond to him. He talks to him using sign language, but Antonapolous does not talk to him. He finds in this friend his sympathetic heart. This relationship parallels to his own position with the characters who visit his room. The novel reaches its climax when Antonapolous dies, and Singer can no longer find a reason for living.

This is a beautifully written book that takes the reader into the South in the 1930’s with a truth that is hard to find in most contemporary novels. I highly recommend The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Rating:
Summary: Heartwrenching
Review: I'm a teenager who read this book as part of an English assignment and about 15 minutes ago finished this book while strewn across the chair with tears streaming down my face.
It is har to find books that truly reach inside you and shake you up, but when you do, it's like visiting with a long lost friend.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of those books. It is about a small southern town and all the people that exist in it. Exist isn't quite the right word though, it is more like they are standing on the outside looking in. Each character- Mick, Jake Blount, the doctor, Mr. Brannon, are hopelessly lost and the truth is just out of their grasp. They each have a piece missing and seek to fill it with drinking, sex, music, or just hiding from their problems. I find it ironic that the only one they can tell their problems to is the deaf-mute, Mr. Singer, for he is the only one that listens.
It was so real in some places that I was amazed that someone didn't read my mind, such as when Mick was talking about entering the "inside place" where music existed.
This book and its story will surely stay in my mind and haunt me for a long while.

Rating:
Summary: A talented writer
Review: This is a book about a deaf mute who moves to a boarding house in the south and changes the lives of people around him. Ms. McCullers was a communist during the time she wrote this book and you can really see the influence of her ideology throughout the book.

The story is very sad, with a sad ending, but dont let that stop you from reading this great book. All the characters come alive and I feel the reader can relate to each ones lives. The saddest part is that no one could hear the deaf mute (Mr. Singer) in his lonliness, and in essence I feel he was being unwittingly used by the town people.

If you have seen the movie, dont let that stop you, the book is ENTIRELY different from the movie, at least what I saw of it.

Rating:
Summary: Not a book I'd recommend
Review: This book was required reading in my honors english class. When I first recieved a copy I thought it looked interesting and different. In the beginning I wasn't really drawn into the book, like so many other's I've read. I read on, thinking it would get better. I was wrong. In fact it just got worse. I couldn't relate to the characters. I mean a girl who hears music in her head, a man exploring his femine side, a Deaf-mute, and a man who is half the time drunk and the other half trying to start a revolution. It did have some good parts but not enough to make it worth the read.

Rating:
Summary: So much to say
Review: A truly amazing book, an outstanding achievment. At times it was dificult to read, dipping as it does into feelings of profound sadness, grief, and loneliness. In some ways I can understand why we don't read it in high school-not many books, if any, illustrate the absurd, self-defeating egotism of human beings. There's so much going in this book it can dizzy you. Is the deaf-mute a Christ figure, full of compassion? Or is he essentially a simpleton, beloved because, like the family dog, he can't talk back. Singer the mute seems to be the hub the other stories revolve around, but Mick is also a central figure. (Representing the author perhaps?) Her brief liason with her Jewish neighbor is absolutely heart rending. They had so much to tell each other, such capacity to heal one another but instead he flees, from his own need, before Mick can sing "Will you still love me tommorrow?" And then there is the severe, dignified black doctor who wants to teach his people, lead them to a sophisticatation and nobility equaling, even surpasing, that of whites, only to be viciously beaten by cops outside of the courthouse when he tries to inquire about his jailed son. A beating which convinces those who he attempts to educate that shuffling and smiling is their destiny. "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is about the inadequacy of human communication. So many people, with such intense wants and needs who can only unburden themselves on a deaf-mute. A deaf-mute who likely is indifferent to their suffering. Is the human experience so lonely?

Rating:
Summary: I loved this book!!!!!!
Review: I don't see a need to summarize the novel as the previous 110 reveiwers have done so, but I will share my thoughts. SOme readers complained that the characters are left in limbo at the end, that that is not a satisfactory conclusion. But aren't we always in limbo? Their relationship with John Singer was not real. It was their imaginary vision of who they thought he was, except perhaps Dr. Copeland, who saw Singer as decent human being. Each of the main characters, in the course of their friendship with Singer, was dealt a hard blow of reality, yet they grow from it. They have their dreams, and they have other things too. Their dreams are shattered but they go on from there. John Singer has nothing, no dreams. He has only one friend, one person who he cares for. And when that person dies, he has nothing left to live for, and calmy smokes a cigarette, drinks a cup of sold coffee, rinses out the ashtray and the glass, and puts a bullet through his heart. What the others, griefstrucken by their deaths, was that he was like them, and every other person, only more so. They worshipped him, but in doing so, they denied him their friendship.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful story
Review: A friend recommended this book to me and I will be forever grateful to him for doing so.

Set in a small southern town in the early 40's, it follows the lives of all the people who come into contact with one man - John Singer.

Singer is deaf. And everyone in the town feels that they can come to him with their troubles and thoughts. Their dreams and hopes. And each one sees Singer as a copy of him or herself.

No one sees Singer for who he really is.

There is only one person who Singer needs. Only one person who sees Singer for who he is. Only one person who understands Singer. Antonapoulos.

But Antonapoulos isn't well and is sent to live in an asylum.

As each one of the characters come to Singer and sees their reflection in him, each one is a little less lonely. Each heart is a little less burdened.

But for Singer, who has no one to understand HIM, he becomes more lonely and more isolated. And finally, when Antonapoulos dies, Singer realizes that there isn't anyone else in the world who can understand him. Who can listen to him. Who can love him.

I thought this book was incredibly sad. All the people were so concerned about having another person listen to them and love them. And I kept thinking - what about spirituality? What about God?

It seemed to be the missing link in every character. There was no promise. No future. No hope. Just the doldrums of living everyday without anyone knowing you. Without anyone understanding you. Witout anyone loving you.

It was beautifully written, it remains a true American classic. But it made me very sad for all the characters in the book who couldn't seem to see beyond the here and now.

Rating:
Summary: A Novel of Loneliness
Review: This novel is mostly based on four characters and their relationship with John Singer. Singer is a deaf mute who lives in a small Georgia town in the late 30s. The book generally focuses on these characters' flaws and desires. These characters are very lonely, and they seek out Singer because they believe that he's a safe character to tell their deepest, darkest, secrets to. However, Singer, as he listens to these people, feels inside himself a deep loneliness. He feels that he has nowhere to turn, so he silently just sits and politely reads the lips of his acquantances.

My favorite character in this novel was Mick Kelly. She is a young girl of 14 who had many dreams and aspirations. Her mind constantly struggled with the concept of how to make her dreams a reality. Her pure desire moved me tremendously.

I was disappointed with the book as a whole. While, I enjoyed many aspects of the book, like the character development, I was disappointed with how most of the characters were pretty much left in limbo in the end. I felt that there was no conclusion of problems or revelations. It left me feeling incomplete.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible achievement for such a young author
Review: "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is a story of several disparate people living in a small city in the deep South (presumably Georgia) in the late 1930's. Each main character is given focus for a chapter while the other characters fade into the background, then the next chapter will focus on another character in which the focal character of the previous chapter becomes a background character, etc. Sherwood Anderson used a similar style of "sketch" writing in his "Winesburg, Ohio," and the two novels share a theme of psychological and social isolation, but McCullers's novel is sharper, more vivid, detailed, and immediate, and evokes a keener sense of empathy in its characters.

There is a popular cafe in town owned by a solicitous middle-aged man named Biff Brannon. The cafe is frequented by a deaf-mute man named John Singer whose unsettling presence piques everyone's curiosity. Singer befriends two ideologically aligned men, an alcoholic drifter named Jake Blount and a black doctor named Benedict Copeland. Blount and Copeland both happen to be radical Marxists; Blount denounces capitalism and the exploitation of workers, while Copeland exhorts his people to become self-sufficient and dignified. When Blount and Copeland finally meet and speak face to face, they agree on the problem but cannot agree on the solution.

And then there's the young teenage girl Mick Kelly, a tomboy who has little interest in acting ladylike and emulating her older sisters, and whose family runs a boarding house in which Singer rents a room. She is at the age when her life is in several states of transition -- physical maturation, artistic revelation (via Beethoven's Third Symphony, no less), sexual awakening, and the initial responsibilities of adulthood. It is remarkable how her character is so innocent yet at the same time so complex and worldly -- like a female Tom Sawyer, she blazes her own trail through society and is ready for anything.

These people hover around Singer like satellites and use him as a sounding board for their problems while he listens attentively and offers symphathy. Why they are drawn to Singer is no mystery -- it is said that a good conversationalist is one who listens well rather than talks. Singer has his own problem -- loneliness for the absence of his institutionalized friend, another deaf-mute, the only kind of person who can relate to him.

The novel illustrates that underneath the idyllic calm of traditional Southern gentility bubbles a cauldron of racial tension and imminent violence, symbolically fueled by the heat and humidity and swampy gloom. Towards the end of the novel there is an incident involving a riot at the fair where Blount works; in the way the local newspaper covers the story, McCullers offers a subtle ironic statement about how the country (the South in particular) is concerned more with the threat of Communism than with racial discord. And she was only 23 when she wrote this? Amazing.

Rating:
Summary: Great Characters
Review: I was most amazed by how much such a young writer (22 or 23 when she wrote this book) knew about human nature and life in general.

McCullers' writing draws the reader into the intimate lives of her characters. She takes us in to their most personal thoughts and meditations, while still leaving the reader to make up his or her mind if a character "is" or "is not." Are they or aren't they? Will they or won't they? The reader must keep turning the pages to find out.

A fascinating read.

It's a long time since I've read such an intriguing story. When I finished "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," I immediately went to the computer to see what other books McCullers wrote. I wanted more.