I read The Road years ago, but I was probably too young to fully understand it; more recently, I read Blood Meridian a few months ago for my book club. Few novels have had me think about them as much (Dostoevsky's Demons and Melville's Moby Dick come to mind). McCarthy was an absolute American treasure.
Rest in peace. His poetic Blood Meridian epilogue really stuck with me:
"In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again."
At risk of sounding stupid in public, what does that epilogue mean? I've read it several times now, and aside from being surprised at how fluid it still reads despite the parsimonious use of punctuation, I really can't figure out what it's talking about.
It's often interpreted as a critique of manifest destiny, the idea that settlers were destined to expand across North America. He's describing that westward expansion in abstract terms.
The man digging holes is a pioneer. McCarthy isn't really clear on what he does; intentionally so. He might be digging fence holes, making campfires, building railroad tracks – it doesn't really matter.
The wanderers are the settlers following the pioneer westward. They appear to be coordinated by some force, like the pieces of a clock. This is arguably the "go west" attitude of manifest destiny.
"...they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality" is McCarthy's true criticism of manifest destiny. Retrospectively, we glorify settlement of the west and slot it into a clean narrative or progress. But in its time, the expansion was chaotic, violent and devoid of morals. People were just walking hole-to-hole for the sake of finding the next hole.
Some wanderers collect bones and some don't. Perhaps McCarthy means that some wanderers kill, but we don't know. From McCarthy's nihilistic viewpoint it doesn't matter because the westward expansion is moral-less so killing someone isn't different from collecting bones on the ground.
This contrasts with the moral good vs. evil narrative usually applied to the old west (see anything written on cowboys vs. indians, sheriff vs. bandits, etc.) McCarthy portrays the old west outside of a moral framework. Horrific violence happens and there's no explanation or justification.
I'll just add: in my own opinion this epilogue is a bit of literary trickery. Like the past, it's difficult to parse. As the epilogue, it naturally occupies a place of significance. This must be the key to understanding Blood Meridian!
But after wracking your brain trying to decrypt the message, you realize that it just says there is no greater meaning to the violence of the book. It is just people doing things on a vast plain.
It's almost as though McCarthy is saying to us, "See? You're still looking for a deeper meaning that does not exist."
I’m about halfway through this book and I’d say this is a very apt explanation, but a bit handwavey.
McCarthy seemed to deal _absurdly well_ in the banality of the pitches of life, both high and low. One always leads to another. It’s a sort of nihilism but with a karmic baseline. Reading his prose I got the sense I shouldn't make much out of anything, but all the same, it still happened and is worth talking about.
Yes, I think the detail and lyricism of the prose intentionally causes us to look for a moral framework for the story.
Many readers feel cognitive dissonance from this book: there’s so much detail, it must add up to some moral lesson. You’ll hear people say, “Blood Meridian is an amazing book, but I don’t understand it.”
They’re still trying to apply a moral label to the story and can’t find one. To quote The Judge, “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
McCarthy’s message in Blood Meridian may be that we see a higher fidelity picture of the old west if we don’t attempt to fit events into a moral arc. Still worth discussing, but we must abandon good vs. evil as a framework if we want a glimpse at the truth of what happened.
When I read it without any context I could see the dawn of human civilization (and progress) in it as well (you can think that the man is trying to make fire, for example). I guess the vagueness allows for many interpretations and the parallelism between these interpretations gives a sense of profoundness. I wonder if the ancient texts, like Torah or Daode Jing, were written with the same intent :?
I’ve always interpreted it as post holes as they fence in and close the Wild West.
He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there
A post hole digger has two handles. When you’re using it in rocky ground you hit rocks and make sparks.
Yeah, the interpretation of that scene as an elegy of the end of the “wild West” through fencing, feels obvious if the reader has read what McCarthy wrote next after Blood Meridian: the Border Trilogy, where some 20th-century Texas romantics are already dealing with that fencing-off.
I'm quite sure he means a post-hole digger. I can practically smell the odor of digging in rocky soil with those, coming off the page, almost feel the cracked dust-sweat-caked knuckles of setting posts on a hot, dry day.
[EDIT] As for the rest, putting aside metaphorical readings, the clockwork-like progression and repeated crossing of the line of holes calls to mind the stop-and-start movement of running barbed wire and working a ratcheting tensioner tool behind the one digging the holes, and in the right country, the curious among those workers may pause to reflect on the remains of long-dead things (fossils, "bones"—fish, horse, bison, mammoth, spine-like crinoid stems, shells and coral from an eons-dead sea, even dinosaurs—the ranches and farms of the West largely sit atop the shallow graves of life's history on Earth) sitting flat in the dirt or exposed by the digging, while others may pay them no mind. There's definitely a defensible reading of this as on the surface a plain, if oblique, description of a work crew running a fence line—not just the one digging the holes, but the whole set of folks described. I'd wager that's what's intended (though not the only thing intended), in fact.
It is also related to the judge's quest to name all things. The relationship is measurement, a fundamentally human activity... or perhaps fundamental to the way our civilization is doing human.
Not stupid at all! There's a long tradition of figuring out what it means (just google "Blood Meridian epilogue"), but the short answer is that McCarthy was probably playing around with ideas, having a bit of fun, waxing poetic. But there's some elements in the passage about determinism, causality, exploitation, the man with the instrument being a "pioneer" of the American West, the holes being railroad tracks, or fence posts, or mine stake poles (referencing the imminent gold rush), etc.
Like like with all poetry, it's a joy to think about and dissect.
I'm not a strong reader and Blood Meridian took me a few times to read and appreciate. I just remember thinking how crazy it was that almost the entire page was a single run-on sentence. I really liked the book but it was difficult for me to read and understand.
Some say it's more like approaching poetry than prose with his work. There is certainly causality and narrative development in his writing, but he often uses his magisterial command of language to impart a cosmic dimension to the simplest of instances or utterances.
It’s not all like that. Just the things that can’t suitably be explained as events. The native assault on the brigade comes to mind. How could you adequately describe such an event with words. It’s a horror poem in the way he writes it and if you haven’t read it, it is as chilling as it sounds.
My reaction to McCarthy has been similar. After trying a couple of his works, my reaction was that he was primarily focussed on the nasty side of humanity. We people can be nasty, but - like much of today's news - he fails to balance that with our positives. There are a lot of grays between black and white. Great authors manage to show them all.
I am actually not sure. I used to agree, but I've found that the best stories I've read use the good and beautiful moments primarily to make the bad moments hit that much harder. That doesn't mean there aren't good stories focussing on balance, but I'd be surprised if there is as much to explore there as there is in the depths of both good and bad.
Stephen had a great quote - which I cannot find tonight - that Cormac McCarthy was like some pop music. It was ok to like it even if you couldn’t make out every lyric.
There a couple themes in this particular passage that really come through to me: steel/fire/stone, the holes in the earth being a “path”, the wanderers following a command they can’t comprehend. To me it evokes it’s a commentary on the weary fatalism of westward expansion, the grim meaninglessness/banality of evil of the nascent industrial revolution. I really love the idea of those exploring the west as a gang of bone-collectors, which tracks with BM’s ghastly but realistic scalp economy.
I get the sense that McCarthy didn’t just find banality in evil but also in beauty and good. Not that they were bad things (any more than “banal evil” is a good thing) but more that they just _are_. His storytelling always felt to me like an illustration of “how can you know what’s bad or good in the grand scheme?”
Haven't read McCarthy, however it sounds like a pretty bleak take on westward expansion of the United States across the North American continent / high plains. The hole, steel and fire metaphor brings to mind the process by which rail lines, telegraph runs and extractive industries are established. Those seeking bones brings to mind the search for grounds in which to establish extractive industries concerned with oil and some chemical precursors.
Then the rest follow blindly not truly knowing why and getting stuck with the destruction/dregs/etc.
If that is what is going on, I can't really argue about it however I'll take the more joyous propaganda tyvm.
I read on Twitter that it’s a reference to the introduction of barbed wire fencing that marked the end of the wild era that the book was set in. It makes sense but I never looked into it.
The man is digging post holes, which means he is putting up a fence.
By putting up a fence he alters so many things about the land, in a profound way, and the others who occupy that land have a relationship and reaction to this fence.
Edit: maybe it isn’t a fence. Could be set up for a railway? Or something else like early poles for wires for communication?
I’ve read a lot of McCarthy but not Blood Meridian
I'm sure it's something horrible and violent, like the rest of that book. I go back and read the ending (in addition to the epilogue) periodically trying to convince myself of one particular version of the ending and main character, or another.
Siblings talking about the closing of the American West are correct but that's not sufficient; you have to extrapolate it out to the existential scale that Blood Meridian grapples with. He's critiquing the notion of "progress" as a whole, favoring instead a view of humanity stumbling through history and all which that entails.
"A legion of golfers, dozens in number, dressed in plaid or argyle or attired in golfing gear from a bygone era, with visors and gloves and golf bags still stained with the grass and dirt of prior rounds. Some wore knickers and tam o'shanters, while others donned bright polo shirts and khaki shorts. One golfer carried a large umbrella, another wore white knee-high socks stained with grass, and another wore a bloodstained wedding veil. Some wore hats adorned with feathers or made of rawhide, and one even dressed in the armor of a medieval knight. The golfers' faces were painted in outrageous patterns, like a troupe of carnival performers, all howling and shouting in a language unintelligible to the uninitiated, as they approached the tee box like a raiding party from a wilder world than that of the manicured course they terrorized, screeching and yammering, their clothing billowing behind them like smoke from some infernal realm."
A phalanx of mace-wielders, legioned by the dozens, swathed in interlocking geometries of archaic clan and tribal shroud, donned in specters of yesteryears garb. Upon crowns they bore the half moons of sun-shielders, hands sheathed in the callused gloves bearing the earthen residue of the wars waged on emerald fields. Some festooned in old world breeches and shapeshifter's bonnets, others in the blaring colors of plebeian polo and desert-dusted shorts. Among these warriors, a solitary figure, a shielder of storms, his trusty parasol held high. Another’s lower limbs swathed in ghostly shroud, baptized by the verdant life of the fields. And still another, a tragic bride, her veil sanguinary from the love-feast unholy. Feathers plucked from the winged ones adorned the headgear of some, the rawhide caps of others akin to the primal trophies of untamed hunts. A lone paladin armored in the steel and iron of yore. Faces beneath this motley parade painted in the ghastly festival hues of the carnivalesque. A cacophony of unknown tongues ricocheted, a grotesque operetta resounding in the ears of those unversed. As they approached the maiden's tee, they were as a raiding horde birthed from some primeval chaos, an epoch more untamed than the manicured world they stormed upon. The shrill discordance of their cries echoing, their raiments in their wake, whispering tales of an infernal dimension, billowing like the smoky breath of the underworld's beast.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
(Faulkner; the first lines of The Sound and the Fury)
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the
long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss
Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it
that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for
forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed
that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler,
and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house)
became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin
thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown
inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was
a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden
trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in
random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and
opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn
for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband
none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was
so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron
shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and
static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard
amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense
self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable
frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked,
quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and
victorious dust.
— Absalom, Absalom - Faulkner - first two sentences
Do yourself a favor and read that prose out loud to yourself. It has amazing rhythm and flow! How he was able to do this for page after page is just astonishing.
I don't wish to be too dismissive, but I listened to the audiobook for Blood Meridian and found it to be noticeably boring. There were some neat phrases here and there, the descriptions were fun, but felt pretty ripped off of both time and money.
It's frustrating because I generally like writing in a similar manner to how he wrote, but I found it incredibly dull to listen to for any length of time. It was just this meandering mess of "here and there" without anything to pay attention to, or have a need to care for. It wasn't that I hated it, I just didn't like it either. I was entirely indifferent to it, other than a vague sense of politely waiting for it to end. I didn't feel I lost much by listening to it, but had nothing to gain either. It was just a distraction of other things I could have been listening to instead.
The point of the book is not at all the visual, most of it is very subtle. One commentary that I heard that was very astute pointed out that many parts of the book are specifically not detailed, one big example being that we rarely if ever witness the Kid killing or partaking in the murder/general viciousness of the gang.
This means that a large part of the book is emulated in your brain while reading - did you infer that the kid is doing all this, and is just as bad as them? Is he an observer, like you, and doesn't leave because he doesn't know better? Does he actively try to avoid unnecessary violence?
Your reading of these things will affect your reading of further parts - like the accusations of Holden, saying that the Kid was always a traitor to the spirit of the gang, which are not specific enough to be factual, but you absolutely know what he means while reading (depending on how you characterised the Kid).
All this means that any one expression of the story would betray the oeuvre (in my mind), which aims to get you in the boots of these horrible men and understand that they are part of you (between other things).
The stark writing and purposeful lack of factual descriptions of some key points make Blood Meridian a very evocative work, rather than descriptive. Half of it is and remains in your mind, and that's simply not what movies do.
All this to say - you can do a movie showing what happens in the book, and it would be good! But it would contain very little of why the book is so beloved and respected.
It's extremely violent, borderline-surreal in some places, excruciatingly slow in others (by design), occasionally has two or three levels of story-within-a-story. Unlike some of his other novels, it's more of an epic than a story, which is usually very hard to put on film. The closest I can think of is something like Ben-Hur or Apocalypse Now (which adapted Conrad's Heart of Darkness); both were famously plagued by production issues.
I haven't seen Yellowstone but I'd be amazed if it comes at all close to Blood Meridian for violence. I can't think of any movie or TV show that would.
edit: American Psycho might have if they'd stayed faithful to the book
WSJ: People have said "Blood Meridian" is unfilmable because of the sheer darkness and violence of the story.
CM: That's all crap. The fact that's it's a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That's not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary.
Eh, I don't think you have to take a silly, fun 633 Squadron remake with cool practical FX as nationalist propaganda. It may as well have been a Star Wars movie.
Looks like they are finally working on a film version as of April 2023:
> it was announced in April 2023 that New Regency is set to produce a feature film based on the novel, with McCarthy and his son serving as executive producers and John Hillcoat serving as director.
Hillcoat made The Proposition, which is a very McCartyesque film in its bleakness and violence. It's a great movie, written by and scored by Nick Cave.
I thought his adaptation of The Road was fine (though maybe a book that doesn't need an adaptation), and he hasn't done anything interesting since then, in my opinion. But Blood Meridian may be better material for him.
I would hope any good director would have the sense to know that it probably isn't for them. I can't imagine Spielberg picking this up. Gangs of New York is about as close as Scorsese could get but still too Hollywood. The Cohens did a great job of No Country but don't seem like a fit for Blood Meridian.
And hopefully nobody would offer it to somebody second rate.
I think some books just don't adapt to movies well. Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite books and I was shocked to learn it was being made into a movie, it just didn't seem like the right format. Despite a lot of talent and money going into it, the film didn't turn out that great and was probably an impossible task.
Idk, I feel like HBO (or any mainstream tele studio) might butcher it by trying to hamfistedly make it a revisionist Western along the lines of “White Man Bad” without catching the actual point about evil being inherent in everything. Thats undoubtedly a part of the reason as to why it hasn’t made it to screen yet - it’s not a story that fits nicely into the sort of Hollywood trope oriented storytelling that dominates mainstream TV.
Agreed. Its not even that a "white man bad" reading of Blood Meridian is wrong per se, its just woefully incomplete. It'd be like if Apocalypse Now was just John Wick in the jungle, or Blade Runner was just a police procedural with flying cars. Like, yes, that is the skeleton on which the piece is hung, but it is not at all what makes the piece great.
Is it merely a coincidence that Judge Holden was described as "face destitute of hair" and the director, John Hillcoat, is also bald and devoid of both eyebrows and facial hair?
Because nobody could handle the judge, that, and would take such a particular style of photography to capture the prose. I think mostly because of the complex characters like the judge, and the violence.
Glenn Fleshler, the main villain from True Detective S1. As soon as I started reading Blood Meridian, he was the first guy that popped into my head. He has that surreal quasi-supernatural energy.
While he might look right, there's a lot more to the judge than looks. I'm unfamiliar with his acting experience but i think the movie will 100% fall flat if the judge isn't right. I'm not sure kane has the range
I'm gonna be brave and say Dave Bautista. I haven't seen Knock at the Cabin yet, but it looks like he's got the range from the previews. He's big enough and imposing enough as well.
Clancy Brown or Glenn Fleshler (True Detective season 1) probably come closest in my view. Another one, if he were younger and bulkier, and hairless, who I think fits best with the book's overall description of the Judge would be Sid Haig.
The important aspect of an actor for the Judge wouldn't just be his physicality and baldness, it would also have to be a certain very particular type of sinister air. Few large actors have that.
It's hard to say why, but Clancy Brown is the one person I can see with the physicality of The Judge. Maybe it's because of his role as The Kurgan in Highlander.
I'm confused why The Road is said to be such great literature. Half the book is
"
Kid: Daddy, I'm scared.
Dad: Don't be scared.
"
What's really funny is how it has become an all purpose meme for a bad future if we don't go along with whatever the latest political program is.
Klaus Schwab even references it in his recent book "The Grand Narrative" as an alternative future that will come to pass if we don't do everything right even though the future disaster, from the hints given in The Road, is clearly not climate change.
I don't think it is generally considered to be as great as his other works like Blood Meridian, Suttree, and All the Pretty Horses. It's just his most popular.
The Road was really poorly written, but it did have an emotional resonance. It was beautiful in some ways, but it was a pretty crappy novel that didn't deserve a fraction of the attention it received. I'm still a bit baffled as to why it received that much attention. I picked it up at random off my gf's bookshelf last year, and read it in a day. It was quite simplistic. Calling it reductive would be giving it undue credit.
If you write a novel that aims to distill a genre into its own __prototype methods, you should leave the reader with a feeling that you're doing something more important and artful than simply cashing in on the existing archetype. Perhaps, like, a critique of the archetype itself embedded in the work would give the reader something more to think about.
[edit] I'd also just call attention to "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart (1949). This pulpy, pathos-ridden, amazing jerk-off sci-fi fantasy of being the last person on earth already hits pretty much all the major themes. If you're going to write the dark and traumatizing version of it with a boy in tow, how about adding something to the genre rather than collecting accolades based on an unproven assumption that by reducing it to parts you have somehow expanded upon it?
His famous “Legion of Horribles” quote below. I often think of “death hilarious”:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horse’s ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
As fantastical as this passage may sound, most of the details McCarthy provides are historically accurate, and based on a particular event: The Great Raid of 1840 [1]. A thousand Comanche warriors conducted an extremely deep raid into Southeast Texas, where they sacked the port of Linnville. An exceptionally large amount of trade goods were present in the port that day, including clothes bound for various settlements across the Texas frontier. The bits about umbrellas, stovepipe hats, and even the wedding veil come directly from eyewitnesses to the raid. The bit about a Comanche warrior wearing the armor of a conquistador is also real [2]. The Comanche were known for being exceptionally flamboyant, prizing extravagant clothing dyed in vibrant colors. It must have had quite a psychological effect on their enemies.
Loved Empire of the Summer Moon. Totally different kind of book, far more accessible than The Comanche Empire with more narrative and a fascinating storyline.
The Comanche Empire is more of a history textbook.
IIRC, I found The Comanche Empire by looking at the bibliography of Empire of the Summer Moon.
I've used this sentence as an example with my children, showing how with language you can demonstrate pace or frenzy. A battle charge is absolute chaos. There's no time for sentence structure, it's all wild glances from one thing to another.
Some of my favorite quotes, from my favorite McCarthy book, Blood Meridian:
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
--
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
--
In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.
--
They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.
And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
> continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.
It occurs to me now that this echoes a scene late in Moby Dick in which Ahab smashes his sextant to the deck and declares that henceforth he will navigate by dead reckoning alone, without reference to the sun or stars or like works of God.
Holden is presented as immortal, a figure for the devil in the Christian sense (in No Country For Old Men, the assassin Chigurh approximates this). Moby Dick's white whale is perhaps immortal, though not a devil figure to any modern reader.
Captain Ahab is mortal and goes down with all but one of the crew of the Pequod, like Glanton who dies along with most of his gang at the hands of the Yuma. Both leaders are proud and defiant to the last and are justly killed (though we have to feel first mate Starbuck at least deserved better).
Both Glanton and Ahab are undisputed masters of their respective expeditions, and both leave behind young families at the outset, though for different reasons: Glanton flees the law, Ahab sails voluntarily.
My favorite of his is As I Lay Dying. I find it much more readable than The Sound and the Fury. The latter is his most famous, and McCarthy's favorite work by Faulkner. But Faulkner himself said As I Lay Dying was his magnum opus.
Good Lord these quotes. What have I been doing in my life that I've never read this man? The imagery in these passages are so vivid, I reflexively started reading aloud after the first one. I gotta find his books now though with his passing, I suspect many will have the same idea.
I have read a lot of tgese, and still felt compelled to read them aloud. To my 6 and 7 year old children, no less. I did need to skim them first, though. He's not particularly known as being "safe for work" as they say in the Reddit world.
> ...on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.
Here McCarthy employs again to great effect his device of a narrator that knows and will tell of all physical events past and future. The narrator however does not know, though will speculate upon, thoughts of the characters:
... with them now rode a boy named Sloat who had been left sick to die in this place by one of the gold trains bound for the coast weeks earlier. ... He rode near the head of the column and he must have counted himself well out of that place but if he gave thanks to any god at all it was ill-timed for the country was not done with him.
Something something Glanton... he was complete at every hour... he would chase the sun to its final endarkenment in the West as if it had been ordained ages since...
That's one of the ones I remember, if you loosen the definition of "remember." I liked it because here's the ostensible leader of a gang of homicidal mo fo's, and not because of that, not despite it, but possibly quite irrelevantly to it, he's just as sure of himself and his "vision" as any other person we would normally think of as a leader.
The Delawares stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores.
--
... they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals.
I love that he didn’t shy away from prose that almost read as biblical even though he risked drawing comparison to it. The authority and confidence he wrote with.
Brings to mind Thucydides: “Of the Gods we believe, and of man we know, that by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they shall. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted on it. We did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time. And we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do.”
"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 moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
I read The Road while doing a lengthy daily commute via train, leading through a kind of lush rural area in western Germany. I vividly remember the stark contrast between the bleak world described in the novel and the vibrant, colorful abundance of life outside the window when I came up for air. It was a very unreal experience, switching back and forth between these two realities.
Blood Meridian was another monstrosity that lured me into a very dark inner space. I think it expresses the USA's relationship to violence better than anything else I have read, fiction or non-fiction. But there is a lot more going on at the same time, and I don't think I ever fully explored that. It didn't help that for a relatively short novel, it's so exhausting to read, both intellectually and emotionally.
I read The Road under similar circumstances (though the commute was more like ~30+ minutes on a stifling and oppressively densely packed underground train) - I felt numerous times that my vision, or my perception, or my perception of my vision, went from greyscale to vibrantly full colour when I looked away from my kindle to get ready to alight the train, and even in the grimy setting with the exhausted dejection of the commuters stuck where they didn't want to be, everything and everyone looked so optimistic and joyful and it all felt so, so happy to be in, compared to where I had been moments before.
Interesting fact about McCarthy: he had a sort of residency, I think pretty recently, despite his fame! as a copyeditor for science papers at the Santa Fe Institute. Here's a thread about a Nature piece with his advice for science writers:
> Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.
> Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn't be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn't fool anyone into thinking you're being objective: "Earth is the centre of this Solar System" isn't any more objective or factual than "We are at the centre of our Solar System."
> Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can't please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own.
EDIT: you posted the wrong link, I was trying to help YOU, and the readers of your comment. You removed the original nature link, and then post a condescending reply to me. It's insulting and makes me think less of you and I now deeply regret trying to help.
The original is on sci-hub under its DOI, of course.
Later
(I wrote "of course" here, as a sort of clumsy acknowledgement that I'm not posting an actual sci-hub link, not as any sort of commentary on the preceding comment --- that comment was appreciated, as I'd originally posted the wrong link, to the paywalled Nature story and not the HN thread. Sorry if it reads any other way!)
I spent a summer at the Santa Fe Institute in 2010 and can say that McCarthy certainly spent a lot of time there. I'm not sure he was a copyeditor, exactly, but SFI is a nice place to hang out for any sort of creative work -- beautiful building and landscape, and very open and collaborative atmosphere.
The institute is on the top of a big hill and I'll always remember how he gave me a lift one day as I was walking up.
Everyone is praising McCarthy and in particular mentioning how The Road impacted them, so allow me to go against the grain here.
First, I do like downbeat, apocalyptic fiction. I sometimes enjoy reading fiction that evokes anguish or that portrays failures. Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite English language writers.
But... I didn't like "The Road" at all. I think I get the point, but to me it was essentially "apocalypse porn". It was about pointlessly and joylessly describing a dying, hopeless world, but in a way that wasn't interesting to read. I didn't even like how it was written, after a while I started counting how many times McCarthy saw fit to write "the last of [food]". "They ate the last of the biscuits". "They ate the last of the beans". Etc, etc.
I'm sorry but I cannot find better words for this, The Road felt like "hopelessness porn".
I read all of his books and tbh the road is a minor work of him. a small book that is easy to enter into and tell a story to a lot of people.
blood meridian, sutree, the border trilogy are not that. they are work of art where words are crafted in ways that go beyond the pages. it is really the work of a master like very few writers ever did in history.
a small excerpt of blood meridian. with so many little words, ..
« And by and by they came to a place where the road was darkened in a deep wood and in this place the old man killed the traveler.
He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the road. Then he went home..
The harness maker lived until his son was grown and never did anyone harm again. As he lay dying he called the son to him and told him what he had done. And the son said that he forgave him if it was his to do so and the old man said that it was his to do so and then he died.
But the boy was not sorry for he was jealous of the dead man and before he went away he visited that place and cast away the rocks and dug up the bones and scattered them in the forest and then he went away. He went away to the west and he himself became a killer of men. »
He never explains what happens, but The Road stuck with me because IMO it depicted how fragile everything we have is and the hellscape we would be inviting if civilization were to collapse.
Since he wrote it this has been done to death by numerous writers (including comic books), but at the time it felt fresh, and I vividly remember wanting to curl into a ball on my bed in horror at some of the depictions in the book, not just because they were horrible, but because I thought: "Yup. That's what would happen alright."
I think there's a beauty in the bleakness. Some of the descriptions are just so vivid, like a charcoal sketch.
> He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered look to it where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. He stepped down into the roadcut and he looked at the gun and he looked at the boy. Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance. He was lean, wiry, rachitic. Dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it.
The line about how the "holes in [his belt] marked the progress of his emaciation" is seared into my brain forever.
I preferred blood meridian. McCarthy, and especially The Road, is definitely a continuation of the hemingway style, it's not for everyone. I find that the bluntness of the prose can hide some very beautiful insights he has though.
Interesting. I actually like Hemingway! For example, I consider "The Killers" a masterpiece: blunt, short, well-written, the dialogue is mundane but interesting, and nothing heroic happens. I don't know if I could stand a full novel in this style though.
To me, McCarthy in the "The Road" was the boring kind of depressing.
When did you read it? I think the US went heavy on post-apocalyptic movies and books since the GFC. Maybe there's a bit of "Seinfeld isn't funny" going on?
There are several doomsday movies that predate The Road, were better at the time, and hold up far better today, IMO. Children of Men (2005) would be my top suggestion. The rare movie I've gone back and watched multiple times. You know why it's good? Because the central premise didn't come true (humanity is infertile), but we live in that dystopia now anyway. It's like Black Mirror but for the police state. It didn't go into hyperbole like The Road or The Day After Tomorrow. It was a realistic, slow-motion apocalypse. Going out with a whimper instead of a bang.
However, Children of Men is admittedly not as bleak as The Road, so not a fair comparison. If you really want a film that produces bottomless despair in the viewer, I recommend Threads (1984) instead. It was produced by the BBC on a shoestring budget, and yet it's still a better film. I can't say I recommend it, but if you do watch it, the ending is on par with Requiem for a Dream for being memorable and filled with doom and horror.
The Road just wasn't very good IMO. No Country for Old Men, on the other hand? Same writer, different genre, but excellent.
Mind you, I didn't think it was samey or cliched, I don't remember thinking "there are too many of these already". What I thought was that it was poorly written and uninteresting, and that it seemed like bleakness for its own sake.
I couldn't get into The Road either and I know others that feel the same. I've always wanted to try a different McCarthy but haven't yet, maybe this will give me the final impetus.
Being a native East Tennessean, I’ve always had a slight preference for Cormac’s Appalachian novels, perhaps in part because the people (at least some of them…) and locations seemed familiar to me. What a loss.
I was pleased to see that the local NBC affiliate had made the announcement of his passing[0] the top story, but I was especially gratified that it describes him as “the author of Suttree, The Road, Child of God and several other novels.” It’s probably the only obit that will lead the list of novels with Suttree and relegate Blood Meridian to “several other novels,” haha.
It is the best book I have ever read and I didn't think I would feel that way so firmly about a book so late in life. I read it last year and it is unequivocally a masterpiece for me.
His first four novels—The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree—are all set in East TN. I’d highly recommend Suttree. It’s superb. Child of God is also quite good, especially for a novel about a necrophiliac serial killer. ;)
Suttree is maybe my favorite of all his novels. If, as others here have suggested, you regard Blood Meridian an epic. Suttree is a picaresque, like reading Pickwick Papers on salvia.
One of my favorite bits of writing is “Yelping with Cormac”, a series of short humorous pieces written by E.D.W. Lynch.
An excerpt from “The Apple Store”…
“… There was folks outside just standin there. Line stretchin round the block. Maybe a hundred people. I saw a man who’d brought his own chair. He had a shirt on with the same logo as the one on the store. I figured he worked there so I asked him what the line was all about. What were all these people waitin for. He told me it was for a apple phone or some such. I said dont these folks have telephones already? He told me they all had apple phones but it was the older one. I asked him what would happen to the old apple phones. He told me about a fella named Craig had a list and everbody sold their old telephones on it. A telephone sellin list.”
Man, this is crushing news. He was uniquely capable of capturing the worst of the human experience in the most beautiful manner.
"Once there were brook trouts 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 moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
It was, I'm told, a very good book that I noped out of about ten pages in.
I made it that far before becoming incredibly annoyed at the way literature critics were praising his new invention of post-apocalyptic stories which nobody had ever read before ever.
Also, if I remember correctly, he felt that the rules of punctuation didn't apply to him. Maybe that paid off if I'd read more than ten pages.
I don't doubt that he was a true giant. But even setting aside these purely meta-textual gripes, it's just not a story I want to hear. If I want to be depressed and angry, I'll read Hacker News.
Don't blame him for being praised by critics, I don't believe he's the one who claimed to have invented post-apocalyptic fiction.
I get the punctuation issue, but I think his writing is proof that you don't always need to follow the rules from elementary school. He was so meticulous that, even without commas, all his sentences remained clear, and the effect it had was—for most readers anyway—to make the meaning somehow clearer, and certainly more powerful.
Honestly, I should have led with the last thing. The real reason I didn't want to read it is that it was violent and unpleasant. There are many people who find value in such things. I'm not among them.
I haven't read it myself, but I've seen many report that it was uplifting to them. Amid the utter horror and hopeless bleakness a parent does everything they can to protect their child.
> I haven't read it myself, but I've seen many report that it was uplifting to them.
Uplifting? There was nothing uplifting about The Road. It's a world without hope. From the description of the forests, seas, societies and families, cormac builds a truly hopeless apocalypse with no hope for redemption or salvation. A world where hope cannot exist.
> Amid the utter horror and hopeless bleakness a parent does everything they can to protect their child.
A father tries to do everything he can to save his son, but ultimately, he fails. It's a world without hope after all. The father dies and a bunch of cannibals "take in" the boy.
It's one of the rare books that I finished in one sitting and then read again a few days later.
> But the love between the father and his son persists to the very end.
So what? Of course the love between a father and son persists. It's only natural. But that's not the point of the book. The book is about finding hope. The father is desperately trying to save his son. To find hope for his son. He thinks there is hope along the coast. That's why they are on "the road". When they reach the coast, they find a leaden sea holding no life. All marine life is dead. They find no hope. There, cannibals that were hunting the father and son shoot the father with an arrow and the father dies. The son buries his father and the cannibals find the boy and "take him in".
This is just reviews with the word "uplifting". Many of the comments with "uplifting" is just saying it is not uplifting.
"This is an unusual book. There is nothing uplifting here, so don't expect it."
"As uplifting as a charred word void of virtually all-living species. As uplifting as a dead land shrouded in night, blanketed with ash and gray snow, legions of charcoaled corpses ornamenting the highways and hallways. As uplifting as the vicious gangs who prowl the countryside surviving on the last food source - other humans. As uplifting as the Halocaust, Idi Amin's Uganda, or Pol Pot's Cambodia."
Read the book. There is nothing uplifting about it. The only thing uplifting about it is that we don't live in such a world. It's as hopeless a world as you can possibly create. It's a world where the wife and mother of the protagonists goes off into the woods to kill herself rather than face the horrors that await her and her husband and her son. That's how bleak and hopeless the world is. It's a world where the father carries a gun to take out his son and himself in case the cannibals get them. It's a world where the father fails to keep his promise to his son and dies, leaving him to a pack of cannibals. And that isn't even the worst of it. What exactly is uplifting here?
> I have read the book, and it is about sticking to your morals no matter how evil the world will become.
What morals? They stole other peoples stuff. They abandoned the poor people in the basement to die at the hands of the cannibals. They "helped" the guy they met on the road but that was due to childish naivety of the son. It was superficial and meaningless help. The book was entirely about amoral animalistic survival than morality. Notice how it was mostly the son who wanted to be "moral". If anything, the book is saying being moral is childish in an amoral world.
If anything, it showed the inability to stick morals. The most important "moral" of the story was the father's promise to the son and his wife, not to let the son fall into the hands of the cannibals. Throughout the book the father promises to kill them both if it came to that. In the end, the father couldn't bring himself to kill the son and left him to the cannibals who were hunting him.
In your response, you say we don't know whether the "good guys" got him or the "bad guys" did. It's obvious the "bad guys" got him. On your first reading, it isn't clear, but after subsequent readings, it is obvious there are no good guys left and the cannibals who were hunting ( or possibly other cannibals ) them got him.
> That is the message of the book.
If that was the message, the book showed how stupid and pointless it was. Not that it was a good thing. If there was a "message", it was that the mother was right and the father was wrong. But that isn't the message either.
Rather than taking the book for it is, people are trying to find a positive message to make themselves feel better. That's a childish notion. Not everything is a disney movie. Not everything has to have a happy ending or a positive message. You don't have to be uplifted or find morality in a book.
It is not. The man that found the child had a shotgun. He was trying to convince the kid that he had his own wife and child. If he was one of the cannibals, he could have just shot him and got it over with...this is like a six year old we are talking about. Overpowering him, kidnapping him, or just shooting him would be more easy. It doesn't make sense for him to try and convince the kid to join him.
>If anything, the book is saying being moral is childish in an amoral world.
I highly disagree. the man had problems trusting others, for good reason. But the child was a reminder to him WHY it is important to stay good. It ties in with Plato's concept of Eudemonia. Helping others must come with a sense of self-preservation. To save others with abandon is not moral...it is recklessness. On the other side of the coin, having nothing BUT self preservation is cowardess. They represent both sides of the same coin...the boy tugs at the fathers heartstrings to keep him in touch with his morality, and the father has the common sense to keep them alive.
>Rather than taking the book for it is, people are trying to find a positive message to make themselves feel better. That's a childish notion.
Making your interpretation the "one and only interpretation" and dismissing others as "making themselves feel better" is closed minded, myopic, and also childish. While I disagree with your interpretation of the book, I respect it. However the point of art is to attach personal meaning to it. That is not childish...that is human.
Your interpretation is that there is no meaning, and that morality is pointless. Mine is that it is important to do your best in a world that is evil, even if you mess up and don't live up to your own standards sometimes. "carrying the fire" seems like obvious symbolism to me for morality. They don't always carry it...they are sometimes bad themselves. When that happens, the kid gets upset at the dad and there are consequences. The dad develops as a character and decides that giving up and killing them both is the wrong thing to do. Is he right? Honestly probably not. But that is the thing about morality, it is not always black and white.
> If he was one of the cannibals, he could have just shot him and got it over with
In the book, the cannibals like to keep their "herd" alive in the basement. Remember? Why did they keep their humans alive?
> Overpowering him, kidnapping him, or just shooting him would be more easy.
No. It would be easier to convince him to follow them willingly. Would you rather drag a corpse 10 miles or have the the corpse follow you 10 miles. I can't tell if you are trolling or not? Throughout book, exhaustion and the physical toll play a prominent role - of just pushing a cart, father carrying the boy, etc.
It's getting exhausting repeating the obvious. The conclusion of the book is the father dead and the orphaned boy ending up with cannibals. Exactly what they wanted to avoid and breaking the promise that the father made to his wife. If that is uplifting to you and you find moral value in that fine. I guess if you keep looking for something, you'll eventually find it. Even if it is not there.
My problem with your reasoning is that it relies on a literal interpretation of the words spoken in the book. The father says that "there are no other kids his age", yes, but remember...most of the book is told through the father's eyes. He doesn't know any more than we do. There is no information technology anymore...all he knows is that he has not seen any kids and that he hasn't heard of any kids. He is an unreliable narrator.
>No. It would be easier to convince him to follow them willingly. Would you rather drag a corpse 10 miles or have the the corpse follow you 10 miles. I can't tell if you are trolling or not?
I am not trolling. Have you ever picked up a six year old? They weigh practically nothing. The cannibals are not shown to be as exhausted or weak as the father so it would not be as much of a problem. Perhaps if he gets off to the idea of betrayal, or if he really does think that having a kid follow him for 10 miles would be easier convincing him would be easier, but I have a hard time believing that.
>I guess if you keep looking for something, you'll eventually find it. Even if it is not there.
I could say the same thing about your interpretation of events. I do wish you would be more open minded and less cynical...the way you so easily dismiss people and feel that your interpretation is the only correct one is extremely offputting. Productive conversation cannot happen if you keep dismissing everyone else as "missing the obvious."
> My problem with your reasoning is that it relies on a literal interpretation of the words spoken in the book.
What? Now you are just desperately grasping at straws.
> The father says that "there are no other kids his age", yes, but remember...most of the book is told through the father's eyes.
And? So what? The kid also says so, not that it matters.
> There is no information technology anymore...
That's right. Before the internet and IT, nobody saw any children. This comment is the dumbest thing I've read in a long while.
> all he knows is that he has not seen any kids and that he hasn't heard of any kids. He is an unreliable narrator.
The kid also said so. And I don't think you know what "unreliable narrator" is. There has to be clues within the story to imply that he is unreliable ( psychologically, memorywise, etc ). Not that he doesn't have access to a smartphone.
> Have you ever picked up a six year old? They weigh practically nothing.
Yes. Not only that, I was six year old once. Long before I was 6 years old, my parents stopped carrying me around. And you are being intentionally sneaky here. Who said anything about picking up a 6 year old. I said carry a 6 year old how many miles they had to go.
> Perhaps if he gets off to the idea of betrayal, or if he really does think that having a kid follow him for 10 miles would be easier convincing him would be easier, but I have a hard time believing that.
Yes. It's easier to believe that in a starving world, a random kind couple is willing to take in someone else's child to feed. Something his own father struggled immensely to do. That is easier to believe.
It's obvious what happened. It's why you ignored every one of my points except the absolutely nonsense about "no more information technology..."
Let me guess, you are the type of person who watched the movie No Country for Old Men and believe that chigurh didn't kill the wife. Or that the girl in the red dress in schindler's list wasn't dead but playing dead because she was saved by some magical good nazis. At this point I hope you at pretending to be trolling to save yourself some embarrassment.
I'm so dumb. I forgot that before information technology, kids were invisible. Thank you.
It is not letting me reply to your reply to my comment, so I am going to reply here instead.
>What? Now you are just desperately grasping at straws.
Explain. Am I incorrect?
>And? So what? The kid also says so, not that it matters.
Because he has not seen any. Just because they didn't see any kids doesn't mean they don't exist. The fact that the kid himself exists suggests that this is not entirely correct.
>That's right. Before the internet and IT, nobody saw any children. This comment is the dumbest thing I've read in a long while.
I would appreciate it if you could make a point without resorting to insults. For one suggesting that others are childish for their interpretations, you are resorting to childish actions.
As for my point, perhaps I was not clear in my meaning. I meant that there was no way to verify that there are no kids...no newspapers saying that "all kids are dead," or any other way for him to verify that information. He is just saying what he has seen, which is no kids.
>There has to be clues within the story to imply that he is unreliable ( psychologically, memorywise, etc ). Not that he doesn't have access to a smartphone.
Again, you misinterpret my point. The father is not omniscient. He does not know for certain.
>Yes. Not only that, I as six year old once. Long before I was 6 years old, my parents stopped carrying me around. And you are being intentionally sneaky here. Who said anything about picking up a 6 year old. I said carry a 6 year old how many miles they had to go.
At this point, I am starting to think you are not actually reading my comments. A well fed cannibal with a stomach full of people is not going to have trouble carrying a six year old the same way a starving father on the brink of death would be.
>Let me guess, you are the type of person who watched the movie No Country for Old Men and believe that chigurh didn't kill the wife. Or that the girl in the red dress in schindler's list wasn't dead but playing dead because she was saved by some magical good nazis. At this point I hope you at pretend to be trolling to save yourself some embarrassment.
Now you are resorting to ad hominem and assuming things about my character. No, I am sure Chigurh killed the wife. I have not seen Shindler's List so I cannot say one way or the other.
>At this point I hope you at pretend to be trolling to save yourself some embarrassment
The only person embarrassed here is you. You have shown great immaturity during this conversation, and immediately assume the worst in everyone. That says a lot more about you than me. I will not be continuing this conversation, because it is obvious any further discussion with you will be fruitless. Have a blessed day.
From what I recall, it's not stated that the family who takes in the boy are cannibals. That could be one interpretation, I suppose, if depression is your goal.
But if you take them at their word, they're "carrying the fire", so the story gets a hopeful ending.
Perhaps that's what people find uplifting about it.
>This is just reviews with the word "uplifting". Many of the comments with "uplifting" is just saying it is not uplifting.
I noted that when I posted the link. But at least half are saying it is uplifting.
I obviously can't argue further as I haven't read it. I will remark that different people will react to the same material variously uplifted or beaten-down, and neither reaction is less valid (unless they just misunderstood the plot). Personally, I tend to find depictions of nobility and perseverance in the face of imminent doom interesting and moving if not uplifting.
> I obviously can't argue further as I haven't read it.
You should. It's the best of its kind in my opinion.
> I will remark that different people will react to the same material variously uplifted or beaten-down, and neither reaction is less valid (unless they just misunderstood the plot).
I'm open to people having subjective feelings - like whether they enjoyed it, they found it too graphic, not graphic enough, etc. But uplifting is different. There has to be something concrete to back up the feeling of being uplifted.
> Personally, I tend to find depictions of nobility and perseverance in the face of imminent doom interesting and moving if not uplifting.
But that's the point. It isn't nobility and perseverance in the face of imminent doom. The mother thought it was inevitable doom. The father had hope. It's perseverance in false hope. Nonexistent hope. It's like you seeing a person jump 100 stories from the twin towers and flapping his arms in the hopes of flying and saving himself. Would you say that is uplifting? Of course not. Unless you were being edgy or silly.
Instead of reading silly amazon reviews, go read the book and see for yourself.
> It felt to me that the family that takes in the boy are not bad people.
What family? You really believe the man and woman who took in the boy had a "family"? A world where boy's own mother abandoned him and his father to kill herself because there was no hope. A world where there are no plants, animals, fish, etc left. A world where a a woman gives birth and then she and her friends cook the fetus over a campfire. You think in a world where there is no food, no possibility of food, where everyone is either starving to death or cannibalizing, that there is a happy family? It's a world where everyone is starving to death. You think "a family" is going to take in an extra mouth to feed?
Did you miss the parts in the book where they explicitly mention how there is no children the boy's age left? The boy desperately wants a friend but there are no children his age left. Except for that one "imaginary" kid he ran into that disappeared. Why do you think that is?
Also, the father and son were being hunted by a pack of cannibals who mortally wound the father. What are the odds that the cannibal hunters caught up to him. What are the odds that a magical good samaritan family stumbled upon him?
When I first read the book, I thought the kid was saved. Then I reread it and boy cormac really made it crystal clear how hopeless that world was.
> The boy offers to give the man his pistol but the man tells him to keep it. That indicates the man is not trying to trick him.
Yes and the nice cannibal they killed offered to give them food and shelter. Remember how nice that cannibal was? The pistol was worthless and if I remember correctly, it didn't even have a bullet left. Of course he let him keep it. It's no threat.
> Talking about odds in a fictional story is misguided.
No. It's a matter of determining what is most likely.
> The odds are 100% whatever the writer intended.
Yes. The author wrote everything that led up to the meeting for a reason. Everything the author wrote leads to the man and woman being cannibals. It's pretty obvious. It isn't a children's book. For children, the author explains everything clearly and spoonfeeds you. But for adult books you have to think about what the author is trying to say. Did that world seem like it had any good samaritans that you envision. No it did not. For a reason.
What the author intended is 100% obvious. You don't like it because you childishly want a happy ending. Cormac wasn't writing disney books or children books. If you are still confused and you seem to be, go read his other books. You'll understand what kind of writer he was.
>I don't doubt that he was a true giant. But even setting aside these purely meta-textual gripes, it's just not a story I want to hear. If I want to be depressed and angry, I'll read Hacker News.
I completely understand. For me, I see it as a story about clinging to hope despite impossible odds. The theming reminds me of the manga Berserk, but way more grounded in reality and somehow even more depressing. Spoilers:
The main character is dying, and will leave his son to fend for himself when he does. The son doesn't really stand a chance, but it is his responsibility to teach him to "carry the fire." It ends a bit vague...the father dies and the kid refuses to leave the body.
Eventually a man comes by and offers to take care of him. Whether or not he is actually a good guy, or yet another disgusting person, is not really known. But its a glimmer of hope, and that is what is important to the message. As long as there is hope, carry the fire.
> It was, I'm told, a very good book that I noped out of about ten pages in.
That's strange. The book grabs your attention from the get go. It starts strong. Stays strong. Ends strong.
> I made it that far before becoming incredibly annoyed at the way literature critics were praising his new invention of post-apocalyptic stories which nobody had ever read before ever.
This makes absolutely no sense. Were you reading the book and reading reviews at the same time?
> Also, if I remember correctly, he felt that the rules of punctuation didn't apply to him. Maybe that paid off if I'd read more than ten pages.
His punctuation was fine. The book reads well. His words and sentences flow. I found it easily one of the most accessible.
> it's just not a story I want to hear. If I want to be depressed and angry Hacker News.
Ah there it is. People with petty gripes always have an agenda. So your "gripes" above are just because you want don't like apocalytic stories and want to warn people off it? Why not just say so instead of making up silly criticisms? Also, it's a work of fiction. It isn't real. Really nothing to get depressed or angry about. If anything, it should make you happy since we don't like in such a hopeless world. But really, like all great literature, it should make you think.
> His punctuation was fine. The book reads well. His words and sentences flow. I found it easily one of the most accessible.
No, this is a fair criticism.
It's true this is done for literary effect, but it does make it harder to read.
To quote McCarthy himself:
> James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.[1]
Whilst this might be true, his punctuation style is non-conventional and that does break our expectations making it harder to follow.
> It's true this is done for literary effect, but it does make it harder to read.
What literary effect? I didn't even notice there were punctuation issues until I read the guy's comment. Maybe since it was basically a book where most of the dialogue is between two people? It was one of the easiest and most straightforward reads of my life.
> > James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.[1]
...“to make it easier, not to make it harder” to decipher his prose. He wrote that way to make it easier to read. And I agree with him. His prose just flowed. Also, the problem with joyce isn't the punctation. Even with proper punctuation, joyce would be difficult.
But if people have issues with it, then so be it. Are there any examples where his punctuation caused issues for readers?
Yup, pretty much. There was this one passage about the man and the boy hiding and watching some guy. Can't quite remember what was going on, he was like struggling or something, gravely wounded, and then he just dropped dead. The way it read...I felt completely empty and dejected after it and put the book down for a couple days.
I read this book when my second son was just born. I cannot recommend reading a book so bleak and soul crushing and unforgiving as The Road while your mind is at its softest and most protective. To feel so hopeless and inadequate as a father…I would not wish it on even the foulest villain in the world.
Damn. I must have exceptionally dark taste in media, because I've definitely got a few "well, that was good, but I kinda wish I hadn't read/watched it" things in my history, and The Road wasn't even close to qualifying. I'd say the film Threads hit me harder, to pick something with similar setting and circumstances, though that's still not quite in that category.
(It Comes at Night is probably my #1 in that category for film, and I guess Watts' Blindsight in books—both messed me up for days after, the former with some depressive nihilism, the latter with days of fairly intense derealization that weren't too fun—and I'm not normally especially prone to either of those, I don't think)
Blindsight is a masterpiece about intelligence without consciousness. De-linking those ideas can be seriously jarring for humans, because we usually consider them two sides of the same coin.
Plus one of the more normal characters investigating the phenomenon just happens to be a vampire who--surprisingly enough--is neither formulaic nor boring.
> Plus one of the more normal characters investigating the phenomenon just happens to be a vampire who--surprisingly enough--is neither formulaic nor boring.
The writing-guide-esque "OK, now write down ten wild elements or characters that certainly do not fit in your world... flip page ... and now add one of them, finding a way to connect it to some other element you've already established" was almost comically transparent, but also so damn effective that I've added it to the ol' toolbox.
(I mean, I don't know that Watts literally did that sort of exercise, exactly, and even doubt that he did, but in my head that's definitely how that part got in there)
I feel pretty certain that the vampires were included in quite the opposite way - especially if you read the sequel, which features their story more heavily. To me, the existence of vampires in the Blindsight setting seems essential.
I found Echopraxia a disappointing follow-up to Blindsight, because the thematic core was much harder to grok, and it felt diffuse and attenuated. It's very hard to write a novel that explores what it means for scientists to encounter the limits of scientific rationality as we understand it.
Interestingly, (and apropos) McCarthy's last, Stella Maris, I think, did a much more eloquent job of exploring the same themes. Stella Maris is astounding, it's cosmic horror without the 'supernatural.' Instead there's only Gödel and Metzinger.
My impression is that Watts is best at first books in a series. Both Blindsight and Starfish were (and are) absolutely incredible to me, but both of their sequels fall short of the original promise. However, from reading his blog, this is not unexpected. He doesn't write sequels to further explore the same ideas, but to move background ideas into the forefront and explore those. This would naturally lead to disappointment if the reader wants more of the original premise.
That said, I think Echopraxia is a better sequel than Maelstrom and a pretty good book on its own. He is working on a final book in the Blindopraxia trilogy and I expect it to move even further from the wonder of the original book, but now that my expectations are set I am looking forward to it all the same.
I know this won't apply to everyone, but Blindsight is one of the few pieces of media that noticeably changed my life. Here be profound ideas, although your mileage may vary, especially if you're neurotypical or already very well read in concepts of truly alien intelligence. (The space probe chapter was one of the most life-changing passages I've ever read, so that may tell the reader something about my autism.)
I read the entire thing in HTML on my phone on the author's web site over a week or so. After the first few days of catching bits during breaks, I found myself sitting at home on the porch just reading from my phone - not typical for me. (I did later buy a copy.)
It Comes at Night didn't have anything come at night. It was derivative of everything else in the genre to the point of being a snore. I was so disappointed. One of my least favorite A24 films.
I suppose I was expecting peak Shyamalan, but A24.
Yeah, it was mostly just a slow-burn misery-fest. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I'd put it in the "good, but also horrible" category, exactly. Like, I don't think there's actually much to it other than the misery. Not like a Funny Games, say, that's thoroughly miserable but also doing some other, interesting things that both justify and require the misery.
I like that you can play through both The Last of Us games and think "What a grim existence, scraping together things to cobble a defence against relentless threats. Horrific."
And compare it to The Road, whose environment would have you begging for a holiday to The Last of Us. Not just the lack of food, but the lack of ability to grow new food, to rest, to warm, to heal. The constant, dogged, thinking, scheming threats. And your kid isn't pushing ladders down to you nearly enough.
I've only watched the movie. But after having watched it, I facetiously recommend that you only watch it if you are currently happy. Because damn, is it just the biggest fucking downer. It will make you more depressed after having watched it. So if you watch it while already depressed, I can't imagine the depths it will bring you to.
It's a good movie, and I'm sure a good book (consider it thrown on the backlog), but damn, so effectively bleak.
Interestingly Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men looks alot like Cormac McCarthy around the same age. [1][2][3]
Coen brothers still make movies with real people and brought this world to life in an authentic way.
[Anton vs the "We can't give out no information" lady](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WLA81q9ok0) I love Coen movies with regular people like this. The lady is hilarious and it is one of the only people that Anton didn't take out.
I've watched that one too. That one has a sort of resigned feeling to it. Situations are over, but nothing is really resolved. It's kind of like a serious version of Burn After Reading. Here are these various lives and stories and the situation that has intertwined them. Once the situation is has passed, everyone is affected in different ways, but nothing really ends.
I'd read it multiple times previously, but recently picked it up after having not read a book in a year or two. Got through 160 pages without realising. Felt like I'd blinked and it happened.
My son is now a bit older than the boy would be. I feel like the book would either build your resolve or beat it down, so just go in forewarned.
I did the same, read it in one (or maybe two) days.
In retrospect, I'm conflicted. In some way, it seems too straightforward ("The Road" title fits well) dystopia. Distilled, masterfully executed, but somehow ... trivial? Maybe it's the "Seinfeld is unfunny" trope where it can become obvious only after experiencing it.
I also read The Road in a single sitting but over night. It was also a stormy night in late November which just added to the atmosphere of the book. The next day felt pretty bleak and grey, just like the weather and my mood. I love it when a book can do that to you.
“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
Something which may not be known to many, McCarthy was also quite interested in math, philosophy, cognition. A piece of his non-fiction work which made a lasting impression on me was "The Kekule Problem" [0], exploring the power of the unconscious, combative with consciousness, as an unveiler of Truth.
If you’ve read his final two books it’s incredible clear how fascinated he is by math, physics, and their interaction at philosophy. Stella Maris is basically just a long exploration of the philosophical implications of math, in dialogue form.
I had a harebrained fantasy of taking a sabbatical to do a visiting fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute while he was there. I figured he would like talking brain-behavioral science and I would like hearing anything he had to say, plus would have gotten to talk with mathematicians and other technical experts with a visionary tinge. I never did it (too early in my career to try), but it was fun to imagine.
My spouse got me his final novel(s), which he had the prescience to announce as such, and I almost started reading them a few days ago. Now I know it will be a memorial read, also content that he assumed it mostly would be.
I think McCarthy believed that telling a story and conventional grammar had no necessary relationship. Whether you like few or none of his novels, recognize that he was brave enough to forfeit fame and fortune to tell the story he wanted to tell, and the way he wanted to tell it. Fiction publishing today would squash CM like a bug. That’s the bad news
I will never remember this Yelp Review a fan of his wrote:
Three stars.
See that false burrito. See it swaddled in tinfoil on the desk in the bowels of that great tower, a bundle of meat and sauce in a place long ago ceded to silicone and copper. The stooped man eating that peasant food as if in consuming it he can escape to a farmfield in a verdant valley and look down and see blood running from his blisters and say, yes this is work. This is work. Instead his hands are clawlike and ruined by the keyboard and the mouse for he is a thing of bone and sinew in a sprawling contraption electric and of man’s creation but not of man at all. And were he to saw his breast open with that plastic knife and soak the carpet black with his hot blood and were he to look ceilingward like some stigmatic enraptured and with the bellows of his lungs let forth a soaring wail in that subbasement his screams would be swallowed by the acoustic panels and repulsed by the good steel door as if he had made no sound and spilled no blood at all.
Calling the Border Trilogy a coming-of-age story is...one way to look at it for sure, given how it all ends. I love "The Crossing", top three McCarthy for me (the others being "Blood Meridian" of course and "Child of God").
Blood Meridian is getting all the praise, and that’s probably right, but I’d put The Crossing right up there with it. The last scene with the crippled dog conveys so much about the journey Billy has gone through, abba what it’s done to him… I don’t know if “coming of age” is so apt as “loss of innocence”
That stuff with the wolf in The Crossing was as deeply affecting to me as an adult as say, The Never Ending Story's Atrax in the Swamp of Sadness was for me as a kid.
I would second that, and add Suttree towards the end. I personally found The Road a little awkward, it felt unfortunately like an experiment in the SF / post-apocalyptic genre that was less successful than his surreal westerns.
And if you still want more westerns after that, Lonesome Dove and Paradise Sky. Neither are McCarthy, but they’re both amazing and will resonate with the same audience.
Damn. I immediately got chill bumps reading this. I'm not one to fawn over so-called celebrity deaths, but here, we have lost a philosopher and a thinker who also told great stories. It feels like ideas and perspectives will be lost forever, referring to the ones he never wrote down or spoke about.
I have always been in love with McCarthy's deep philosophy in his writing. I like the following two examples, not for any particular relevance of their content but just for the deepness that they get at.
One is one of the final scenes in the No Country for Old Men film adaptation by the Coen brothers, and the dialogue is in the book as well. Sheriff Bell visits his cousin Ellis about feeling overmatched by the violence he's seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdOPJKocMWg
> "What you got ain't nothing new. This country's hard on people. You can't stop what's comin'. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity."
The other is one of the final scenes in The Counselor, which is, as far as I know, McCarthy's only screenplay, at least that was actually filmed and released. The Counselor is on the phone begging for some way to get his wife back from the cartel, the Jefe of which explains the impossibility of the request regarding situation he has created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIn7y4ejIFM
> "It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There's only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago. I don't mean to offend you, but reflective men often find themselves at a place removed from the realities of life. In any case, we should all prepare a place where we can accommodate all the tragedies that sooner or later will come to our lives. But this is an economy few people care to practice. ... You continue to deny the reality of the world you're in. You are at that crossing. At the understanding that life is not going to take you back. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist."
This is pure brutality in the form of prose and dialogue.
Oops, it's a bit of a spoiler for sure, but it's probably expected from the beginning. The cast described the screenplay as bizarre. I think the movie could have been better handled, but it has some great writing. It's what you would expect from a novelist like McCarthy writing a screenplay. And it's not a feel-good movie for sure though. The violence is both bleak and full.
Although the preface to Suttree is my favorite, the preface to The Passenger is beyond the best:
* It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones. One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she’d dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered. That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures. The hunter knelt and stogged his rifle upright in the snow beside him and took off his gloves and let them fall and folded his hands one upon the other. He thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing. He bowed his head. Tower of Ivory, he said. House of Gold. He knelt there for a long time. When he opened his eyes he saw a small shape half buried in the snow and he leaned and dusted away the snow and picked up a gold chain that held a steel key, a whitegold ring. He slipped them into the pocket of his huntingcoat. He’d heard the wind in the night. The wind’s work. A trashcan clattering over the bricks behind his house. The snow blowing out there in the forest in the dark. He looked up into those cold enameled eyes glinting blue in the weak winter light. She had tied her dress with a red sash so that she’d be found. Some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation. On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.*
It hits even harder when you finish Stella Maris and consider the significance of that red sash — that she put it on despite her despairing solipsism. It breaks your heart.
I read The Road like 10-15 years ago. It was the first or one of the first books I fully read in English (I'm not a native English speaker). The simplicity of the grammar and lexicon helped me to follow the story, and although the crude environment that happens in the book is daunting and somber, I loved the book.
From that time, when I see some news piece about Cormac McCarthy I cannot thank him enough for doing a masterpiece accesible to ESL speakers.
For me, McCarthy is among a few authors ( Sherman Alexie, Edward Abbey, Octavia Butler, etc) who truly broke the Northeastern cultural stranglehold on American literature. His voice is brutally and uncompromisingly continental.
I listened to The Road on audiobook while falling asleep, over a week or so. Amazing book, but not a recommended setting! Don't think I've recovered yet either.
Feel silly but I didn't know what Darker America was. Maybe i'm in the minority but The Road, No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian seem to be massively more popular so it seems a bit odd for the title to mention what I perceive as a lesser known book.
"he fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until he fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved him forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was"
I think this paragraph, from The Road, is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever read:
“Once there were brook trouts 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 moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
> READING MCCARTHY is a podcast devoted to the consideration and discussion of the works of one of our greatest American writers, Cormac McCarthy. Each episode will call upon different well-known Cormackian readers and scholars to help us explore different works and various essential aspects of McCarthy’s writing.(Note these episodes try to offer accessible literary criticism and may contain spoilers from different McCarthy works.)
I came across his work far too late and am catching up, having only read The Road Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men so far. I've never read an author who can paint such a vivid picture in my mind with so few words. I wasn't much of a fiction reader prior to picking up his work, and it's certainly reignited a love of reading for me.
His books don't resonate with a good number of friends, and I can understand why. But for me it's a strange mix of dark and comforting, with words that make my neurons dance like they're listening to jazz.
The Road is really good and a quick read. I read it in one sitting, and really loved it. Check out Sutree for something completely different but really well rendered. McCarthy is one of my favorite authors. He gave us so many gifts.
The border trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) is understated compared to many of his other books, but gets to something about young men becoming who they are that I haven't found elsewhere.
Since I haven't seen mention of it yet, let me recommend one of his (seemingly) lesser known works: The Sunset Limited.
It's a play of 2 characters and 1 setting, and has an (IMO very good) HBO adaption starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones.
Like most of his work, it's an existential contemplation of sorts and perhaps raises more questions than it answers. But I find myself going back to it a lot, maybe as a divining rod for my own meaning to life and death.
As others have mentioned here, John Hillcoat (director of the film adaptation of "The Road") is taking a crack at filming the "unfilmable" "Blood Meridian".
I'm stoked to see how he handles BM, especially who he casts as Judge Holden. I feel like Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been perfect for the role, but I'm confident Hillcoat will find someone equal to the task.
My favorite Judge quote from BM:
“This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance, in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned, and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale, there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event, the history of all is not the history of each, nor indeed the sum of those histories, and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence, for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know, he might well absent himself, and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan, if plan there be.”
A friend of mine has been saying for years now, and I fully agree, that Puddles Pity Party[0] would be perfect casting for Judge Holden. Not just his height and that he’s bald. Watch the way he moves, listen to his voice. I can’t imagine anyone else playing the role now.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=VBmCJEehYtU (Linking his version of Royals, as it’s my favorite, but there are are plenty of other wonderful covers and originals)
A phenomenal artist. Thank you Cormac for bringing honest beauty to my life.
Some of my past HN comments re McCarthy:
-
When I read both Melville and McCarthy, I'll often find myself mid-run-on-sentence and think to myself, "welp, he's gone too far this time" only to find, by golly, they pull it off in the end. What would otherwise be complete pretension and chaos is, when wrought by true literature artists, simply breathtaking. There are times when I'm reading McCarthy and I literally, out loud, utter "Lord have mercy" for the beauty/fullness/meaning that man can lay upon us.
—
This quote from Blood Meridian is one of my favorite in all of literature and I think capture McCarthy's magic. He has such great talent to describe simultaneously with vivid details yet inexact clarity/meaning.
> It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
Adding to the list of favourite passages. This is from The Road, when the father holds his son: “No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”
In light of the LLM break throughs in the last couple of years, I've been returning his speculative essay about the source of symbolic thought every few months: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/
McCarthy was one of my bigger introductions to what I could call a more "adult" form of literature. He was one of my favorite novelists when I was in my late teens and early 20's, and I believe him to be a master of setting a tone in a novel. Truly will never forget the first time I read Blood Meridian.
I have never connected with any artist as much as I have with Cormac McCarthy. His writing brings forth feelings and ideas that seem to have always existed inside me but were waiting for his words to take shape.
Throughout his work runs a line of thought that is never explicitly explained or can be easily summarized but some of his sentences and paragraphs nod at it. Here's one of my favorites:
"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."
I always heard the "Big 4" (white guys) were John Updike, McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. I think somebody like, the disgraced, Harold Bloom at one point said they were the last 'great', living American Authors.
Bloom considered McCarthy the best living American author and Blood Meridian one of the best American novels, right up there with Moby Dick in terms of importance.
He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.
Fudge, I loved that guy and his work. I still remember how fun it was to binge The Road in a single day. I don't think I left my couch from the early morning on through to the late evening. Such a compelling and gripping writer.
Blood Meridian is a rendering of the actual history of that period. McCarthy based the main characters on real people. The kid is Samuel Chamberlain who wrote about his time with the Glanton Gang in his memoir My Confessions: Recollections of a Rogue. Here's a fascinating article that discusses Blood Meridian as an important work of American history.
I grew up in Ohio. I moved west the year I turned 30. I always felt like the West never made sense to me. Through his words, I feel like I got some understanding. Fantastic writer and a definite loss to American prose.
Growing up in Ohio as well, I was fortunate to encounter in high school Ursula Le Guin's short story "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" which helped me feel like I understood it better. After spending more time in the West and Southwest, those feelings were confirmed.
Just my experience with living in Texas, there is a major individual independence vein that runs through a lot of folks here. In NE Ohio, sure... there were those that didn't follow the norms, but for the most part attitudes were very collective.
Texas? Don't tell them what they can do with their land. Don't tell them they need to ditch their truck. Not saying it was a 1:1 illustration in his novels, but it did give me a better insight into how folks west of Austin 'tick'.
I posted a few months ago[1] about Suttree, and was surprised at how many people connected with the book (which I agree is great).
I haven't read The Road or Blood Meridian, but when you consider the different styles and structures of McCarthy's prose, it's easy to agree that he was a remarkable writer. RIP.
RIP McCarthy
The Road was a hard book to read - sparing with words but yet very effective at describing the dystopian landscape and the grueling journey that father and son are on.
I could not stop thinking about it for weeks after having read it - had a profound effect on me.
RIP. One of the modern literary giants. The Road remains one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read, and Blood Meridian, the most disturbingly beautiful.
Is he worth reading if you don't have a vivid visual imagination? From the glowing praise here I feel like I should finally check him out, but all these comments sharing people's favorite quotes are just falling flat with me. I don't picture things in my head real well, and usually skim over description. I'm generally more captivated by interesting ideas than interesting ways of expressing the ideas.
I only started reading his books within the last year, but McCarthy quickly became one of my favorite authors. Suttree in particular I think is quite wonderful. I also immensely enjoyed the Passenger and have been thinking about it for months. Allow me to quote some of the late critic Roger Ebert's remarks about him, which had an influence on me to pick up a McCarthy book:
At first when I could not speak, I could not read easily, because sedation had undermined my attention span. I was depressed. I could turn on the TV, but why? My wife brought a wonderful DVD player to my hospital room, but I could not make myself watch movies. My life was stale and profitless. I would spend hours in a murky stupor. Knowing I had always been reading a book, my concerned wife began reading to me: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens.
Curiously, my love of reading finally returned after I picked up Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a book I had already read not long before my first surgery. Now I read it two more times. I was not "reading the same book." I was reentering the same experience, the same occult and visionary prose, the life of Suttree so urgently evoked. As rarely before, a book became tactile to me. When Suttree on his houseboat pulled a cord and brought up a bottle of orange soda pop from the cool river, I savored it. I could no longer taste. I tasted it more sharply than any soda I've ever really had. When Suttree stopped at the bus station for a grilled cheese, I ate it, and the pickle, and drank the black coffee. I began to live through this desperate man's sad life.
https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-...
McCarthy, the heir of Faulkner, who mines the Southwest and Mexico for the way they can break your heart before they kill you. McCarthy is best known for his Border Trilogy, about men, horses, pain and loyalty; All the Pretty Horses was directed by Billy Bob Thornton. McCarthy's best book is said to be Blood Meridian, which Harold Bloom said he hated so much for its violence he threw it across the room twice, and then read it, declared it a masterpiece, and wrote the introduction for the Modern Library edition. My own favorite is Suttree, with its closely-woven mosaic of unusual and unknown words and its heartbreaking story. It's about a man fallen from grace who lives in a houseboat, catches catfish for a living, has hallucinatory alcoholic adventures and episodes of sentiment, pity and loyalty.
https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/coen-country
As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his "Blood Meridian", and as in his "Suttree," especially in the scene where [...], the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men-20...
I know its bad form to speak ill of the dead but -
A friend gave me a copy of "Child of God" amd frankly it was the most disgusting, dark, unrewarding, unethical, uninspired, uniteresting, poorly written books ive ever read.
I was flat out offended by the book and repeatedly had to set it down and fume about how unnecessarily disgusting he was being. I never finished it.
I got the impression that cormac was a thoroughly disturbed individual with a macabre fascination with the most fucked up 0.00001% of humanity. To make matters worth he cant write worth a damn.
I will say his metaphors can be quite beautiful hut they often make no sense grammatically.
>I got the impression that cormac was a thoroughly disturbed individual with a macabre fascination with the most fucked up 0.00001% of humanity.
you should separate yourself from that notion.
it's true that authors can be damaged individuals with little personal hope, but some of the most macabre things ever written have been conjured by perfectly normal/well-functioning/happy individuals who enjoy fairly well-balanced lives -- it's simply not a good indicator of the person behind the pen.
as for the grammatic non-sense (to which I agree can be exactly that, non-sense) I always read it as if it were sort of styled similarly to the concept of 'beat poetry'. Grammar and syntax goes out the door for prose/beauty/imagery and style.
100% agree about his prose being basically beat poetry. I think that was why I didnt like it. I hate spoken word poetry 90% of the time.
I can see the appeal, certainly, but it does really feel middle school edgelord-ish to me.
"I will say his metaphors can be quite beautiful hut they often make no sense grammatically."
Question 1: Example, please?
Question 1.5: In what way does the example not make sense grammatically?
Question 2.0-2.(n): To what degree does grammar 'matter'? Is conformance to some prescriptive view of grammar essential to 'good' writing? What is the function of grammar - precision and disambiguation? Are there contexts in which grammar can or should be subservient to other linguistic effects, such as prosody? Are there other phenomenological effects of reading to which grammar may or may not be relevant?
An exercise for the motivated reader: Read 'A Carafe that is a Blind Glass' by Gertrude Stein. What does it feel like? What does it evoke? What are we doing mentally when we read it? What exactly are we doing when we read?
> Question 2.0-2.(n): To what degree does grammar 'matter'? Is conformance to some prescriptive view of grammar essential to 'good' writing?
To be fair—his writing's a lot more challenging than most. Even most other literary writing. Even most other literary writing that's widely regarded as challenging. Editing it to conform to language & grammatical norms would definitely make it a lot easier to read.
> What is the function of grammar - precision and disambiguation? Are there contexts in which grammar can or should be subservient to other linguistic effects, such as prosody? Are there other phenomenological effects of reading to which grammar may or may not be relevant?
And this is the "on the other hand": on the other hand—and most unusually—reigning in that deviation from norms, at all, would, nonetheless, make his writing worse. Some writing can tolerate bending even the more well-considered and empathetic of writing rules—his required breaking them. Demanded it, and demanded a whole other set of rules of his own making, exactly as a poem may break the rules of prose writing, while strictly following a whole other set of rules, all to good effect.
This is so hilariously pompous. I dont need to give you an example. Im sure you can find one in the first chapter of Child of God.
And grammer matters to the extent that the sentance is able to convey its meaning clearly to the reader. In my opinion, McCarthy does not hit this mark in a lot of case. Maybe im too dense, but his mixture of invented hick language, completely fucked up punctuation, and flowery/poetic language, is often very tough to sus out. What is actually supposed to be happening is often not so clear.
That's all important, if he were writing documentation or a technical manual.
That the reader is required to make some effort to un-knot the language is a legitimate tool of the poet. Some are too impatient, used to sound-bytes from a tv personality perhaps, and won't open them selves to something novel or evocative. It has to 'make sense' grammatically and semantically. Poetry is often neither of those.
Im not the only person with that opinion. Its a subjective thing. In my opinion his writing is amatuerish. Reminds me of stuff I would write trying to shock people in middle school.
Also Id like to clarify I am basing my opinion solely on the one book of his ive tried to read- child of god
Your review is almost spot on for me. I’m agreeing with it all along with the exception that I really like his writing and, well, I would say “enjoy” his novels, I do respect and value the time spent reading them.
That was entirely up to you. That was a decision you made and blamed on someone else. I feel like that is something important to consider with your first sentence.
Idk man have you read it? I found his gratuitious descriptions of a mentally retard man ejaculating onto the corpse of a dead young lady to be profoundly disturbing and unrewarding. It read to me like the author was exploring his own fantasy, rather than using it as some kind of plot device.
Im actually quite hard to offend but when a sick fuck publishes and makes money of his disgusting pornography, its upsetting. If it had some real artistic merit in my estimation I would not be so bothered.
But clearly this is all subjective. It just crossed a line with me, and the work wasnt meaningful enough to justify it.
> I was flat out offended by the book and repeatedly had to set it down and fume about how unnecessarily disgusting he was being.
Ok, but can you see any beauty in the fact that he wrote words that evoked such a response? How much do you read on a daily basis that evokes absolutely nothing and passes without memory? Read some of his other stuff if you didn’t like this particular novel.
Actually, he doesnt even exist.
He is a fantasy made by someone who has a very very pessimistic view of humanity. There are not very many Lesters out there. Sure, maybe a few, but he is writing about something that is not at all relatable. Hes singled out some fucked up abscess in the human race and tried to make him sympathetic.
I find his exploration of dark matters to be uniquely stimulating and useful in a variety of thought experiments.
Take The Road, for example. The notion of assessing the probabilities that you'll have enough ammunition to either kill multiple assailants, or alternatively, need to keep the ammunition to kill yourself and your son seems sickening and pointless to explore to some people. Taken seriously and with an open mind, it can invoke serious contemplation of your values, what life means to you, what compassion can really mean, how you take what you have for granted, and more.
As awful as it is to consider, there are real people who have had to make these decisions. That there can be a state of existence in this world where these are pressing matters is simultaneously bewildering and disgusting, yet eye-opening in ways I consider important to living better even outside of that context.
The relentless and ruthless tunnel of gloom and suffering in that book is a useful tool to remind yourself in a vivid way: It's all still here. I'm alive. The trees are green, the rain is clean, the grains are growing for a fall harvest I can still reasonably expect will arrive — life is pretty good. And yet life can get so much worse. Perhaps I should value this moment so much more than I was prior to these thoughts.
Cormac took the very real, very disgusting parts of humanity and wove horrifying tapestries from it. But they're not purely for the sake of shock and disgust. The contrast of what he depicts — held up to most readers' realities — provides a heightened sense of the inverse of what he describes, allowing you to realize much better how beautiful the good parts of humanity are. Left to our own imaginations, most of us are not only unlikely to wade into that darkness, but we also lack the sheer depth and breath of skill he has in bringing it to life. What he offers is a sort of simulation of something otherwise inaccessible to most of us.
I'd make the case that without this exploration, our perception of life can be duller. I'd never want that dullness to be sharpened by real experience though; I'd much rather brush against that reality in the form of a story.
Human senses are calibrated by relative experience. Whether it be taste, sight, smell, touch, or even emotion: you won't recognize what feels good or what is better without experiencing what's worse in some way or another. The harrowing experience of imagining the vulnerability and suffering of loved ones or yourself might actually be an excellent tool for recalibrating and hardening your desire to see people safe and thriving. It may reestablish how crucial it is not to let the world descend into what Cormac describes. It can open your mind to possibilities you hadn't considered in ways that aren't strictly hypothetical or for the sake of pure masochism.
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