"I’ve been going through Eudora Welty’s Collected Stories (1982). I read her first novel, Delta Wedding (1946), over the summer. I think what strikes me most about Welty’s writing is her pace. It’s fixed and unrelenting, guided by her gentle perspicacity. Delta Wedding’s complexly interwoven familial networks, steadily revealed and progressed, remind me of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I think Welty and Woolf share a common heartbeat. And I’m happy to think of the genealogy of writers that connect Welty to that main arterial flow, reaching back from Welty to Woolf, and from Woolf to Jane Austen, and forward from Welty to Marilynne Robinson.
Marilynne Robinson’s own Pulitzer-prize winning work, Gilead (2004), holds striking similarities to George Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest (1936), another book I read last year. There are obvious structural parallels between these two works—the epistolic reflections of a country servant of God—as well as stylistic affinities—their slow pace, their perfect, fluid prose. I smile sadly through them both. But Bernanos’s sensitivity and subtle intimacy more acutely provokes my sympathy, leaves me gasping and wincing as though pricked by needles."
Marilynne Robinson’s own Pulitzer-prize winning work, Gilead (2004), holds striking similarities to George Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest (1936), another book I read last year. There are obvious structural parallels between these two works—the epistolic reflections of a country servant of God—as well as stylistic affinities—their slow pace, their perfect, fluid prose. I smile sadly through them both. But Bernanos’s sensitivity and subtle intimacy more acutely provokes my sympathy, leaves me gasping and wincing as though pricked by needles."
