Reviews for The Heart of Hyacinth

The average rating for The Heart of Hyacinth based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-05 00:00:00 Scott Olson Like the similarly named deadpan comic the author Wright is bizarre, comic, grotesque, and sometimes beautiful and brilliant. Written in dense sometimes stunning prose with the ability to switch from slapstick to profundity and tragedy without jarring the tone and mood, Wright examines the incredibly important years before and during America's civil war without reducing it to banalities seemingly acted out by museum reenactors that a lot examinations of the era proffer us. Our failed revolution with regards to the crime of slavery haunts this book, the tragedy that reached a crescendo with those years but still continues as an undercurrent in our day and age. Wright is a profoundly American writer that we should be proud of, continuing a tradition of such American masters(though reviewers have noted a similarity to English authors Carroll and Conrad (via Poland) which I concur with) Melville and Twain through Pynchon(who provides a blurb), Delillo, and McCarthy (most resembling him in an appropriately apocalyptic rendering of the battle of Antietam) he ponders national questions of our legacy and nature with powerful language and purpose, but also manages to be funny and readable.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-11 00:00:00 Steve Velner A random read: I pulled it off the library shelf for its title, kept it for the cover art and the Civil War setting. The story was engaging but the writing is intolerable. "Be prepared for a lot of rereading," warns the jacket copy, "due to the vibrant beauty and savory brilliance of every paragraph." What? I don't know what all these gushing reviewers are talking about: Rushdie is "rich"; Wright is overwrought; Diaz is "idiosyncratic"; Wright's just a dude with a thesaurus and tendency to ornament every sentence that'll sit still long enough to take on a few more clauses for decoration. This book also features terrible dialect and battle scenes like a Warner Brothers cartoon. Nope.