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Title: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie ISBN: 0-374-25680-2 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.86 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Great Gem in Catholic Literary Scholarship
Comment: The title of Paul Elie's book THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN is borrowed from a short story title of Flannery O'Connor, one of the four writers discussed in his book. The other three are Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy. The focus of Elie's work is not as much biographical as it is literary. He looks at the two things that connect these four great people: faith and writing, and shows how both work together to produce the great literary output of each author. Elie sees these four people as being part of an informal "Catholic" school of writers. Elie looks at an analyzes many of the writings of each author, and presents it in a manner that will appeal to the scholar and lay reader as well. Though the book has biographical information, and is arranged in a chronological manner, biographical and historical details are only provided where absolutely necessary to discuss the literary works of Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy.
There has been a temptation to see Merton and Day as larger than life, almost saintly figures, Percy and O'Connor as eccentric southerners who happen to be Catholic, and in the case of O'Connor, a Catholic writer trying to impose blatant symbols of faith in all of her writings. Elie certainly admires all four, but shows them from a human point of view. In doing so, he debunks many of the myths surrounding these four figures. From a spiritual point of view, they are just as human as we are, and it is because of their very human struggles that their literary output is possible.
Elie breaks important ground by looking at these four great Catholic figures as writers, and his work will undoubtedly set the stage for further study of the literary connections of Merton, Day, O'Connor, and Percy. His book includes copious endnotes that will enable a person to easily find works by and about these four authors. In most chapters Elie discusses each of the four, but he uses breaks after sections about each author which makes reading easier. Elie himself is a book editor and he uses his skills as an editor to write a concise work. The length of the book demonstrates this alone. The text without endnotes is approximately 475 pages. There are certainly individual works about Merton, O'Connor, and Day equal or greater in length than Elie's work, but hardly say as much. I cannot say for certain about Percy since I am not familiar with scholarly or biographical works about him.
This book will more than likely be of interest to Catholic readers, but anyone who wishes to study the role of faith in Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy, will find this book a great read an a valuable resource.
Rating: 5
Summary: Moving Examination of Religious Belief in American Writing
Comment: Paul Elie's book is a sort of multiple biography of four well-known American writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day), as well as a social and intellectual history of 20th century American Catholicism. This is a very ambitious book, but Elie pulls it off with great style. The strongest parts of the book are about O'Connor and Percy; maybe this is because they were the more accomplished writers. Elie makes O'Connor come alive again; we see the maidenishly lovable and strong-willed young author as she is struck down by illness and condemned to a confinement in her rural backwater. Instead of giving into despair she turns to her faith and casts a compassionate but unblinking eye to the human "grotesques" of the South: they come to unforgettable life in "Wise Blood" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find". She becomes interested in the powerful, consoling theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who taught that "everything that rises must converge." She dies of lupus at age 39.
Walker Percy also had to battle with despair. Both his father and grandfather committed suicide. The Percys were an aristocratic Southern family with a strong tradition of stoicism; that is, the nobility of suffering as the sole consolation. Percy eventually came to see that wasn't enough. In his first novel, "The Moviegoer", he examined "the greatest despair: that it does not know that it is despair." And in his best novel (in my opinion) "The Thanatos Syndrome" he explores the death wish of western civilization and the necessary faith-based cure.
Elie's accounts of the lives of Merton and Day are also very interesting, but those authors are perhaps not quite as prominent as they used to be. Day is better known for her many good works than her prosaic writing. And the monasticism of Merton seems to be a little esoteric and removed from quotidian, everyday life as it is lived by most of us. But they are still worthwhile as studies of what it means to take religion seriously in your life; to try to see the ultimate, luminous transcendental reality above and beyond the immediately visible one. This is a very moving, soul-satisfying book.
Rating: 3
Summary: A Flawed but Good Read
Comment: Paul Elie's combined biographies of Merton, Day, Percy, and O'Connor has many virtues, which other reviewers have mentioned and elaborated upon. No doubt the convergence of the lives of these four gifted writers is a fascinating story, and Elie's footnotes in the back are very detailed and helpful. The main problem I have with this book is that Elie's Catholicism is so attenuated that it can hardly grasp much of what these writers were trying to do with their lives and with their work. On the last page of his book, Elie states plainly his position that "there is no one true faith", true for all people, all times. That's a proposition that I think his four subjects would take issue with, and sharply. As O'Connor famously said of the Blessed Sacrament, "If it's a symbol, well the hell with it." Elie also has a fairly superficial understanding of what a pilgrimage is in traditional Catholic culture and theology. He reduces it to a journey undertaken to see something with one's own eyes, something akin to a story lived out. Well, sure, but of the deeper sense of that word--one central certainly to Percy--Elie has no idea. The "homo viator" is essentially a pilgrim, a wayfarer, and is central to Percy's idea of the self, and thus to all his work. Alas, Elie's faith--at least as expressed in this book--is nothing like the faith of the writers he finds so fascinating. Merton, Day, Percy, and O'Connor knew their faith allowed them to assent to something that transcended their reason, that allowed them to partake of mysteries that are not "projected" by their desires, but are the source and goal of all natural human desires in the first place. Elie's interesting but flawed work shows that heterodox Catholicism is hardly up to the task of really appreciating these gifted writers. Unfortunately, that is the least of its problems.
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Title: A People Adrift : The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America by Peter Steinfels ISBN: 0684836637 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 05 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints by Elizabeth A. Johnson ISBN: 0826414737 Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life by Paula Huston ISBN: 082941441X Publisher: Loyola Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Saints' Guide to Happiness: Everyday Wisdom from the Lives of the Saints by Robert Ellsberg ISBN: 0374253536 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: The Inner Experience : Notes on Contemplation by Thomas Merton, William H. Shannon ISBN: 0060539283 Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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