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Wise Blood

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Wise Blood

By: Flannery O’Connor
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
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About this listen

Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate 15-year-old daughter.

In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with “wise blood,” who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel’s existential struggles.

This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.

©1990 The Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor (P)2010 Blackstone Audio Classics Genre Fiction Literary Fiction United States World Literature Fiction Witty Funny

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Critic reviews

“No other major American writer of our century has constructed a fictional world so energetically and forthrightly charged by religious investigation.” ( The New Yorker)
“There is in Flannery O’Connor a fierceness of literary gesture, an angriness of observation, a facility for catching, as an animal eye in the wilderness, cunningly and at one sharp glance, the shape and detail and animal intention of enemy and foe.” ( The New York Times Book Review)
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Love the late Flannery O'connor 's style and the production allows her unusual use of language to flow.I'm glad of the introduction that says it's a comic novel,the situations that arise are darkly comic.

Beautiful to listen to.

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Fantastically dark and weird, with occasional laugh out loud moments. Nevertheless something quite deep and moving about human frailty underneath it all, even though everyone in it is pretty awful.
Bronson Pinchot delivers probably the best reading/interpretation of an audiobook I’ve ever experienced with this one and really brings the strange cast to life, as well as the latent emotion in the book.

Brilliant!

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Flannery O'Connor is a writer I greatly admire, but I have always found it difficult to immerse myself in her novels; they speak of an environment that is highly remote in time and place from my own. Bronson Pinchot's reading of Wise Blood is simply masterful: it absorbs the dialect and brings each character to life. What is more, Pinchot makes apparent the humour that O'Connor intended but can easily be missed by a reader not versed in her idiom. Wise Blood is still a strange and outlandish tale, but this recording presents it in the best possible light. Highly recommended.

Narration is of huge benefit to the book

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Well written and read story about faith, religion, rebellion and repentance. It’s interesting characters represent various relations to the religious experience. Well worth the listen.

A story about rebellion and repentance

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This is probably one of the weirdest books I've listened to. The entire cast was angry. Maybe it was the just the opinion of the guy who read it.

everyone seemed angry

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Brilliantly performed this actor is pitch perfect with all characterisation. Great story very funny. The Coen Brothers would make a great film of it.

Amazing performance

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This is several short stories pasted together. Themes of redemption, racism, sexism, and isolation also run through the novel. Christians may take offence as Jesus is repeatedly rebuffed.

Several Short Stories

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Religion and redemption, freewill and destiny, isolation and loneliness , the spiritual and the animalistic - this story has it all. Wonderfully performed, this story is darkly comic, unsettling and profound. O'Connor's style is something like Shirley Jackson meets John Steinbeck, I highly recommend this book.

Exceptionally brilliant

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Great performance. Like glimpsing a man in a gorilla suit within a darkening wood, it gives the sensation of witnessing something mysterious and inexplicable but at the same time hinting of a darker truth.

American gothic

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Made me despair shallow cultural Christianity that at its best makes people feel better about themselves in a very general way (while still having them heading towards damnation) and at its worst is used self-righteously or cynically for power and wealth. I'm torn on the use of blashpemy and taking the Lord's name in vain, even though it feels suitable to the situation.
A gripping listen. The narrator was great with the voices of the different characters and probably made the story feel even more grotesque than it was on paper, which I found suitable.

Great narration

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