Choice 评论

Giannone (Fordham Univ.), author of Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love (CH, Feb'90; rev. ed., Jan'00), links O'Connor's vision with that of the fourth-century desert mothers' and fathers' ascetic spirituality. Like Anthony Di Renzo (American Gargoyles: Flannery O'Connor and the Medieval Grotesque, CH, Jan'94), Giannone is interested in discovering premodern paradigms for O'Connor's thought. He points to writings like The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Eng. tr., 1975) and The Lives of the Desert Fathers (Eng. tr., CH, Sep'81), which presented the desert as a necessary arena for revelation through solitude, self-denial, and discipline. This connection creates refreshingly new readings of O'Connor's stories and novels. Giannone claims that Wise Blood's Hazel Motes, for example, like the desert fathers, achieves victory over temptation through the mortification of his flesh, which becomes a sign of his ultimate resistance of the temptation to espouse an abstract theology associated with a bloodless Jesus. In story after story Giannone convincingly demonstrates how O'Connor's characters suffer the assault of cultural darkness, much like the demonic temptations that beset the desert ascetics. This is an exciting study of O'Connor, probably the best that has been published in the past decade. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. P. Baumgaertner; Wheaton College (IL)