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Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#22One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer"). "No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in ano…
Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say. My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singula…
> post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery
If you were to show me that phrase and ask which book matches it most closely, I would have to say "Blood Meridian". It's a singular work. Texas-Mexico border area, 1850s. It's definitely post-apocalyptic, the aftermath of an invasion of technologically sophisticated but genocidally savage aliens ... for the native Americans.
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#23One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer"). "No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in ano…
Ok that passage from Blood Meridian is obviously great, but posting it out of context like this makes my skin crawl! It's almost a spoiler. Without knowing the preceding events, and the general way in which the story is grounded in reality, the otherworldliness of this passage is totally out of context!
That's my 2c.
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#24One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer"). "No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in ano…
Love Cormac as well he is also one of my favourite authors. That Judge passage is also one of my favourite passages in literature, alongside the ending of The Road which I have framed with a technical drawing of a brook trout: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of mos…
His prose is just immaculate. Do yourself a favor and read the above passage out loud. It has a driving rhythm. What’s amazing is that he maintains the beat for entire novels.
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say. My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singula…
I highly recommend Suttree, which is much less in that post-apocalyptic vein. It’s incredibly humanistic and funny and I think it’s his best work. It still has his incredible command of the English language and sequences of just absolutely beautiful prose, and in some ways it can be quite devastating but it’s much more balanced with the endearing parts of humanity I think.
I second Suttree. I love the preface so much I memorized most of it.
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#26One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer"). "No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in ano…
Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say. My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singula…
> ...but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.
I've literally only read the Cliff's Notes version of The Road, but the scenario it describes seems far bleaker, prolonged, and hopeless than any historical event you might look for as precedent. It seems quite plausible that what the book describes is after some people tried to pull together in some feel-good way, and then failed and fell apart again because it wasn't going to work.
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#27One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer"). "No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in ano…
Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say. My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singula…
Some of this is in the service of making commentary on broader topics. I view Blood Meridian as a treatise on the horrific nature of war. McCarthy accomplishes this via an endlessly gruesome tale, but the underlying message couldn’t be more clear.
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#28One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer"). "No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in ano…
Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say. My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singula…
The Road is his only post-apocalyptic novel, it's not really a theme of his.
The potential for savagery, how easy it is for some to take a human life or completely disregard it is a theme that runs in many of his novels. In a post-apocalyptic scenario like in The Road, where everyone is literally scavenging for their lives you can bet your ass life will become a horror show. Not for everyone, not anywhere, but for enough people to determine that it is part of human nature just a much as extending help to one another.
To me CM's work explores the duality of beauty (in the most expansive sense of the word) and tragedy that exists in the world.
I recommend All the Pretty Horses if you want something less intense than The Road or Blood Meridian but no less powerful. One my favorite quotes:
“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#29I first heard of Cormac McCarthy when Harold Bloom raved about his "Blood Meridian". I am sorry to say this, I was not moved by Cormac McCarthy. I read "All the Pale Horses", and "No Country for Old Men". I started reading "Blood Meridian", but there was a gruesome scene involving infants. I never saw the point of Judge Holden, even though in my mind, I kept visualizing him being played by Daniel Day-Lewis. My plan i…
I think you will find those two novels similar to his other work. Also, there is a book in the Border Trilogy between "All the Pretty Horses" and "Cities of the Plain" - "The Crossing".
"Suttree" doesn't come up as often as his other work but is my personal favorite. There are some darker moments but it's a very funny book - a lot of "Charles Portis"-esque conversations and encounters.
Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
#30I first heard of Cormac McCarthy when Harold Bloom raved about his "Blood Meridian". I am sorry to say this, I was not moved by Cormac McCarthy. I read "All the Pale Horses", and "No Country for Old Men". I started reading "Blood Meridian", but there was a gruesome scene involving infants. I never saw the point of Judge Holden, even though in my mind, I kept visualizing him being played by Daniel Day-Lewis. My plan i…
Blood Meridian left me with the feeling that Judge Holden was originally multiple characters turned into a composite to serve as a narrative device and metaphor. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had been a straightforward odyssey of the kid, involving the many people and situations he encountered along the way. Using the Judge as a thematic binder sort of ruined it for me.
There’s a lot of interpretations and I don’t know if he’s ever endorsed one, but I see the judge as a general representation of a concept I’d describe loosely as capitalism, or the Industrial Revolution, or western technological progress in general.
He’s the embodiment of a force that just overtops and envelops everything in its path. It’s doesn’t even make sense to consider him moral or immoral or amoral (as many do when considering him a stand in for the devil) but more as a force that just transcends morality completely and makes it irrelevant, a force that has no other purpose but to expand and consume resources, indifferent to death or convention or tradition. A force that never sleeps.
I think the scene where he calmly ignores the Indian attack while making explosives is probably the most literal example but the theme runs through his character.