Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is a bizarre book — and not only because of its plot. Strangeness permeates almost every level of the novel: the characters, the dialogue, the language, the religious obsessions, the grotesque behaviour and the sudden acts of violence. This is literature associated with Southern Gothic: a stifling, deformed and morally unsettling world, full of preachers, frauds, spiritually broken people and those cast adrift by society. It is not, however, a book that convinced me.

The characters seem to emerge from a fog. The reader encounters them already thrown into the midst of events, but their motivations often remain unclear, weakly grounded and almost arbitrary. Hazel Motes, Asa Hawks, Sabbath Lily, Enoch Emery — hardly any of them inspires sympathy. A literary character does not, of course, have to be likeable. Great literature very often depends on difficult, repellent and morally ambiguous figures. The problem is that in Wise Blood I did not always feel that beneath this repellent surface there was a sufficiently strong psychological or spiritual necessity.

The novel’s central idea is the Church Without Christ — Hazel Motes’s blasphemous and paradoxical construction, an attempt to create an anti-religious religion. Hazel wants to escape Christ, yet his entire obsession revolves around Christ. It is a very powerful concept. In theory: excellent. In practice: not always convincing to me. I had the impression that the author too often asked me to believe in a symbol that she had not rooted firmly enough in the protagonist’s lived experience.

I reacted in much the same way to other scenes: the self-blinding, the theft of a corpse, Hazel’s sexual relationship with Sabbath Lily, the bizarre religious gestures and Enoch’s chaotic impulses. All this ought to create a dense and disturbing vision of spiritual collapse. Instead, I experienced many of these events as arbitrary. It was as though O’Connor were saying: “this is an important symbol,” without always managing to make me feel its weight.

I have no problem with difficult literature. Quite the opposite — I value books that I do not understand immediately, but in which I sense the weight of the message. There are works one wants to return to precisely because they leave dissatisfaction, anxiety and a sense of hidden depth. Good literature often works with delay: first it irritates, later it returns, and then it opens further layers. My response to Wise Blood is different. The book did not so much intrigue me as exhaust me with its strangeness. I felt no need to return to it. And not because I “failed to understand the symbols” and should now humbly admit my own immaturity as a reader. I am far from such an attitude. Whenever a book remains obscure, one must also ask a question about the author: did they actually succeed in communicating what they intended? Does the form serve the content, or does it merely manufacture an aura of depth?

In this context, V. S. Pritchett’s sentence from the introduction seems particularly important: “The author does not convince us by argument, but by the physical vitality of the scenes, the recording of voices and of people’s lives (...).” This is an accurate observation, because O’Connor is indeed not writing an argumentative novel. She does not lead the reader through a logically ordered account of the characters’ motivations. She does not explain, justify or lecture. Instead, she throws us into a world of voices, faces, gestures, dirt, religious fever and grotesque behaviour. And this is precisely where my main problem appears. If a novel does not persuade through argument, it has to persuade through the intensity of life. It has to make even the characters’ incomprehensible gestures feel internally necessary. Yet in Wise Blood I often sensed not so much the “physical vitality of the scenes” as their oddity. The characters speak, move and perform radical acts, but I did not always feel that those acts arose from a deep and credible experience. More often, I perceived them as figures arranged in a grotesque theatre.

Equally important is Lech Budrecki’s afterword, in which he writes about the multiplicity of interpretations in O’Connor’s prose: “This multiplicity arises from omissions, the insistent use of ellipsis and constant understatement.” This explains very well the fractured impression left by the novel. O’Connor does not psychologise where another author might add several pages of explanation. She leaves a gesture, a voice, an impulse, an act of violence, a blasphemous declaration. She does not elaborate. She does not close things off. She does not explain. Budrecki adds, however, another very important point: O’Connor’s stories and novels are not based on a systematic reference to some hidden history suppressed by the plot, and therefore do not sink into literature of a concealed “second layer”. This diagnosis seems crucial to me. If there is no conventional hidden meaning waiting to be decoded, there is no point pretending that every oddity in the novel is part of a perfectly encoded system. Ambiguity is not always depth. Sometimes it remains merely ambiguity.

And it is precisely here that my reaction to O’Connor diverges from her method. I understand that she builds her world through ellipses, omissions and grotesque collisions, rather than through transparent psychological motivation. I also understand that her characters are not meant to be “explained” in a realistic sense. But as a reader, I did not always feel that these gaps worked in the novel’s favour. Too often I had the impression that the omission did not open depth, but weakened the bond between me and the represented world.

Perhaps the greatest problem with Wise Blood is that its world is deformed from the first pages, making it difficult to feel the process of deformation itself. If everyone is strange, repellent and spiritually twisted, the grotesque ceases to surprise after a while. Instead of increasing unease, distance appears. O’Connor presumably wants to shake the reader, but in my case the result was the opposite: instead of shock, there was fatigue.

The strangeness of the language itself remains interesting to me. O’Connor can write sentences that appear simple, but are internally warped, as though reality had been assembled slightly incorrectly. A good example is the description of a painting showing a moose standing in a small lake: “The look of superiority on this animal’s face was so insufferable to Enoch that, if he hadn’t been afraid of him, he would have done something about it a long time ago.” Enoch feels humiliated by the expression on the painted moose’s face. The sentence captures O’Connor’s linguistic oddity very well: the lifeless image of an animal is treated as a real opponent. One may of course regard this as an apt portrayal of the character’s unstable mind, but for me it is above all another example of a grotesque that displays its own peculiarity more than it truly deepens the character.

I do not deny Wise Blood its significance. The book clearly reveals the author’s distinctive temperament, brutal religious imagination and individual voice. But individuality does not always mean greatness. For me, O’Connor’s novel remains more peculiar than successful; more symptomatic than moving; stranger than deep. Wise Blood is therefore a book full of powerful sentences, but without the force that would make me return to it.

I apologise for such a long review of what is, after all, a short book, but Flannery O’Connor had waited a long time on my list of authors to read. I had high expectations, especially because she is respected and widely recognised in America — though, as it turns out, perhaps more in academic circles than among the broader reading public. Unfortunately, those expectations collided with reality, so I will allow myself to remain in opposition to American intellectual circles.