Wantok

An incredible novel. I've never read something with a plot so ultimately pointless yet so engaging and gripping to read. It truly is a fascinating portrait of a person's life, and yet also, I thought anyway, a description of the idealogical and aesthetic groups that people (mostly young people) create. Mythicized individuals who are constructed as totems and in the end are painfully ordinary people, elitist creators who lash out with their own set of defined morality which becomes arbitrary and in the end was meaningless and the individuals that are swept up in their charisma and the enjoyment of connection in a group. The book as a whole described how in the end often our lives are defined by the impression we leave on people and how we're remembered, the two main protagonists of this book are never characterized through first person narration, we only learn about them through the perception and memory of others. Their absurd quest is ultimately pointless yet the book spans decades. It in a way holds a microcosm of humanity and human association, lives that come together for one cause and gradually and inevitably drift along to their final conclusion, never stopping.

A dense, truly guard blade style work. Exceptionally unique stories and memorable moments, however this is double edged, and there is inherent exhaustion in trying to keep up with Barth's games (one of the stories, for instance, et cetera, is specifically designed to be seven paragraphs of seven different narrators speaking about seven different things that are wholly alien and nonsensical to the reader, until finding out what the structure was in the author's notes at the end of the book). So while the technical forms Barth presents are interesting, certainly unlike anything I've read before, it left me feeling empty often. I think this goes along with his inherent pessimism and criticism of narrative language as a whole which was one of his motivations for this book. Its interesting to read this while also reading Quixote, as they both are works of metafiction in their own right. However Quixote's satire is a joyful one, Funhouse's is cold and analytical. Quixote leaves me feeling inspired by the optimism literature can offer, Funhouse left me feeling inspired that the future of literary form must lie in labyrinthine spirals of syntax. Overall a lot of this book was truly over my head, much like the laughter above Ambrose's, the wordplay of which I just don't have much energy to attempt to decipher through a rereading.

Dang... O'Connor has become one of my absolute all time favorite writers... Her writing is stunning, so much anger constantly pushing against itself, her characters both extremely alienating yet hypnotizing. Absolutely unforgettable moments and images, I don't think I will ever escape Hazel's flagellant marching or Tarwater's rubble revelation.

A tormenting novel, a moral apocalypse. Simply arresting, and its hard to say why, O'Connor's hell is different from any I've seen before... Perhaps because while other hells in literature have a defined Satan there is none in Wise Blood, simply the illiterate and hateful clawing at each other. Such cruelty and evil, and yet Jesus' name is not missing from a single chapter, the destruction of morality would not be complete without the knowledge that somewhere someone is grieving it, and that shadow hangs heavy over this book.

At a certain point its hard to not read this book from a purely allegorical standpoint, at least I think thats what makes the first two parts of this book bearable. It felt like some interesting themes, perhaps drawing a connection between misogynist culture and how humans treat the earth. The first two parts also, to me at least, show polarizing forms of male objectification and lust, the first coldly utilitarian, the second delusional romanticism, and how in both cases they take what they want, which interestingly also seemed like it could tie back into how humans have viewed the earth.
However I suppose its the third part of the novel that awakened me from the dream, as there really is nothing that drives these points home. So then in retrospect, we have a book about a woman who at first makes a somewhat major life choice because of a dream and is brutally persecuted by all the people who claimed to love her, then as she's recovering is persecuted again, then as she's recovering is persecuted again, then recovering from that is indeed continuously persecuted again. In the end I wasn't sure what the point of all this brutalism was.