Every single sentence in this book is perfect.

There is a beautiful poem by the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky I really love. I think it summarises this incredible book perfectly! It goes like this:
Once upon a time
there was a lonely wolf
lonelier than the angels.

He happened to come to a village.
He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls
the caresses of its bricklayers.
But the window stopped him.

In the room sat people.
Apart from God nobody ever
found them so beautiful
as this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.
He stopped in the middle of the room
and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes
and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.

-Translated by Janos Csokits and Ted Hughes

Carson McCullers won her place in my heart with only two novellas and a few short stories. She is an author of incredible talent and I am both sad I have not read her books earlier, and happy I have started reading them now, when I believe I've reached the right level of appreciation for this type of writing and literature. Her writing is visual, cinematographic either, with the use of a lot of colors and descriptions of gestures and personal traits. Her characters are very human and from what I have read so far - quite often possess some sort of emotional or physical impairement. Loneliness and destruction are no strangers to her writing, and Reflections in a Golden Eye is no exception.
I cannot wait to read more from McCullers!

I read Reflections in bus stops, busses, malls, and movie theaters in Nashville. I thanks Carson McCullers for this little gem, which enriched my life for a brief moment in the vast desert of car parking lots and needless and scary commercial enterprises. I thought often about what she would think of the South now.

I read the last part of Reflections in the movie theater as I was being blasted with some preview stuff about upcoming films. Guns, space, bombs, armies, things blowing up, murders, blood... It was nice to have Reflections neatly and snugly spread out on my lap and McCullers' narration calmly describe a very alien life, one that was calm, boring, subtle, simple, yet intricately complicated, repressed, and ultimately violent. Then I read the afterword, where Williams defends the Gothic, defends the gruesome and "awful" things McCullers writes about. And it occurred to me, with renewed surprise, that we have come so far in how much awfulness and violence we assume and expect not only from life but from arts and entertainment. But despite the blood and gore in the film previews, the uneventful murder (which McCullers tells us about in the first paragraph of the book) seems so chilling. It touches something so fundamental. And that's what makes this book special.

Unlike most people, I liked Reflections better than Member of the Wedding. Heart is a Lonely Hunter is certainly my favorite, though. It is hard to compare the two, as I think Reflections is entirely different from Heart. Reflections is meant to be short and minimalist, almost like a snapshot. Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a philosophy, a study of a whole era and peoples. McCullers' voice is clear in both of them, and it's the only thing that I can really see that's similar.

3,5/5

Ma première rencontre avec Carson McCullers. Reflets dans un œil d'or est son deuxième roman, une histoire courte de 150 pages qui se lit rapidement. Le récit se déroule dans un fort militaire de Géorgie où l'on suit plusieurs personnages dans leur quotidien. S'y croisent trois soldats, pour certains gradés, leurs femmes voisines aux destins opposés et un cheval majustueux. Par un enchaînement d'événements habile, tous vont se retrouver impliqués dans un meurtre. L'autrice sonde l'âme et les habitudes de chacun avec une finesse exceptionnelle. J'ai beaucoup aimé le questionnement sur la masculinité, qui s'exprime notamment à travers la sexualité trouble du capitaine. Moins charmant en revanche, le contexte de ségrégation raciale aux États-Unis qui implique un lexique parfois daté, que l'on peut juger de raciste aujourd'hui. Très moderne sous certains aspects, l'œuvre vaut quand même la peine d'être découverte avec un œil averti.

Pour : les amateurs du genre Southern Gothic (William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, etc.)

I forgot how strange Carson McCullers is...not House of Leaves strange, but Muriel Spark, early 20th century literature, Southern gothic weird. I need to reread her other stuff and see how it measures up to this one which I hadn't read until now.

Stunning and unreal and real. HOw a book like this was published is one thing; how it was the second novel following a successful first is another.

I decided to reread this, perhaps the slimmest of McCullers’ books, because I didn’t remember a great deal of it. I love her writing, but this did not immediately feel as compelling as many of her other works. Well paced and plotted, the whole has been nicely slotted together, and is most clever with regard to the way in which the characters cross one another’s paths. An interesting novella, filled to the brim with important themes, and some very memorable characters and plotlines indeed.

"Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known."
- Reflections in a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers



Published in 1941, RiaGE is McCuller's second novel after [b:The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter|48156289|The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter|McCullers Carson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568538541l/48156289._SY75_.jpg|73380610]. Anthony Slide considered RiaGE one of the four great pre-1950 gay English novels (Djuna Barnes' [b:Nightwood|53101|Nightwood|Djuna Barnes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1298480120l/53101._SY75_.jpg|828739], Capote's [b:Other Voices, Other Rooms|2287|Other Voices, Other Rooms|Truman Capote|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1329028916l/2287._SY75_.jpg|2222705], and Vidal's
[b:The City and the Pillar|88884|The City and the Pillar|Gore Vidal|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320504639l/88884._SY75_.jpg|6145478]).

To me, it was patient, beautiful and sad. Nothing like the melodramatic movie that John Huston made in 1967 out of it later. It's six fabulous characters drill into you. Loneliness and repression run circuits throughout. I felt like [a:Patricia Highsmith|7622|Patricia Highsmith|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1418715271p2/7622.jpg]'s entire ouvre was hatched out of this one egg.* For me, this is not so much gay lit as it is a fantastic psychological novel. Carson can bend the tension in people like a ridding crop and let it snap at will.

* I haven't read one way or the other if Highsmith EVER read this novel, but it almost feels like Highsmith's later works.

What a bizarre, odd, little book.