I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.
Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West
CORMAC MCCARTHY
What a haunting and beautifully repulsive book! I can see why this has been called McCarthy's masterpiece, but that didn't make this fictionalized account of Westward expansion along the Mexico-Texas in the 1850's any easier to digest.
McCarthy's Biblical diction took a long while for me to get used to, and it's been a long time since a book has sent me fleeing to the dictionary every fifteen pages.
This has been my most difficult read of the year and a large part of that is due to the seemingly endless random violence that forms the spine of the narrative. It's doled out almost like a type of currency or more like a fact of existence the way the sky exists. And McCarthy spares no details. It almost seems like every horrific and wholly destructive act of violence that can happened did happen within the confines of the novel. So unbelievable was it in fact that I hadn't realized the Glanton gang actually existed and wasn't completely a fabrication from possibly Literary America's greatest pessimist.
Ostensibly, the book follows the exploits of a "kid" who aimlessly falls in with a gang of scalphunters and through their "adventures" the reader is given an idea of what America's westward expansion entailed.
The writing is beautiful and graphic and evocative and very Old Testament, and some of the landscape descriptions are the most beautiful I've yet read in the English language.
The characters, every shade of vagabond and derelict, were absolutely fascinating in a morbid way and seeing them interact and seeing how they grouped themselves and how conflicts among them spun out or died down made for some of the more interesting and compelling fabric of the novel. Judge Holden is one of the most enigmatic and beguiling and captivating creations in American literature.
At times, I wondered if I weren't reading a tale of the American Southwest and had rather stumbled upon some sort of apocalyptic chronicle detailing the clandestine battle between angels and demons who'd donned human skin. Perhaps that was an effect of McCarthy's narrative affectations and perhaps reason also lay in the occasional digression on human nature that some of the characters were privy to indulging in around teh campfire. But it made for a book that seemed to me at least immensely rich in interpretation.
I'll be thinking about this one for a long time yet.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
What a haunting and beautifully repulsive book! I can see why this has been called McCarthy's masterpiece, but that didn't make this fictionalized account of Westward expansion along the Mexico-Texas in the 1850's any easier to digest.
McCarthy's Biblical diction took a long while for me to get used to, and it's been a long time since a book has sent me fleeing to the dictionary every fifteen pages.
This has been my most difficult read of the year and a large part of that is due to the seemingly endless random violence that forms the spine of the narrative. It's doled out almost like a type of currency or more like a fact of existence the way the sky exists. And McCarthy spares no details. It almost seems like every horrific and wholly destructive act of violence that can happened did happen within the confines of the novel. So unbelievable was it in fact that I hadn't realized the Glanton gang actually existed and wasn't completely a fabrication from possibly Literary America's greatest pessimist.
Ostensibly, the book follows the exploits of a "kid" who aimlessly falls in with a gang of scalphunters and through their "adventures" the reader is given an idea of what America's westward expansion entailed.
The writing is beautiful and graphic and evocative and very Old Testament, and some of the landscape descriptions are the most beautiful I've yet read in the English language.
The characters, every shade of vagabond and derelict, were absolutely fascinating in a morbid way and seeing them interact and seeing how they grouped themselves and how conflicts among them spun out or died down made for some of the more interesting and compelling fabric of the novel. Judge Holden is one of the most enigmatic and beguiling and captivating creations in American literature.
At times, I wondered if I weren't reading a tale of the American Southwest and had rather stumbled upon some sort of apocalyptic chronicle detailing the clandestine battle between angels and demons who'd donned human skin. Perhaps that was an effect of McCarthy's narrative affectations and perhaps reason also lay in the occasional digression on human nature that some of the characters were privy to indulging in around teh campfire. But it made for a book that seemed to me at least immensely rich in interpretation.
I'll be thinking about this one for a long time yet.