Blood Meridian

[jesse_custer]

I just watched "No Country for Old Men" by the Coens, and the story, characterization, and themes impressed me so much that I decided to look into the career of Cormac McCarthy. Many critics have cited "Blood Meridian" as one of Cormac's greatest achievements and one of contemporary literature's finest efforts. So I'm going to read it first.

Basically, I want to see if any of you would be willing to share your experiences with "Blood Meridian."

[howyadoin]

I still haven't read Blood Meridian, but I'd wholeheartedly recommend The Road and All the Pretty Horses.

[Kaiju]

I still haven't read Blood Meridian, but I'd wholeheartedly recommend The Road and All the Pretty Horses.

I was saving Blood Meridian and Suttree for my holiday reading.

I love the Border Trilogy and the other McCarthy I've read. All The Pretty Horses is a great book but something about The Crossing blew me away. That book stayed with me for a long time.

[FroggieBKT]

I'd argue that the first section of the Crossing contains the most beautiful prose in all of contemporary fiction. Blood Meridian is great too. I don't know if I've ever been more affected by the violence in a novel.

[mlcm]

"Blood Meridian" is much more "modernist" than McCarthy's other work. It's more allegorical and more sparse than anything else he's written. However, that being said, the prose in "Blood Meridian" is exquisite. I've never been so captivated by the act of people simply riding horses across the desert. McCarthy makes the very mudane seem biblical and elegaic in "Blood Meridian".

"No Country For Old Men" remains my fav McCarthy, while "The Crossing" comes up a close second. I am a huge fan of McCarthy.

[DrewTheXenocide]

I'm reading it right now. I just finished chapter IV. The end of that contained some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. Not in content, mind you.

[howyadoin]

Is this book even still in print? I've literally never seen it in a bookstore.

[jesse_custer]

Yeah, I saw it in Books-A-Million the other day.

[Doodle Bob]

There is a rather interesting interview with McCarthy in the latest Rolling Stone. He apparently rarely gives interviews and hangs out with some very, very smart people.

[Kaiju]

Yeah, I saw it in Books-A-Million the other day.

My wife picked up a copy for me at Barnes and Noble last weekend.

[jesse_custer]

Began reading this yesterday and it hasn't betrayed its title, with enough violence in the first 50 pages for one novel. Between these spurts of uncensored barbarism are flat and futile descriptions that, as mlcm pointed out, give the book a biblical trim. The dialogue is the language of the uncultured--not unintelligent but littered with no regard for the civil and quaint.

This passage I want to share reads like carnage against your very own eyes, a run-on sentence that signifies a trance for the author, a highpoint in his craft:

"Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows."

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

I figure the less context and explanation for these gruesome acts the better. Point is, read the story now.

[Kaiju]

Agreed. I'm over halfway through and it's absolutely mindblowing.

The passage you quoted was more horrifying than anything I've read in a long time. I like the exchange between Kid and the other character wondering what the hell kind of Indians were those?

The scalphunters' attack on the Apache camp and escape later in the book makes a great counterpoint to that passage.

What do you think of Judge Holden? Brrrrr.

[jesse_custer]

Possible spoilers:

Kaiju, I completed chapter 12 this morning, which is basically the halfway point. The siege on the Apache camp was similarly disturbing and beautiful. McCarthy does a good job of representing all sides as savages.

Holden is a mystery to me. Does he represent God, the devil, or the secularist? It seems that he could represent all three at different points. I'll have to admit that sometimes I have no idea what the hell Holden is talking about. But I believe that's what the author is striving for. Most of the characters themselves are perplexed by his language and ways.

[jessecuster3]

If you do a bit of a search this was the first book in the supposed CBR Book Club and there was some discussion of it there.

[howyadoin]

If you do a bit of a search this was the first book in the supposed CBR Book Club and there was some discussion of it there.

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