{"id":2710,"date":"2015-12-14T17:27:21","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T12:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/?p=2710"},"modified":"2015-12-14T20:25:38","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T15:25:38","slug":"best-in-reading-2015-sadia-khatri-reportage-editor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/2015\/12\/best-in-reading-2015-sadia-khatri-reportage-editor\/","title":{"rendered":"Best in Reading 2015 – Sadia Khatri, Reportage editor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today we have Sadia Khatri, one of our reportage editors sharing her thoughts on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter<\/em> by Carson McCullers.<\/p>\n

\"9780141185224\"<\/a>Someone said there isn’t a book they take more pleasure in re-reading. I cannot think of a more accurate one-line review. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Read that title, no, sentence again. Dwell on it. Think about how beautiful, accurate it is. When I picked up the book, I wondered if the writing would live up to the title — it isn’t often the case. I had read Carson McCullers before, her novella ‘The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’, whose pages lift up the kind of heartbreaking love that we know we live with every day; her short stories — clever, profound and unbearably real — ‘A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud’ is my favourite, and I have re-read it several times.<\/p>\n

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter<\/em> is her longest work, and she wrote it at 23. Why should that matter? Because the novel manages emotional complexity beyond – one would assume – a 23-year-old’s grasp. Its writer must have lived several lifetimes. I picked up the book, and was thrust into the familiar McCullers world – the mood and time she creates with her writing – American South in the 1920s – by picking up ordinary people (a deaf man, a ‘tomboy’ child) doing ordinary things. But this novel was better than her novella and short stories; there was something else going on among the usual dexterity with which she tugs the most taken-for-granted details out of fictional streets, rooms and bars; the way she narrows out those intimacies (with ourselves) we almost always leave out of our writings and conversations. It took me a while to understand. It’s a heartbreaking book. Like her other writings, it deals with love – in that melancholic shape love takes only after it has been lost – she deals with loss – the absurdity of it – the power and survival of it – but most glaringly, she deals with loneliness. Not so much the loneliness caused by others; but the loneliness that stems from our own bodies and thoughts and the ways we choose live around it (or not). Emphasis on the word choose.<\/p>\n

McCullers is considered an important 19th century ‘woman’ writer — though the acclaim came much after her death. This is true, and the importance might stem from the fact that her writing is feminist in every sense of the word I understand today. It is feminist, it is radical, it is even political — and perhaps some days I will read it again for those reasons (I have read it twice), but most movingly, it is the closest (and therefore most heartbreaking) translation of everyday feelings, I should say everyday empathy, into language. There is no book I have taken more pleasure in re-reading.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned for the next book(s) in the series and be sure to tweet<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Facebook<\/a>\u00a0your favorite book of 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today we have Sadia Khatri, one of our reportage editors sharing her thoughts on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Someone said there isn’t a book they take more pleasure in re-reading. I cannot think of a more accurate one-line review. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Read that title, no, sentence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":2716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[649,655,55,475],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2710"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2717,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions\/2717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}