During the week that my pc was out of commission, I was able to catch up on my reading using my Kindle, particularly the two novels by Flannery O'Connor that I had been meaning to read for quite some time - Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away.
The Wikipedia article on O'Conner states something that I had often read about her and her writing - "Her writing reflected her Roman Catholic religion and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics."
I don't mean this as a criticism of O'Conner, but I found little (or no) evidence of Catholic thought in her two novels. Don't get me wrong; I found her novels to be genuine masterpieces, but I never would have known O'Conner's religious leanings simply by reading her novels. There is an element of an anti-Pentecostal viewpoint, but that isn't necessarily Roman Catholic.
Yes, O'Conner's novel are masterpieces, but they are a bit bizarre and grotesque as well.
To bring my thoughts back to normal, so to speak, I needed to begin reading something less grotesque. I choose Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial.
The jpeg at the beginning of this post contains randomly chosen photos of Kafka and O'Conner. After putting the two photos together, I noticed a slight physical resemblance between the two writers. If I were inclined to follow Yukio Mishima's train of thought as shown in his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, I'd suspect O'Conner of being Kafka's reincarnation.
She was born nine months after Kafka's death.
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