Passed away today at 89, maybe the greatest living American author. After I loved No Country for Old Men's film adaptation I went back and read some of his work. Was never a "fun" read, but he had a style that's hard to replicate. His last book just came out just last year, haven't had a chance to read that one yet.
Such a great writer. The New Yorker had an excellent review in 2022, really more than simply a review, of two new novels by McCarthy, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The "preamble" to it is excellent. Here's an excerpt that I think shows what I mean about this being "more than a review." It's a deeper look into McCarthy's style as it evolved: Books December 19, 2022 Issue Cormac McCarthy Peers Into the Abyss The eighty-nine-year-old novelist has long dealt with apocalyptic themes. But a pair of novels about ill-starred mathematicians takes him down a different road. By James Wood December 7, 2022 There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” McCarthy’s deflatus mode is a rival rhetoric of mute exhaustion, as if all words, hungover from the intoxication, can hold on only to habit and familiar things: “He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk.” “He put his toothbrush back in his shavingkit and got a towel out of his bag and went down to the bathroom and showered in one of the steel stalls and shaved and brushed his teeth and came back and put on a fresh shirt.” McCarthy’s novel “The Road” (2006) can be seen as both the fulfillment and the transformation of this profligately gifted stylist, because in it the two styles justified themselves and came together to make a third style, of punishing and limpid beauty. The afflatus mode was vindicated by the post-apocalyptic horrors of the material. It might have been hard to credit, say, contemporary Knoxville as the ruined city that McCarthy describes in his earlier novel “Suttree” (1979), a giant carcass that “lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears . . . vectors of nowhere,” and all the rest. But the imagination had much less difficulty in “The Road,” where a similar rhetoric floats over the ashen landscape of an annihilating catastrophe. Meanwhile, the deflatus mode suddenly made both literary and ethical sense, since a world nearly stripped of people and objects would necessitate a language of primal simplicity, as if words had to learn all over again how to find their referents. One of the most moving scenes in “The Road” involves a father and son discovering an unopened can of Coke, as if in some parody of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, with the father having to explain to the son just what this fabled object once was. The third style holds in beautiful balance the oracular and the ordinary. In “The Road,” a lean poetry captures many ruinous beauties—for instance, the way that ash, a “soft black talc,” blows through the abandoned streets “like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor.” This third style has, in truth, always existed in McCarthy’s novels, though sometimes it appeared to lead a slightly fugitive life. Amid all the gory sublimities of “Blood Meridian” (1985), one could still find something as lovely and precise as “the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and smooth as arcane eggs,” or a description of yellow-eyed wolves “that trotted neat of foot.” In “Suttree,” published six years before the overheated “Blood Meridian,” this third style was easier to find, the writer frequently abjuring the large, imprecise adverb for the smaller, exact one—“When he put his hand up her dress her legs fell open bonelessly”—or the perfect little final noun: “while honeysuckle bloomed in the creek gut.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...ers-into-the-abyss-the-passenger-stella-maris
my favorite author. ive read all his books but the two most recent ones. ive read blood meridian at least a half dozen times and am about to start it again. his style is so enjoyable to read...like poetry. i would often find myself finishing a paragraph or page only to go read it again. a true master of the written word. apparently he spent the last decade hanging out with a bunch of theoretical scientists and quantum physicians and they inspired his last two books. i mean, come on! what a picture he paints here... “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 wedding veil and some in headgear or 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 horses' 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.”
so many philosophical gems and life truths throughout his books too... You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” “You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.” “The point is there ain't no point.” “People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things” “I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it. ” “It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men “...you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men “All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men “My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men “I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men “Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
I just hope whomever brings Blood Meridian to the screen eventually does it real justice. Maybe HBO makes a limited series on it.
One of the best. Big fan. Very nearly named my son after him, but changed my mind at the last minute. That said, if we accidentally have another baby and it's a boy, his name will definitely be Cormac.
i remember sometime in the last decade james franco put out a 15 minute or so long scene to try to get funding. it was on youtube, but got taken down. it had luke perry playing glanton. it was the scene where they first meet the judge and he shows them how to make gunpowder to fight off the indians chasing them. it didnt look very promising. franco wanted to direct and star in it and im really glad he didnt. id love an HBO 5 parter or something. it needs to be more than a 2 hour movie. as for directors, i think kevin coster could do it justice. my first pick would have been mel gibson, but i cant get behind that dude on any level. apocolpyto was bad-ass though. leo dicaprio as glanton. the judge would have to be someone really tall.
my friend names his dogs after characters in his books. john grady and lacy rawlins. and thats their names. its not john and lacy. its john grady and lacy rawlins.
yeah several years ago i spent 45ish minutes reading around on the internet on the reasoning for it not being made. i like franco but NO. I waited a long time to see Jordan's wheel of time put on screen and it was extremely mediocre. B.M. deserves to be something great. it's been a little while since something epic has come during that time period.
its been about a decade since ive seen all the pretty horses, but i remember really liking it. tough to turn any book into a two hour movie, but i thought they did a good job with it. if you have read the book but havent seen the movie, i highly recommend it. glad they didnt include james francos 'child of god' on the list. it wasnt very good. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/movies/cormac-mccarthy-film-adaptations-stream.html Stream These Five Cormac McCarthy Film Adaptations The Coens and Ridley Scott are among the directors who took big swings at the novelist’s work. The distinctive writer left his mark on the big screen.
My favorite sentence-to-sentence writer for sure. Not necessarily a true novelist, per se, but nobody can paint a scene or just think through a scene and an atmosphere like he did. Favorites that somehow get lesser mention these days: The Crossing & Blood Meridian. The writing in Blood Meridian is absolutely incredible, perhaps him at his absolute peak. Also a ton of good historical research in that one, especially for Texas borderlands folks. Glad y'all have mentioned All the Pretty Horses -- fantastic read, and along with the Crossing, one of his only books with a true plot. Of those two new books, I loved the second one (Stella Maris) to a surprising degree. (The first one is a slog but necessary to fully enjoy the 2nd.) Such an interesting format -- Q&A between brilliant young mathematician and a mental health care doctor in an institution -- and in retrospect, you can kind of read it like his winding down goodbye to the world, resigned, thoughtful, contemplative, and while wrestling with familiar demons, even relying on a kind of friendly banter with them.
The Crossing and Blood Meridian are my favorites. I also loved All the Pretty Horses. Fantastic writer. I could echo pretty much everything @B-Bob said.
Oh man, i am glad i read that. i just finished Stella Maris - i didn't think I'd like it, because I'd found the hallucination sequences of Passenger hard to get through. And i was right - i didn't like it it, i f'n loved it man. Granted i am no scientist or even adjacent but I've spent the last 3 years listening to podcasts and stuff from SFI and i know who Gronthendiek was (cause i read "when we cease to understand the world" - also great)... so I'm kind of primed for it. But jesus, it was great. I probably missed a lot of things but I still loved it. I mean i liked Passenger - but man this book was just a special way to end a career.
