RIP Cormac McCarthy

The Road or No Country for Old Men

Brilliant author.

edit: @exiledgator great suggestions. I wanted to add he won a Pulitzer for The Road. It was written with his son in mind.

 

Thanks for the recs.

Read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry earlier this year, which lead to look for similar authors, and heard a lot about Blood Meridian--but when I looked into it, All the Pretty Horses seemed like the better choice to get my feet wet with. Not regretting it at all. Rather ease my way in, than swan dive into the deep end, as I hear he's pretty intense in those books you mentioned.

Digging him so far. Hemingwayesque, but enjoying it more than any EH other than TOMATS.

 

I am going to have to re-read his new ones. Maybe more than once.

 

Lonesome Dove is such a great book. I read it a handful of years ago then watched the.mini series a couple years later. A great one two combo, IMO.

In the same vein, watch Deadwood if you haven't already

 

Though more of a writer about the modern west, you might wanna check out Thomas McGaune.

 

I thought the movie was great my favorite movie people working from my favorite author!

There's a lot to unpack and get on a screen, but the way the Cohen bros conveyed the sentiment of the bleakness was spot on. And the coin toss scene. Damn dude.

I understand that a few folks have at least considered turning BM into a movie, but I don't think it can be done. Too big. Too meandering. Too deep. Way too violent - and not that it's just violence for the sake of it, it's reprehensible, evil violence that can't be shown to American audiences the way CM wrote it. Diluting it would dilute it all.

 

No. Blood Meridian was the most dense and abstract. Did did you manage to finish it? You can find some good summaries online regarding what it all meant.

See my post above for other suggestions. Most are much more straight forward.

 

I finished it. But I can't say I enjoyed it because I had so much difficulty trying to understand what was happening. I remember repeatedly reading several pages/paragraphs and not being able to take anything away from them. Lots of bizarre/archaic words. I'll give No Country a shot.

 

No Country is great. Child of God and the Road are good follow ups too. All are pretty quick reads. You can finish No Country in a day or two.

If you finished Blood Meridian and you're still curious, there are some really interesting takes on the conclusion and themes you can google. And Yale Open Courses has an English Lit course that covers it.

 

WSJ, from a few days ago.

The Brutal Beauty of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’

The plot is as straightforward as it is grisly. A runaway adolescent known only as “the kid” heads west and in 1849 joins the murderous Glanton gang—scalp-hunters who are enlisted to kill threatening Apaches but soon expand their quarry to include all sorts of innocents—then spends much of the story traversing barren deserts and committing unspeakable acts of horror. (John Joel Glanton and his debauched marauders were a real group, and Mr. McCarthy based much of the book on the accounts of Samuel Chamberlain, who published a memoir about his time with them.)

Why would someone want to read a novel whose graphic acts of brutality make Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings look like a children’s coloring book? A simple answer is Mr. McCarthy’s writing. Without question, he was one of the best stylists of the 20th century—stripping punctuation to its studs, embracing diction archaic and mellifluous, apt to reduce sentences to the fewest possible words but unafraid to let them gallop along at full tilt when they needed to. A dying man lets out “a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world.” Parties passing in the night are “pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys.”

Amid this gripping prose “Blood Meridian” grounds itself in man’s preoccupation with the inevitability of death. Yes, carnage surrounds the characters and killings are handed out without a second thought by characters ranging from the psychotic Judge Holden—the closest thing the novel has to a flesh-and-blood antagonist—to the still-religious ex-priest Tobin. And yet, hardened as these men are, the clawing knowledge of mortality still eats at them—the “ultimate destination” of man “is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.” Like all of ours, their deaths are faits accomplis from the moment they are born; in life, they are “a ghost army” who “sleep among the dead,” experiencing but a brief interregnum between periods of nonexistence.

So how is that brief moment of life directed? If Melville—with whom Mr. McCarthy is frequently compared and whose “Moby-Dick” is often cited as a precursor to “Blood Meridian”—explored man’s search for meaning through a Romantic, post-Enlightenment lens, then Mr. McCarthy does it through a nihilistic, post-Nietzschean one. Here, free will and fate grapple in a seemingly unresolvable conflict that plays out against a godless landscape of savagery.

 

This is a quibble, but I absolutely hate the phrase "post-Nietzschean." First it suggests that the average reader is supposed to know WTF "Nietzschean" means. I would guess most people who actually read Nietzsche don't even know that. Second, Nietzche was the exact opposite if a nihilist. He rejected the idea that life has transcendental meaning, but strongly advocated one creating their own values in spite of that. Nietzche was an anti-nihilist. I suspect McCarthy was too, but I don't know.

Free-will vs. Fate is a theme in a lot of McCarthy's work and could be said to be one of the main themes of Blood Meridian. Fatalism is usually the thesis of McCarthy's antogonists: The Judge in Blood Meridian, Chigur in No Country, The Cartel leader in The Counselor (screen play), The Father in The Road (not a villain, but was the fatalist of the pair). And fatalism usually win out, but there is sometimes a sliver of hope if you look closely.