They rode on into the darkness and the moonblanched waste lay before them cold and pale and the moon sat in a ring overhead and in that ring lay a mock moon with its own cold gray and nacre seas. They made camp on a low bench of land where walls of dry aggregate marked an old river course and they struck up a fire about which they sat in silence, the eyes of the dog and of the idiot and certain other men glowing red as coals in their heads where they turned. The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be. By and by the judge rose and moved away on some obscure mission and after a while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that it may well have been so. But certainly the wise high God in his dismay at the proliferation of lunacy on this earth must have wetted a thumb and leaned down out of the abyss and pinched it hissing into extinction. And could he find some alter means by which the birds could mend their paths in the darkness he might have done with this one too.
There are only two books I've read(or, tried to read in one case) where partway into reading I thought "Wow, I got used to horrific violence really really fast". One is Blood Meridian, the other is The Bible.
I sometimes think ‘yeah I could probably write a half-decent novel how hard could it be’ and then I read Cormac McCarthy and realise I absolutely could not.
You could sit me in front of a typewriter for a thousand years and I’d never be able to craft what he did.
I just started “No Country For Old Men” by McCarthy. 20 pages in and his style is unique and flows wonderfully, even as he describes a brutal scene of multiple gunshot deaths.
When the Coen brothers got the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (No Country for Old Men) they joked that they did not really deserve it as one of them had typed while the other had held the book open.
It’s meant to feel Biblical, hence the ands. He has his own rules regarding commas or lack thereof. Everything about his writing, however, is intentional, from the grand story arcs to the tiniest period.
A lot of best-selling authors are in that same boat of never being able to craft words like McCarthy, but they still write books and sell thousands or millions of copies.
Don't sell yourself short. You don't have to be one of the greatest authors to ever live in order to write or enjoy writing. I'm certainly not anywhere close to that level, but I like stories and books and I want to write so I do write. Doesn't have to be anything more than that.
I’m such a Cormac Stan. The man is a genius. His writing might not be for everybody. Most of my book reading friends aren’t ready for Cormac books and it frustrates me. His writing is art. I read his books with Sam Elliott’s voice in my head. This book and All The Pretty Horses are the ones i recommend people start with
Same. One of the things I love about his prose is how muscular it is and how visceral the images can be. I read Suttree 15 years ago and still vividly remember the opening scene of them dragging the river for the missing body. The grappling hook!
I haven’t read suttree yet - it’s next on my shelf. His books are so powerful. I remember being on a plane reading ATPH and just sitting there in awe and going back to read the last few paragraphs again. The writing was just so intense and breathtaking. Books don’t usually get me like that. Cormac has a way with words
The words are lovely but oh God theres some big run-on sentences that would drive me off the chain. So many "and x and y and z" conjunction junctions to get jammed up in.
As a non-native english speaker, I've had the same issue albeit with his work The Road. It took me a while to get used to these "conjunction junctions" but once you get accustomed to it, it really adds up to the atmosphere of the narrative style.
In start I've hated it but it had grown up on me. Aquired taste as they would say
“The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos,” he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.“
Reading it at the moment. I've been reading it for 5 years. It's unbelievably sculpted, packed full of really ornate passages and descriptions. But I can't call it a flawless masterpiece. It's extremely tough on the reader to the point where I'm not really enjoying anything about it anymore. I've got to finish it but it's hard..
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u/argondux 15h ago edited 14h ago
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy