51–60 of 60 posts
Why is it coming up now? Does he finally have a chance to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
‘The find [of the early interviews] comes as McCarthy is preparing to publish two new intertwined novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” — his first since 2006, when he released “The Road,” a best seller that won the Pulitzer Prize.
‘McCarthy will give no interviews in conjunction with their release. Instead, here is a look back at a less guarded time in his life.’
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's just because it was the order I read his work in, but I'd start with "Blood Meridian". It's just beyond so many other books out there. Same with the Border Trilogy. I'm coincidentally reading "The Road" right now for the first time -- somehow I never made it to it over the years -- and honestly I'm not sure I'd have gone into the rest of his work so deeply if I had started with it. Same with "Suttree". The…
Child of God is an easier read than Blood Meridian, and acts as a pretty good way to get used to his minimalist punctuation
I actually found "All the Pretty Horses" to be the harder read, since he'll just write full dialogues in Spanish, and it's not just a couple of times, it happens often (my Spanish is just ok, enough to survive traveling in latin america).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd suggest there's a similar identification between the author and the Kid of Blood Meridian.
What McCarthy thinks of Melville's Moby Dick I have not heard, but for the reader anyway, there's a rich cross-fertilization. Both of ideas -- being a pawn within a monstrous, doomed enterprise -- and of technique, as with the cryptic oracles of catastrophe who say their piece and then vanish from the narrative.
I got a few paragraphs into the article and realized that I feel weird about reading an article that oriented around sharing inconsequential private details he probably regrets divulging decades ago. I don't need to know about his private life to appreciate his books. I think it's fine for scholars to dig this stuff up and record it, but I don't need to read about it.
I liked the image of Cormac McCarthy the recluse, but oh well.
In the age of digital archives, there's no "right to be forgotten" for geniuses, I guess.
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…
This is very tangential, but this is one of the reasons I could never get into The Walking Dead and similar shows. It was really hard for me to suspend my disbelief there.
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…
When working together is clearly beneficial, not cooperating is simply illogical. But what happens when cooperation is not only not clearly beneficial, but may even be actively detrimental? What happens if you're starving to death, and you see a weaker man who has enough, barely enough, to feed himself approaching? And that is all there is?
Adding a notion of a child, of the future itself, into the picture makes it all the more difficult.
I 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.
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 the difference between "reading fiction" and literature: text as a work of art. Great authors are present through their style. How they tell their story is an important as what the story is about. Attributing it to the author being smug is as ridiculous as saying that Picasso should paint his objects in a way that conforms more to how they look in real life.
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.…
>When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices. That's the difference between "reading fiction" and literature: text as a work of art. Great authors are present through their style. How they tell their story is an important as what the story is about. Attributing it to the author being smug is as ridiculous as saying that Picasso should paint his objects in a wa…
Rmoving parts of th languag that you find unncssary just fls lik bing cutsy for its own sak. I don't gt what it adds to th rading xprinc. Similar to how my rmoval of th most common lttr from this post dosn't simplify it, it maks it annoying to rad.
But I admit I am a lowbrow typ and I don't work vry hard to lik things that I don't lik at first tast.
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.…