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Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

nytimes.com

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Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#31

Post by jnsie »

ak39 wrote: post #18
lqet wrote: post #4

One 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…

> 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 find it hard to agree with this after COVID showed that a substantial portion of the US and global population weren't willing to wear masks to protect their fellow man and life saving vaccines were purposefully politicized. I also think that post apocalyptic novels typically live in a world where traditional power structures have been abandoned/destroyed and individualism is necessary for survival so I'm not sure one can draw a parallel between typical catastrophes and apocalyptic events.

Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#33

Post by wellthisisgreat »

lqet wrote: post #4

One 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…

Blood Meridian is like a poem, that is movie but in a form of a sculpture and in prose.

Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#34

Post by wellthisisgreat »

mellosouls wrote: post #14

Blood Meridian is worth a Nobel on it's own, I've often wondered why he's never received it, he's distinctive and mesmerising at his best.

Same, maybe BM is just too... pulp genre-wise somehow? Or too cruel while being fictional and Nobel tolerates cruelty when it's based on true events?

Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#35

Post by brudgers »

ak39 wrote: post #18
lqet wrote: post #4

One 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…

At the end of The Road, there are The Good Guys.

It is an allegory of fathers and sons.

Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#36

Post by mellosouls »

wellthisisgreat wrote: post #34
mellosouls wrote: post #14

Blood Meridian is worth a Nobel on it's own, I've often wondered why he's never received it, he's distinctive and mesmerising at his best.

Same, maybe BM is just too... pulp genre-wise somehow? Or too cruel while being fictional and Nobel tolerates cruelty when it's based on true events?

I think it has some basis in real events and characters, eg The Judge was real (though obviously somewhat reimagined here).

Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#37

Post by rspeele »

I read post after post of gushing praise for Cormac McCarthy, so I bought The Road on Kindle a few years ago. A few pages in I wished I had bought a hardcopy -- the e-book seemed to have been badly OCRed, and was missing most of the punctuation and a few of the spaces.

Another few pages later, I looked up whether other people had the same problem. I was surprised to find that there was no issue with the Kindle copy. That's just how McCarthy writes. Although it's no secret, most people don't mention it -- somehow it had never come up in any of the glowing reviews I'd read. It's not been mentioned in any of the 30-ish comments in this thread so far.

Now, it's a little thing, so it shouldn't bug me so much. But it did.

When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices. My brain's little imagination engine should be cranking away, running the projector, imagining the characters speaking, moving, thinking, and feeling. Words from the page flow into it like fuel.

With McCarthy, the engine would snarl and grind every time I hit some ugly looking naked contraction like "werent" or "didnt", or a bit of unquoted dialog that I didn't realize was a character speaking until the end of the sentence. The projector skipped a frame, and for that moment I was no longer thinking of "The Man" or "The Boy", but involuntarily thinking of "The Author" and his smug need to be special, to remind me of his presence, to prove that the rules of language are beneath him.

Ironically, the justifications I have read for this style are that it's supposed to flow more naturally. Apparently punctuation is unnecessary, baroque, and only slows the reader down. Perhaps many readers agree with that, but I don't. I've spent most of my life reading English that was written according to standard rules of grammar, so it parses readily. McCarthy's "house rules" grammar does not.

That all leaves a question. I finished The Road and found it to be OK. Would I have loved it, had it been written in conventional style? Still probably not. But at least I wouldn't be annoyed at the author.

Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#38

Post by random42_ »

mellosouls wrote: post #36
wellthisisgreat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, maybe BM is just too... pulp genre-wise somehow? Or too cruel while being fictional and Nobel tolerates cruelty when it's based on true events?

I think it has some basis in real events and characters, eg The Judge was real (though obviously somewhat reimagined here).

The Glanton Gang was also real: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton

Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#39

Post by mellosouls »

rspeele wrote: post #37

I read post after post of gushing praise for Cormac McCarthy, so I bought The Road on Kindle a few years ago. A few pages in I wished I had bought a hardcopy -- the e-book seemed to have been badly OCRed, and was missing most of the punctuation and a few of the spaces. Another few pages later, I looked up whether other people had the same problem. I was surprised to find that there was no issue with the Kindle copy.…

Your "meta" criticism is fair, and it's something I would normally bridle at as well, but in McCarthy's case, it just has me hooked, though it takes a while to get into the flow.

In a less artificial way you could say the same about any writing that reads as non-standard, for instance it took me a long time to appreciate Shakespeare coming from a familiarity with modern English, but eventually I got it and it was life-changing.

Obviously in McCarthy's case there is a "problem" of intent, but I think if you can replace your suspicion with an assumption of artistic good faith, you may be able to relax into the flow more easily.

Re: Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

#40

Post by defen »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #22
ak39 wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

> 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.

It's also worth noting that for Blood Meridian, McCarthy learned Spanish and did five years of historical research with his MacArthur award money. The broad strokes of the story are true - there really was a group of scalp hunters who went rogue, raping and murdering the people they had been hired to protect.
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