Thursday, December 25, 2003

Finished reading Flannery O'Connor's collection of really tragic stories called Everything That Rises Must Converge.
The memorable title, according to Robert Fitzgerald who introduces the book, was from Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit philosopher. The short stories in the book are good and all tragic, all of them with one character dying at the end except for the two stories in the book.

Common among the characters in the stories is a certain trait of self-righteousness and a fastidious desire to reshape other people's characters according to one's conception of what is good. Driven and irritated by that feeling of insatisfaction with the characters of other people around them, the people in O'Connor's stories all ended up tragically, most of them dying.

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