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Cormac McCarthy's personal library

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#51

Post by brennanpeterson »

username223 wrote: post #36
JKCalhoun wrote: post #4

"McCarthy’s detractors, meanwhile, found his writing overly mannered, his characters overly masculine, and accused him of relishing the violence he wrote about so vividly." Yeah, maybe his detractors were on to something. I haven't even started "The Road" because of its reputation. I have only read "Child of God" and wondered why someone might write about the worst among us. But then I'm not a fan of Quentin Tarantin…

"Child of God?" You started at just about the darkest, least approachable place. Try "No Country for Old Men" or "All the Pretty Horses," both of which are far easier to read and contemplate.

Or The Crossing, which, at least for the first third is his sparest and best writing. At least, I prefer the marriage of the gothic sensibility and poetry with the classic western.

Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#52

Post by layman51 »

ChanningAllen wrote: post #22

This article makes me want to cry. I'm an unbelievably big Cormac McCarthy fan and the findings in his library shed so much light on many inscrutable and poetic passages from his books. I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian: > Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. Corm…

I hope that wasn't Cormac McCarthy's stand-in because the Judge character is like some type of supernatural violent being.

Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#53

Post by wewxjfq »

> They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

Reminds me: I once read a listicle about famous people with large personal libraries. Most were writers and had collections in the lower thousands, a few reached into the tens of thousands. The person with by far the most books was Karl Lagerfeld, who owned 300,000 books.

Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#54

Post by ycombinete »

octygen wrote: post #5
lomase wrote: post #3

The Road is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. I could not stop reading it, but at the same time I hated how it made me feel. I stoped reading novels for years after finishing it.

The Road is my favorite fathering book ever. I have recommended it to all my dad friends. Audiobook is excellent too.

I can see why, but as a new father the last thing I want my fatherhood associated with is that horrible horrible story.

Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#55

Post by ycombinete »

groos wrote: post #19
dzuc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only book I've ever read in a single sitting.

After reading the Road, I started on Blood Meridian and could not continue, swearing never to read McCarthy again. The man's soul was just too dark.

Yes. There’s something cruel there, or perhaps simply resigned, to reflecting the most brutal aspects of humanity in their most casual, logical, and inherent expression ([0] spoiler).

You certainly never shake the feeling that something terrible is going to happen at any moment.

I have read The Road and All the Pretty Horses. I won’t read any of the others. AtPH has less horror than The Road, for what it’s worth. It’s very much a bildungsroman.

If you enjoyed the road and want more like that, but without the horror; I’d say try our Steinbeck if you haven’t. He’s a greater writer, and less cruel.

[0] AtPH spoiler: For example mangling that boy’s feet. It’s not arbitrary, not entirely necessary, but it had a logic to it; and is exactly the type of thing people do to each other.

Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#57

Post by blast »

tehnub wrote: post #50
lunatuna wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve only read The Road and found it extremely difficult because of the nihilism. I put it down in the middle of it and stewed for 6 months before I picked it up again. I am so glad I did. I think his detractors are right, it is violent, nihilistic, masculine and whatever else. Through that the other side of the contrast becomes so vivid. Maybe there are better ways to get there. For me it hit. My daughter and I talk…

It sounds like the book itself isn't nihilistic but there may be nihilistic characters in it, which doesn't seem like something worth criticizing it over.

How do you tell that a book with nihilistic characters isn't a nihilistic book? The difference is obvious in principle, but I'm not sure it is in practice.

Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#58

Post by BrenBarn »

bexsella wrote: post #38
BrenBarn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a stretch to call The Road optimistic.

I would argue that the ending of the book is optimistic despite the event that precedes it. An imperfect father wants the best for his child, and does the best he can with the hand he's dealt. In a dying world of cannibals and worse, there are people who are good, and whose surroundings don't poison their view on what it means to be good. "Do you carry the fire?" is, to my mind, an incredibly optimistic sentiment.

The ending is definitely the most optimistic part of the book, but on balance I think the overall picture is still excruciatingly bleak. It gives me the impression that any optimism of the part of the characters is likely unwarranted. They're still doomed.

Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#59

Post by [deleted] »

currymj wrote: post #9

If you read his last two novels he was clearly well-informed about mathematics. However I have to assume that McCarthy didn't actually master all the material in the math books mentioned here, I think the reporter may be a little too credulous about that. I suspect he had the very common experience of buying a yellow book and being defeated in the first couple chapters.

[deleted]

Re: Cormac McCarthy's personal library

#60

Post by komali2 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #11
JKCalhoun wrote: post #4

"McCarthy’s detractors, meanwhile, found his writing overly mannered, his characters overly masculine, and accused him of relishing the violence he wrote about so vividly." Yeah, maybe his detractors were on to something. I haven't even started "The Road" because of its reputation. I have only read "Child of God" and wondered why someone might write about the worst among us. But then I'm not a fan of Quentin Tarantin…

How is overly masculine a bad thing? Makes me want to read it even more.

It could be clownish and a caricature. I enjoyed The Road but it makes me think of a critique of sci fi I read once, wherein masculine sci fi novels focus deeply on engineering problems and all but ignore human or environmental ones. Some books tackled this by demonstrating the presumptive and flawed approach sci fi writers take to biospheres / space stations / generation ships for example (Voyage from Yesteryear, A Half Built Garden) where despite all the engineering, the biosphere suffers. I suppose a part of why Dune made such waves was that it took a very human and ecological perspective front and center.

The Road could be seen as overly masculine in its portrayal of a man and his son against nearly the entire world, which is often the fantasy of male prepper types. Some oppositional takes to this would be e.g. Cory Doctorow's Masque of the Red Death, where he presents the dichotomy directly in a post-apocalypse world and argues for the more optimistic outcome, wherein people work together in a non-exclusionary way to overcome whatever the apocalyptic scenario is, which might be considered a more feminine perspective. Others taking that perspective would include Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built in Hell."

In the Too Like Lightning series, Ada Palmer takes on the male/feminine sci fi angle directly by creating a near-utopian society of mostly gender neutral people. At one point in the novel a character argues that in fact they've created a feminine society of women, and therefore aren't prepared to handle the outlier class of people that want to create war, who have for the most part began to present explicitly as men.

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