Just finished Blood Meridian. Holy shit. Somebody help me collect my thoughts.
>>7381890
seems like i've found my next book
been hearing alot of good things about it
Am I really the only one that thinks the prose of this book is quite poor? American authors are trash.
>>7381907
It's certainly overwrought. OP is probably new to books and probably has a weak personality and so he was overpowered by the "gravity" of BM's self-indulgent prosody.
Am I the only one that thinks this comment is poor?
Shitposters who provide no reasoning are trash.
>>7381907
not an american and i think the prose is some of the best i've ever read
>>7381915
Yep, 100% correct.
Now discuss the damn book.
>>7381930
who said it was purple?
>>7381924
If you think the prose is some of the best you've ever read you obviously can't have read much.
>>7381957
list 5 works that have better prose right now
>>7381968
by americans? anything written by henry james, or herman melville, or william faulkner, etc. why do you think Blood Meridian has good prose? because of Judge Holden's rhetorical flexing?
>>7381974
>henry james, or herman melville, or william faulkner
utter trash. come back when you know what you're doing, silly highschool plebeian
>>7381977
evasion
>>7381977
le patrician face xd
>>7381979
you say 'evasion', I say 'evoision'
>>7381974
Why do you think it doesn't?
>>7381986
because it's often overwrought, obscure, obtuse, and self-indulgent, without adding depth to the expression; the meaning is always king. of course eccentricity of style for the sake of effect is sometimes a perfectly valid technique, but McCarthy overdoes it. some people call it "writerly writing".
>>7381996
>i have trouble understanding the meaning being conveyed therefore the prose is bad
i had actually assumed as much, but thank you for confirming it
>people this pleb are posting on /lit/ RIGHT NOW
>>7382002
i doubt you've read McCarthy, seeing as you're having trouble interpreting my casual english post
>>7382008
i've read every mccarthy novel, and you clearly are protecting your pathetic self image by dismissing an author that uses too many big words that you don't understand
>>7381974
It's amusing that you list Melville and Faulkner like you didn't already know they are people McCarthy admits are better than him. Despite that, I'm free to disagree with you and McCarthy and claim that there is nothing "overwrought" in Blood Meridian and that McCarthy is easily among the best English language authors in history.
>>7381996
>Obscure Obtuse Overwrought
You like your "O" words a lot. It's okay to admit you had a hard time understanding BM. Most people do. It requires some time to digest but nothing about his prose distracts from the meaning and instead it often adds to it.
>>7382031
>dismissing the author
what the fuck are you talking about? do you even read the posts you reply to?
>>7382041
>It's amusing that you list Melville and Faulkner like you didn't already know they are people McCarthy admits are better than him?
and? how is that amusing? are you saying that it somehow negates my point?
>you didn't understand it
typical evasion non-rebuttal
it's not Finnegans Wake you fucking faggot, we GET the meaning. we're saying his DELIVERY is INEFFICIENT and STILTED. get the fuck over yourself.
>>7381907
>Am I really the only one that thinks the prose of this book is quite poor?
>>7382041
It's shit faget, read real books next time. Not this pulpy fagooty.
>>7382120
>evasion non-rebuttal
There's nothing to evade. You don't like how he writes. I do. What more is there to say?
Is the prose in all of his books like this? I admit that up till now I only had contact with his work through the two film adaptations of his books. Now I checked out this book and damn, I get a totally different vibe than from the films. Not just talking about the setting but the tone reminds me more of something like Carnivale than The Road or No Country for Old Men.
In fact for some reason whenever the prose gets more intense I start reading it in my head in the voice of Clancy Brown. Which is weird cause I never really voice text in my head while reading at all.
>>7381968
Lolita, Madame Bovary, The Waves, Dubliners, One hundred years of solitude, Bestiario or Hopscotch if you only want novels
Wew that was easy
That cover is fucking ugly. What a horrible edition.
Alright, OP here.
I should've made a more structured post as this free reign approach I took only led to everybody trying to lambast one another.
What do you think about Holden? Was he really there or was he the dark side to The Kid and Glanton's gang? The spirit of war? Satan, the devil, god?
How about that ending? Think The Man died? Did Holden literally kill him and win or only figuratively in the sense that The Man raped the missing girl in the jake(outhouse)?
Was anybody else actually expecting The Kid/Man to win other than me? Call it false hope, but hey, I really thought something good would happen.
Also, I am only looking for further opinions. Trust me, throughout the coming work day I'm going to be structuring my thoughts on the ending and the book as a whole, but I wanted to attempt a poke at the /lit/ subconcious.
Also, please explain beyond, "x was bad pleb shit."
>>7382602
Forgot to add these as well:
Why did Tobin begin to hiss so damn much? Near his final chapters every liece of dialogue from him came in the form of hissing. Was this simply an attempt to put in the reader a sort of dissonance?
Deep down inside was Glanton remorseful towards the outcome of his life? In the two, maybe three, paragraphs we get that almost get into his head I felt a feeling of remorse in their wording. He thinks of the people he left and those that died in his gang. Of course these small moments are finished with Glanton immediately hardening up and saying in a way that he doesn't care. Perhaps this is something I'm seeing from nothing.
>>7382602
>What do you think about Holden?
He was a physical being, perhaps a greater one than human ("war is god" and to some extend he was war personified)
>How about that ending? Think The Man died?
Judge did to The Man something so gruesome that someone got repulsed by it which as I recall happens there for the first and the last time in the book - so yeah, he's dead
>Was anybody else actually expecting The Kid/Man to win other than me?
He got what he deserved tbqh family. Him surviving wouldnt be a 'good' thing
>>7382639
Talking about Tobin what Im more interested in is how in the shootout between Kid&Tobin vs. Judge the big guy starts to call him "priest" as opposed to "ex-priest" - is it connected with the will to kill judge and not blindly obey his commands?
Also, I read somewhere that the fate of Tobin is told by Judge in the conversation with Kid in prison cell at the end. Judge made people believe that the priest was the retard.
>>7381907
>American authors are trash.
So plen it hurts.
Fuck off Jim
>>7382476
Blood Meridian is particularly detached and cold compared to his other stuff. It's all a bit like BM but I don't remember his other books being as strangely written.
>>7383729
I think I disagree about The Kid/Man meeting his end in the outhouse, mainly because of the missing girl near the end. I have yet to hammer out the thiught completely in my head to be comfortable with ut, but I think it was the girl in the outhouse, not The Man. The Man was the dude taking a piss nonchalant next to the outhouse, him having done the horrendous thing to the girl.
>>7381907
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y66j_BUCBMY
Agreed
>>7382639
I've never read this American trash author but occasionally have a look at these threads for a good laugh.
>Why did Tobin begin to hiss so damn much? Near his final chapters every liece of dialogue from him came in the form of hissing.
This is the top.
>>7384034
its literally s-m-h written there - the man goes to the outhouse and meets the judge sitting on his throne who grabs him with his huge body
so either rape or murder or both
I read this alongside the ego and his own as a self imposed meme challenge, and realised that the judge is the ultimate form of Stirner's egoism. A man unfettered by memes, acting absolutely autonomously becomes suzerain of the universe.
I'm enjoying it so far. I just got to the part where theblack Jackson beheads white Jackson with a bowie knife and nobody seems to give a fuck
I like the prose, but one thing annoys me: how do you guys deal with encountering words you don't know? On average I'm seeing a couple every page and i have to stop and look it up in the dictionary. This isn't including the Spanish. I appreciate that I'm learning new words but it's kinda tedious and breaks the immersion don't you think
>>7381890
imho, it was BOOOOOORRINNNGGGG. Left it at about 100 pages. does it get good?
>>7386001
If you think you know what the word means, as in in the context of the sentence or paragraph, then you might as well keep reading on. Obviously it would be best to know every single one, but if it hinders you that much leaving words here and there should be fine. If anything your immersion is already broken by the fact that you don't know a word when you come upon it, so you might as well look it up in a dictionary, which shouldn't be so hard since you have a phone or if you're close to a computer or laptop. Personally I just look it up every time because there are times when I might be certain of what a word means and then when it means something else entirely it changes my whole understanding of the sentence or situation.
>>7386001
McCarthy is really good with context, so as long as you're able to take clues as to the words meaning, you should be good. However, he does use a lot of plant names that I did not recognize(living on the east coast) so I would recommend looking the plants up just so the picture gets painted more clear.
>>7386005
The beginning is sort of a slog but I found enjoyment in the sentences themselves whenever the, for lack of a better word, action got dull.
>>7386001
I read BM on an e-reader. Tap the word and it opens the dictionary. Pretty handy.
>>7385948
... or Nietzsche, or the Devil, or a Gnostic devil.
>>7386316
>not reading where the book actually takes place
pic related
>>7388220
I read Anna Karenina when I visited Russia in the winter, though it was more homeless people and drunks than aristocrats and horse-drawn carriages.
Also, try reading Catcher in the Rye around Xmas time, you really get the feel, very comfy
>>7382501
>the waves
Fucking kek
>>7388236
best part about the desert is rarely changes
CARGOSA
A
R
G
O
S
A
>>7388220
>>not reading where the book actually takes place
I'd say you're too far east by a couple hundred miles.
Where was that photo taken?
t. Old Pueblo
>>7385892
Yes but the judge is presented as a pedophile--throughout the novel he is presented as raping and killing children. And it is clearly written that there is a missing girl at the end.
Why did the Judge shoot the bear? to get the organ grinding girl alone. He was raping her in the bathroom when 'The Man' appears, who the judge probably killed too, opportunistically. The guys who looked in probably saw both bodies.
>>7382602
>>7382639
>>7388523
I think the Judge essentially represents the laws of nature/materiality and the seed of evil inherent in them, he is their lawyer and high priest, but he might supernaturally be seen as an agent of the Devil, the Old Testament God, the Gnostic demiurge, Schopenhauer's Will, etc., or even of Lovecraft's Azathoth, like Nyarlathotep. He is the irony of Nietzchean optimism, brought to life in grotesque joy. The book suggests his order is not all there is, that there is some "spark"/spirit or goodness trapped within it, and the Kid is special in intuiting this at some level. Hence the Judge is a false king, symbolized best by the dream where he supervises the enslaved coin-forger (like a king inspecting his [in reality, counterfeit/illusionary] mint). I believe the Judge killed the Man, because of the latter's merciful attitude (his refusal to slay the Judge in cold blood, when given the chance, his confession to the mummified woman, etc.), and more immediately by his killing of Elrod, all underlied by the Man's long-standing blasphemous intuition against the Judge and his order. The Judge advocates a cycle of paternal inheritance, which reflects nature's bloody life-cycle. Mercy obviously largely contradicts this. But the Kid also violates his paternity by running away from his father, refusing to kill the Judge (who would've "loved [him] like a son"), and last by killing his doppelganger-son (Elrod), denying the boy's own paternity and chance to sprout into a killer himself, a semi-merciful ("you wouldn't have lived anyway") affront to the cycle. This is ultimately what summoned the Judge to destroy the Man. I think the Man did win, in some way, by simply sticking to his own, and forcing the Judge to acknowledge the rebellion by likewise committing filicide. Then you have the falling stars' appearance after the Man is murdered, the same stars as on his birth, which symbolize his unique link to the divine "spark".
Tobin was tempting the Kid to slay the Judge (hissing snake = temptation, I would guess), which would've played right into the Judge's hands. As for Glanton, we talked about him a little some days ago in this thread: >>7381074
Creating a distraction to abduct the little girl might've been the reason the Judge shot the bear. But I also think it foreshadows the Kid's murder. The tameness of a bear, a powerful natural predator, obviously creates a mockery of the Judge's system. And his unwilling dancing suggests a treacherous reluctance to participate in the "dance" (The Judge's dance symbolizing something like the danse macabre, or nature's violent yet vibrant living cycle).
Glanton is more interesting than Holden, plebs.
>>7388523
The majority say that The Judge killed The Man and did something even more horrible than dead babies/cooked brains etc.
I personally don't agree since I find it too convenient, we get a scene which describes The Mans pants and then have a guy taking a piss just meters away from the most horrible violence ever to exist.
>>7388476
About 30 miles from Carrizo Creek
>>7388969
find something more interesting to be a desperate reactionary over T B H
>>7388287
Desert very resilient, like good Russian woman.
Desert very unforgiving, like good Russian woman.
Desert slowly taking over Earth, like good Russian woman.
>>7381907
The prose isn't poor so much as it's just very different from what most people expect out of a novel. McCarthy's entire writing style is based around reflecting the world the story takes place in. Because Blood Meridian takes place in an extremely bleak, largely uneducated, and horrifyingly violent world, his prose reflects that. The simplicity is also meant to highlight how basic that kind of life was, and to draw attention to how little morality and thought play into things.
Most of it is just a play by play of action with basically no internal monologue, narration, or explanation of thoughts and motivations. This comes off as being simplistic, but the point is to show that those things didn't exist in the minds of the men in the story. This kind of style is present in all of his works, but it is by far the most apparent in Blood Meridian.
If you want to read some McCarthy with more traditional prose and style, I would recommend reading All the Pretty Horses, and the entire Border trilogy for that matter.
