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The Violent Bear It Away
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
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Publisher's summary
First published in 1960, The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle - that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensue, as Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet, while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more “reasonable” modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul.
O'Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos. The result is a novel whose range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writer acutely alert to where the sacred lives and where it does not.
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The profoundly original and wildly entertaining short stories of a legendary Twilight Zone writer. It is only natural that Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone - for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.
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Contents
- By Ralph Freaster on 06-22-16
By: Charles Beaumont
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Into the Out Of
- By: Alan Dean Foster
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Earth is being invaded by the shetani - spirit creatures so small and stealthy that only one man knows about the increasing peril. The potential savior is an African elder named Olkeloki who is capable of fighting evil both in this world and the spirit one. But to be successful he must recruit the help of two others: government agent Joshua Oak, and a feisty young woman named Merry Sharrow. Only the three of them can keep the shetani from destroying reality as we know it.
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Another Great Book by a Master Storyteller!
- By Tracy Michael Herring on 05-03-21
By: Alan Dean Foster
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The List
- By: Patricia Forde
- Narrated by: Imogen Wilde
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In the post-apocalyptic, neo-medieval city of Ark, speech is constrained to 500 sanctioned words. If somewhere were to speak outside that approved lexicon, they'd face banishment. The only exceptions to this rule are the Wordsmith and his apprentice, Letta. Together, they are the keepers and archivists of all language. But when Letta's master dies, she is suddenly promoted to Wordsmith and finds the situation more complicated than she knew.
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Love is Language
- By Jennie Smith on 02-19-21
By: Patricia Forde
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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Great American Stories
- By: Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce
- Narrated by: Patrick Fraley, Patrick Hagan
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Here are 10 unabridged stories by the greatest American authors. These treasured stories from the most influential authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries were selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic oral qualities.
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Great Classic Stories
- By kutzkai on 03-13-21
By: Mark Twain, and others
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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Deus Irae
- By: Roger Zelazny, Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Two masters of science fiction collaborate on one wild post-apocalyptic story. After World War III, the Servants of Wrath cult deified the mysterious Carlton Lufteufel, creator of the doomsday weapon that wiped out much of humanity. But to worship the man, they need an image of him as a god, and no one has ever seen him. So the high priests send a limbless master painter named Tibor McMasters into the wilderness on a mission to find Lufteufel and capture his likeness.
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Satirical apocalypse or apocalyptic satire?
- By Jacob on 06-30-17
By: Roger Zelazny, and others
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The collection that established O’Connor’s reputation as one of the American masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive "The Misfit", as well as “The Displaced Person” and eight other stories.
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A literary treasure of over 100 unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends. Flannery O’Connor is a master of 20th-century American fiction, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, the likes of Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Those familiar with her work know that her powerful ethical vision was rooted in a quiet, devout faith and informed all she wrote and did.
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this narrator's faux southern accent is abominable
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By: Flannery O'Connor, and others
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A Subversive Gospel
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In this volume in IVP Academic's Studies in Theology and the Arts series, theologian Michael Bruner explores O'Connor's theological aesthetic and argues that she reveals what discipleship to Christ entails by subverting the traditional understandings of beauty, truth, and goodness through her fiction.
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Grace in the "Bleeding, Stinking, and the Foolish"
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The Terrible Speed of Mercy
- A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor
- By: Jonathan Rogers
- Narrated by: Jeremy Childs
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Jonathan Rogers follows the roots of Flannery O’Connor’s fervent Catholicism and traces the outlines of a life marked by illness and suffering, but ultimately defined by an irrepressible joy. In her stories, and in her life story, Flannery O’Connor extends a hand in the dark, warning and reassuring us of the terrible speed of mercy.
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Grotesque Southern Gothic Masterpiece
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Everything That Rises Must Converge
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Overall
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This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment.
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Pride goeth before the fall
- By Ryan on 08-14-13
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
- By: Flannery O'Connor
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
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The collection that established O’Connor’s reputation as one of the American masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive "The Misfit", as well as “The Displaced Person” and eight other stories.
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A literary treasure of over 100 unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends. Flannery O’Connor is a master of 20th-century American fiction, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, the likes of Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Those familiar with her work know that her powerful ethical vision was rooted in a quiet, devout faith and informed all she wrote and did.
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this narrator's faux southern accent is abominable
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In this volume in IVP Academic's Studies in Theology and the Arts series, theologian Michael Bruner explores O'Connor's theological aesthetic and argues that she reveals what discipleship to Christ entails by subverting the traditional understandings of beauty, truth, and goodness through her fiction.
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Grace in the "Bleeding, Stinking, and the Foolish"
- By C. Matthew Hawkins on 04-20-21
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The Terrible Speed of Mercy
- A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor
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By: Jonathan Rogers
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Love in the Ruins
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The auto age is defunct. Buicks, Chryslers, and Pontiacs disfigure the landscape. Vines sprout in Manhattan. Wolves are seen in downtown Cleveland. And psychiatrist, mental hospital outpatient, and inventor Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument: the ontological lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind’s spiritual flu. But first, he must survive Moira, Lola, and Ellen - and discover why so many living people are actually dead.
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Percy's Prose Dances with Grace, Charm and Style
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No Easy Hothouse of Consecration
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When Dr. Tom More (of Love in the Ruins) is released on parole from state prison, he returns to Feliciana, Louisiana, the parish where he was born and bred, and where he practiced psychiatry before his arrest. Upon arriving, he notices something strange in almost everyone around him: unusual sexual behavior in women patients, a bizarre loss of inhibition, a lack of complexity in speech - even his own wife’s extraordinary success at bridge tournaments, during which her mind seems to function like a computer.
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In the end one must chose--given the chance.
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Williston Bibb Barrett is a rather unusual and inquisitive young Southerner with a special gift for cultivating the possibilities of life. He suffers from occasional bouts of amnesia and disconcerting attacks of déjà vu. He clings to certain old-fashioned notions of behavior, and yet he finds himself constantly impelled to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. And he lives with the secret suspicion that the great world catastrophe that everyone fears will happen has already happened.
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Newly divorced and robbed of his farm by his real-estate shark of an ex-wife, 60-something Cliff is off on a road trip across America, on a mission to rename all the states and state birds and redeem them from the banal names men have given them.Cliff's adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high-school teaching days 20-some years before, to a snake farm in Arizona owned by an old classmate, and into the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer.
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A picaresque novel for baby boomers
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The Gospel Singer
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A gifted, idolized singer returns to his poor hometown and a life and family he is so far removed from he now holds them in contempt. The Gospel Singer reveals the absurdity of blind religious faith and idol worship and the hypocrisy that results with the offering of money or sex. Crews grapples with race, gender, religion, and place and steps back to divulge the secrets of his characters - including a dead girl awaiting the gospel singer’s melodious eulogy, his dysfunctional family, a murderer, the zealous town residents, and a traveling freak show.
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The gospel singer
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ín Chaparro is a retired detective still obsessed by the brutal, decades-old rape and murder of a young married woman in her own bedroom. While attempting to write a book about the case, he revisits the details of the investigation. As he reaches into the past, Chaparro also recalls the beginning of his long, unrequited love for Irene Hornos, then just an intern, now a respected judge. Set in the Buenos Aires of the 1970s, Sacheri’s tale reveals the underpinnings of Argentina’s Dirty War and takes on the question of justice - what it really means and in whose hands it belongs.
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Movie Must Be Better Than the Book
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The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
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This complete collection includes all of the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are 41 stories in all, including those in the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.
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Too Good For Audio
- By Yennta on 06-18-12
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A Childhood
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- By: Harry Crews, Tobias Wolff - foreword
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
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- Unabridged
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Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way.
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Story rings true
- By Greg B on 07-26-22
By: Harry Crews, and others
What listeners say about The Violent Bear It Away
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 10-22-12
Biblical, American and Absolutely Brutal
O'Connor was ruthless in her vision. The struggle of Tarwater and his uncle Rayber against their joint destinies and the pull of fundamentalism and secularism is fully realized in this short novel. The Violent Bear it Away is biblical, American and absolutely brutal in both its imagery of destruction and language of redemption. I can only think of a handful of writers who seem to grab both my brain, my spine and my gut at the same time. O'Connor can't be over-appreciated; she was an absolute genius of passion and power. So brilliant and terrible was this novel, that I still exceedingly fear and quake.
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75 people found this helpful
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- bookscdsdvdsandcoolstuff
- 05-25-13
Expertly read edition
This book is easily one of the best I have ever listened to. It is Flanery O'Connor, so one must be prepared to read this text like someone who understands literature. Remember that O'Connor is deeply rooted in Catholicism, and scholasticism. Remember that she is first and foremost a committed Christian. Her characters will be grotesque, and there will be tremendous violence and disturbing images, but the book will stick with you forever. It will point to deeper transcendent truths that are timeless and eternal.
Reading Flannery O'Connor will enrich your life, but please understand that you are not listening to surface level romance novels / John Grisham stuff here. This takes hard work and patience, but it is work that will be deeply enriching should you undertake it.
The narration is perfect. The southern accent throughout is very important, and the individual voices of each character are pitch perfect. Simply outstanding.
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40 people found this helpful
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- Katherine
- 04-27-13
Holy wow.
I am typically bored by literature that is too overtly influenced by the Christian faith/the Bible. Somehow, Flannery O'Connor has escaped such classification for me, and I am riveted by her, absolutely stunned: every time I read her, it feels like the first time I have encountered the idea of God. I liked Wise Blood, but The Violent Bear it Away is in a league of its own. This novel is so dark, and so unflinchingly intelligent and so surprising, and I wished it were 20 hours long instead of six. In fact, I listened to several chapters several times, not because they were difficult to follow, but because I was so amazed by her craft and its unfolding. It will be a difficult novel to follow-up.
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28 people found this helpful
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- W Perry Hall
- 07-24-15
Violence to Youth of Good Ol' Fundamentalism
If you were raised in the rural South or spent the summertime there with someone in your WASP family, you may still suffer the occasional nightmare, as I do, from the trauma left by hellfire and brimstone sermons or a fundamentalist Sunday "school" or two, having been left at an impressionable age (8 to 14) with the constant fear that you and all who have not yet been saved will be eternally damned if you do not save them from this blasphemous world, and spooked by the bountiful ignorance that surrounded you.
Flannery O'Connor, a devout Catholic, was super-critical of fundamentalist Protestants. Her short stories and two novels either explored dark religious themes or were tinged with often morbid religious undertones.
THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY's title is taken from a verse in the Douay-Rhiens Catholic Bible at Matthew 11:12: "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away."
I'll forego delving into possible meanings of the title, and any discussion of the novel gives away what happens at and near the end of the book. I'll just say that it's a BRUTAL book, dealing with a 14-year-old boy, fanatical, Southern fundamentalists and the related themes of destruction and redemption.
If you are looking for an enjoyable summer read, perhaps you should look elsewhere. If you'd like to get a sampling of the deeply dark, morbid and haunting world of Southern fundamentalist ol' time religion, purchase now.
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23 people found this helpful
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- Andrew
- 09-09-12
Disturbing in Biblical Proportion
Where does The Violent Bear It Away rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
This is among the very best audiobooks I've listened to. The performance is haunting and captivating. The text is elevated and infused with meaning by the reader.
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17 people found this helpful
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- jerrybednar
- 10-16-10
Excellent Narration
The narrator interprets this novel in a wonderful way. The novel itself is superb. The narrator has a way of clarifying who's speaking and hinting at significant images as they unfold. Very satisfying.
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11 people found this helpful
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- andrew
- 11-25-11
Good, Strange
I loved this book early, then it bogged down. I did not care for the schoolteacher character, and I am probably not going to read any more O'Connor. This one had enough elements of unique, disturbing storytelling to be worth the time though. Picks back up at the end. Not sure what to say about it still- a bit of an exploration of the prophet "type" in modern society. And a story about manipulation. The characters are all trying to make the world like themselves, and especially the "hero". Never read a book like it, and that is really its best quality. The early chapters are much funnier than the book on the whole, and that tempered the subject in a way I liked. I laughed a lot at the old man, and I think one is supposed to.
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10 people found this helpful
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- T. L. Walker
- 12-28-15
Haunting Southern Gothic Tale
Southern Gothic novels are so haunting and chilling all the same filled with things that could be considered magical realism, and as a Southerner, despite the time gap between many novels in the genre, you can still see how some of these ideas are so pervasive in the south such as the religious fervor that provide the focal point of this love. This is the first novel I’ve ever read by O’Connor. She’s known more for her short stories and wrote only a very few novels in her lifetime. This story follows the struggle of a family who are marked by a legacy, starting with a mad uncle who claimed to be a prophet, leaving behind two nephews who struggle against and for the marks he’s left on their souls, two family members living two extremes–the overzealous and the overdisciplined–as they follow a path of self-fulfilling prophecies left behind by an old man. The title of this books comes from the bible verse Matthew 11:12 (from the Douay-Rheims version of the bible): “And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.”
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5 people found this helpful
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- Daphne Stevens
- 03-13-13
Southern Literature at its Best
If you could sum up The Violent Bear It Away in three words, what would they be?
PiercingSardonicFierce
What did you like best about this story?
The depth and relationship among characters
Which scene was your favorite?
The many encounters between Tarwater and his uncle created a thread that was a scene in itself. The ambivalent relationship between the two characters-- actually shadows of one another--was both funny and poignant.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
I wanted to listen, then digest and reflect before listening further.
Any additional comments?
Flannery O'Connor once said that the South is "Christ -haunted," and the religious motif is prevalent here. Her characters are both archetypal and personally compelling. This is classic Southern literature at its best--a book worth re-reading and discussing with others.
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- Diane
- 02-01-16
Toxic Religiosity
Perhaps it is only with the benefit of hindsight that one might begin to comprehend the horror of this novel, published in 1960, with the story taking place in the American South of 1952. Although I am not a scholar of O'Connor, the research I have done indicates that she was a devout Catholic and intended the novel to be a tribute to the power of religious passion in the face of a vapid secularism. But it is a very violent and horrific passion she writes of, full of the destructive forces of fire and water. When I read of the induction of the young Tarwater into the fanatical faith of his "crazy" great-uncle, a faith which eventually leads the 14-year-old to a place where he is capable of the murder of an innocent, I can't help but think of the scores of young Muslims currently being indoctrinated into a similarly twisted version of their faith. The same is true of religious zealots of any tradition who come to believe they are justified in committing the most barbaric atrocities in the service of their faith.
O'Connor posits a stark dichotomy between the fire of religious passion and the emptiness of a secular life. It is a false dichotomy, in my opinion--religious passion can be perverted, and meaning and purpose can be found in a secular life. I firmly stand with the Buddha on this one: the Middle Way is the path of wisdom.
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