PimpinAinttEasy — 9 years ago(October 18, 2016 03:23 AM)

Reflections in a Golden Eye is set on an army base during peace time. The army folk (two couples are the focus of the novel) are attending parties, getting drunk, indulging in gluttony and sleeping with others wives. But everyone's broken inside and struggling with their repressed desires. Some of them are wasting away from psychosomatic diseases.
McCullers writing is very imagistic - (for eg. She pulled off her her jersey, crushed it into a ball, and threw it into the corner of the room. Then deliberately she unbuttoned her breeches and stepped out of them. In a moment she was standing naked by the hearth. Before the bright gold and orange light of the fire her body was magnificent. The shoulders were straight so that the collar-bone made a sharp blue line. Between her round breasts there were delicate blue veins.)
And also the vivid descriptions of the woods around the army base and the colors in the sky. It is almost like you can see and feel what the characters are going through. Like Captain Penderton's (a repressed homosexual) horse ride. McCullers describes it through Penderton's eyes, so it is almost as if we are watching it through a movie camera placed on the horse. Very cinematic.
The horse is a sexual symbol - the voluptuous and flirtatious Leonora (the captain's wife) who is forthcoming about her sexual desires rides the horse with ease. But her husband Captain Penderton who is a closet homosexual struggles to control the animal.
There is a funny account of the fake persona of Major Langdon (On the Major's bedside table there was an open book - a very recondite and literary book. The place was marked with a matchstick. The Major turned over forty pages or so, a reasonable evening's reading, and marked the new place with the match again. Then from under a pile of shirts in his bureau drawer he took a pulp magazine called Scientification. He settled comfortably in the bed and began reading of a wild, interplanetary superwar.)
It is really depressing. I could identify with what some of the characters were going through.
(8/10)
(8/10)