Day 46.2: Reading 'Delta Wedding'

[sunshowerdandelion]

I'll be honest: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty is one of the hardest works I've personally tried reading.It has a lot of my least favorite story aspects:

1. A large family with multiple similar names (Battle and Little Battle and Ranny and Orrin which intersect with other characters in other works that I know - hence the proneness to mixup).
2. The central drama revolving around familial politics (The Fairchilds are a sprawling Southern family who have a lot of dead US Civil War men, and the drama - such as it is - revolves around dead family).
3. The obligation to remember family trees to understand the drama (I was not up for this, not on this first read-through).
4. Multiple POVs with frequent POV switches (Eudora Welty sometimes switches POVs between sentences with this incredibly swift ping-pong style).

Which has resulted in me reading the work very slowly, due to me needing multiple breaks and getting distracted due to being unable to follow a lot of the drama. Needless to say, I have not been struck too hard by the book's beauty, although I have my favorite parts (mostly bits in the beginning) but I truly admire Eudora Welty's ability to make the POV transitions smooth as butter, and not have it be jarring at all, and to then illustrate in extremely great detail each character (or nearly each character's) POVs to the point where I (I, the not-very-attentive reader) could have a feel for them. I have no doubt that a closer and more generous read of the text will floor me with its beauty.

But this is my first read, and my first read in the context of a detour from Carson's works! So I shouldn't be too hard on myself really.