Customer Reviews

Clock Without Hands

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Geez...what can I say about this book? Well...I could start by saying that is was an excellent novel. Being 16 years old and all, this book really explained to me how some of the old southerners thought. They still had pride in the "old south" and it fascinated me that the old judge wanted Confederate money to be made redeemable into US dollars. I just could believe it. It portrayed racist, economic, and political issues in a very believable way. It was, all in all, emotional and it really had every emotion contained within it. At times it was funny. At times is was serious. Sometimes it was happy. Sometimes it was sad. It really gets you going once you read the first 10 pages. I liked it very much and do recommend it to everyone -- regardless of age.

Written in 1953, this book explores the racial tensions in a small southern town. The winds of integration are in the air and the Old South is dying. The story is told through several characters. There's a pharmacist dying of leukemia who struggles with the diagnosis. There's a elderly judge who's a former congressman who really believes that the confederate money hoarded in his attic will some day bring him riches. There's the judge's grandson who sees changes coming. And then there's a young blue-eyed Negro who tries to be accepted.

Carson McCullers is a master of setting the stage for this disturbing tale which is certainly not comfortable to read. Each of the characters is exaggerated but that is her intent. She lays out the conflict with surgical precision and creates a world that doesn't exist any more. It's a brutal world and all the sugar coated Southern niceties just don't help. There's violence in the air. I felt it coming throughout and hoped it wouldn't happen. But the conclusion is inevitable.

Fine book. Fine writing. Recommended.

Not as well known as "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", this is a beautiful story about small town politics and emotions in the South. McCullers has a talent for describing the dark side of humanity, what drives us and why. Emotions run high in this book where conservative judge, African-American piano player, local pharmacist, and others are connected to one another by unusual ties. It is a difficult book to find, highly recommended.

Unlike previous reviewers, I was not terribly impressed with Clock Without Hands. While obviously Carson McCullers wanted to make a rather emotional, dramatic statement regarding racism in a changing 1950s Georgia, I believe she "over-egged the pudding". The story itself is about a small town in Georgia where several related characters, centered on a elderly judge, struggles with the pace of change with regards to racial equality. While the interactions and complications between the characters are interesting and, at times, quite moving, I felt the basic premise of the story was compromised by two-dimensional racial stereotypes. I thought the young protaganist, a blue-eyed negro, was in particular very poorly developed.

However Clock Without Hands does not discourage me from exploring further works from Ms. McCullers. I was particularly impressed by the amazing Reflections in a Golden Eye, which I strongly recommend over Clock Without Hands for those uninitiated with her work.

Clock Without Hands is another fine example of McCullers' ability to quietly yet intensely probe into the mystery of the human psyche. Her work reminds me of Tennessee Williams at times. This novel deals with an old judge, his grandson and the presence of his dead son, a young Black man, and a pharmacist who is dying of leukemia. There is a revelation near the end of the story concerning the link between most of the characters, but it seems odd considering the Judge's personality and value systems. The last chapter, however, which concerns the pharmacist's worsening illness, is transcendant. An uneven McCullers tale is certainly better than none at all.

JT Malone is dying of leukaemia. Judge Clane is dying of old age. And the old south they revere is dying as the world changes.Whilst they mourn the old ways passing and want to turn back the clock, the judge's grandson, Jester, just like his own late father, believe in the new era coming...
McCullers weaves together a complex pattern made up of characters it is difficult to find any sympathy with.The interactions and coversations come across as stage managed and unlikely-the judge as an omnipient powerful statesman and lawyer seems undermined as he allows Jester and then his black 'amanuensis' Sherman Pew to insult him with no rebuke, yet by the end of the book McCullers has left you with a complete picture of a corrupt and dying south. 'Clock..' is more powerful, perhaps, because there are no really redeeming characters.So often the white mans conscience is appeased in this type of story by having the good white man defending the poor oppressed black. This is ok up to a point, but it still has the smell of white above black;no justice unless the white man delivers it.McCullers steers clear of this trap by starkly highlighting human failings; the lust for power and revenge; the need to have someone below you; the al la carte love of justice the judge and his cronies espouses which excludes any hint of justice for the black man.(Indeed, the judges son is damned by the lover of the black man he is defending for pushing the civil rights and justice angle rather than the plain one of self defence which the man was pleading; this is at odds with the usual line such cases are written about in fiction.)
An oddly crafted story that has a lasting power due soley to the style it is written.

In "Clock without hands", Carson McCullers' last novel, we find her at the peak of her game. Her writing, which has always been so beautiful, reaches a higher level in a story of loss, death and sadness. It is a book about the dying process of a man, of a establishment and of feelings buried inside minds linked to the past.

Early in the novel, J. T. Malone, owner of a drugstore, learns he has leukemia. During the whole story, he is in denial, going to different doctors only to hear the same diagnosis. He lives in a southerner small town, where most people long for the lost pre-Civil War past, where African-Americans didn't have many rights were slaves. The voice of the town is Judge Clane who resist the integration.

Jester is the Judge orphaned grandson, whose father committed suicide and the mother dying giving the birth. Sexually confused and with no clue what to do with his futures, the young man wanders around in hope to find answers. Living in the same town is Sherman Pew - a blue-eyed African-American orphan with no idea who his parents are. These four people's lives are bounded. Ties that bring together and may also tear apart.

McCullers's dives into these people inner, present and past lives that make connections explaining their bounds in the present. Her prose, as has always been in novels such as "The heart is a lonely hunter" and "The member of the wedding", is at the same time melancholic and gritty. These people are dead or about to die, living in the past's glories. The only one able to awake before it is too late seems to be Jester, but, then again, he is confused with his own identity, in search of past that was denied him.

McCullers had a difficult life, with problems both physical and emotional. Somehow her own struggles were managed to translate into art. Her art is precise, dense, beautiful. Her novels and stories handles both emotional and sociological levels. In her books, especially in "Clock without hands", she investigates the relationship between one's soul and how he/she is connected to the historical moment.