I’m super glad I finally read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers - it didn’t become a new favourite classic for me, but it was certainly hauntingly beautiful, sad, and I never can resist a story set in a small town!
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It switches between the perspectives of five characters in a small southern town in the US, all very different from each other but all suffering similar feelings of loneliness. Four of the characters seem to circle around the fifth, the deaf-mute Mr Singer, using him almost like a journal of some sorts to bounce their own feelings and problems off, which was uncomfortable at times, but he does have a voice himself in his own sections, and his were the most incredibly sad and powerful.
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I was expecting beautiful writing and although it was more sparing than I imagined, it was still lovely, if a bit cold. She has a way of describing everything in this haunting, dreamy quality and then all of a sudden dropping such a bombshell in such an unconcerned way that the shock is double what it would have been with heightened, dramatic tension. I was eating a packet of dried mango during one section and when I read the end of this one chapter I had a piece on its way to my mouth and just dropped it in disbelief 😂
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It has all the claustrophobia of excellent small town novels, unflinchingly revealing the problems and prejudices of small town America in the 20th century, with some truly harrowing scenes of violence and racism. It continues to blow my mind that McCullers was only 23 when she wrote this, I don’t think I could ever produce something so profound at this age!