My Funny Valentine

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers was my 19th read this year. It is a collection of short stories, bearing the title of the first and longest story in the volume. As is usual with me, I came upon this in the library by accident. I don't know if you've noticed but I tend to hang around a lot near the "M" section because there are a few volumes with the author's name starting with M which I've meant to borrow for a long time but still haven't due to their not being in, such as Minot, McEwan, or more recently Ondaatje, which is also close to M. So, as I eye the shelves looking for some particular books I often find promising titles or familiar names and take a chance on them.
I'm sure I've heard the name Carson McCullers mentioned before but I couldn't tell when or why. I didn't even know it signified a woman until I read the preview (same situation with Harper Lee). And look what it says:

She was always a delicate person and as a young adult began to suffer from strokes, and by the age of thirty-one was paralysed down her left side. For a while she could only use one finger to type, and for years before her death could not sit at a desk to work.

And what is perhaps even more striking:

She was established as a writer by the time she reached her twenties but it was not until she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at the age of twenty-three that she won widespread recognition.

I must admit that when I read such descriptions I feel a mixture of admiration, envy, and self-pity, and perhaps a twinge of being old and helpless as well. Then I try to calm myself claiming that it was different in the old days and perhaps easier to become a writer. Or perhaps the real reason is that they were braver (and possibly more talanted). I mean, think of all these groups of youngsters at the turn of the century or in the first third of it, creating the literary canons of their time in the U.S., in Paris, or even in Hungary. Now tell me who would start out as an editor right after graduation today? Or even a most wanted journalist? Lucky if you find a job with a degree in arts. But then of course, there are positive examples even today, such as Tóth Krisztina or Varró Dani, who have been published since their late teens and have never done anything not related to literature. The magic cocktail must be something like talent, luck, and perseverance, and I wonder which one is the weakest in my case.
Anyway, let's get down to talking about the book. I know it's a prejudice and professionally invalid, but I feel that McCullers' peculiar life and experiences influenced her writing and way of thinking to a great extent. The story called "The Ballad of the Sad Café," for example, is full of strange creatures and turns. The protagonist is a six-feet-tall plantation owner heiress, Miss Amelia Evans, who is "slightly cross-eyed", has the hobby of suing people, and invents all kinds of medicines, cures, and liquors. Later on she falls in love with a hunchback, who claims to be her half-cousin. Music is a recurring theme in the book, and I assume that she had some musical education as well, which is always a plus for me.
My favorite story is probably "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland," which is about a music teacher, who is also a manic liar. All of the stories are pervaded by some hidden melancholy and resignation, and in the end the characters have to face that they cannot change the course of life. Another peculiarity of her writing is her ability to create an atmosphere with the help of details and adjectives. In the first story it was particularly prominent, and I wonder if I understood more than half of the adjectives correctly.

P.S. In relation to Capote's In Cold Blood I've found out that he and his friend, Harper Lee, started to work on the case even before the murderers were found, and made notes amounting to about 8,000(!)pages. Their research have been themed on screen several times, the latest one only a couple of years ago, with Sandra Bullock playing Harper Lee.