Birthday Book Recs 18/50 : The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Birthday Book Recs: 18/50
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
God, this book is so good. I read McCullers’ debut novel the first time we lived in Charlotte after I learned that she wrote part of it while renting a room in what is now an Indian restaurant on East Boulevard. {Last 2 pics were actually among the first posts on this account back in 2018.} The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is — just like McCullers’ other work — fixated on how individuals grapple with making sense of themselves while muddling through life with strangers who are also trying to make sense of themselves. Characters embody absurdity and what others might think of as grotesque. (I once compared the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café to the opening montage in the first episode of Portlandia if that provides any sort of illustration.) The Modern Library ranked The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as number 17 on its list of “100 Best English-language novels of the 20th Century.”
I read this novel while juggling work and finishing up my NYC-based grad program remotely. I was also pregnant. I spent my mornings before work at the now-defunct Dilworth Coffee — down the road from McCullers’ old stomping grounds — writing my MA thesis, which was an ethnography of a group of children of immigration and their relationship to mass media. There are so many good quotes in this novel, and I ended up using at least one as I prefaced different ideas or chapters in this enormous paper. I don’t remember which one(s) I used…I found my thesis recently, but didn’t thumb through it before putting it back in a bin! But here’s a selection:
“I’m a stranger in a strange land.” (Not the originator of this turn of phrase, but it fits it perfectly.)
“When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?”
“I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?”
“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”
“…we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
You can find all my 50th Birthday Book Recommendations HERE.
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