Clock Without Hands

On the bedside table is "Clock Without Hands" by Carson McCullers. It's a novel about a boy and his grandfather in the segregated post-WWII South. Jester and his grandfather are at odds about slavery and segregation; both begin different relationships with the same black boy named Sherman. Jester, seduced by Sherman's blues piano, tries to force a friendship; whereas, the Judge, his grandfather, hires Sherman as his amanuensis to write letters to congressmen about reinstating the south's legacy of Confederacy. Threaded within are themes of sickness and dying -- the acuteness of leukemia and the slow brain death after a stroke.

After doing a little reading about Carson McCullers, I learned that she was chronically ill all her life with everything from pleurisy to breast cancer. It makes the themes in "Clock Without Hands" more personal and has changed how I interpret the book. This is her last book published before she died in 1967.

Dad got me this book for Christmas. He and I seem to exchange books every year.