Hey /lit/ what's your opinion on Cormac McCarthy? I just started The Road and it seems like what might happen if some good literature fucked an airport novel.
>spits
>not starting with suttree
>>7582805
>reading his worst book
>>>/reddit/
>>7582938
well what's his best novel in your opinion?
>>7582987
Blood Meridian is his magnum opus
The Border Trilogy is also fantastic, if a bit more romantic than McCarthy's usual fare
>>7582987
Blood Meridian, Harold Bloom told me so.
>>7582987
suttree
His writing style sucks. Return the books you bought.
>>7583018
His prose is the only thing I've enjoyed about The Road so far.
>>7583018
>not able to appreciate great prose without bias
This is supposed to be a smart board.
>>7583137
>smart
>>7583042
The language in The Road is subpar compared to most of his other novels. If you enjoy it, I'd recommend moving on to Suttree when you've finished, it's arguably his best novel aside from Blood Meridian, and probably the best way to start with serious McCarthy.
>>7583159
Thanks, anon.
I love it, not sure why it's been swept up in 'muh literary world' though. It's pure unapologetic genre stuff and all the better for it.
>>7582987
Child of God (8/10), Suttree (9/10), Blood meridian (10/10), the border trilogy (8,7,7)
The Road is a 5 from a literary perspective.
He's good but you'll never convince me he doesn't write a simple novel then go back and go over word by word with a thesaurus. I like reading them but I wouldn't call them difficult other than having to look up words every now and then.
>>7582805
CM is as solid as they come. The Road is shit though, don't judge him by it alone. Blood Meridian. That's the goods.
thank ye
>>7582805
Hack
>>7582805
i fail to understand how he's so great he's exempt from basic grammatical rules.
just use the fucking quotation marks, you pretentious cunt.
>>7583736
Oh, so no other author has ever foregone quotation marks?
-Are you retarded?
>>7583736
Literally this.
I was talking to an english major and asked her what it was all about.
She literally
>literally said,
"it's post-modernism"
profound.
>>7582805
I've heard declamatory voices on here shout both how amazing and how shit his prose is, so either there's a huge variation in the quality of his writings or he's so stylistically unique that people can't make comparisons and either love or hate him (comparable to someone like say, gertrude stein or ben lerner)
>>7583736
top pleb
if anything he shows how superfluous grammatical rules are as his writing can be read as easily as if it included quotation marks
>>7583777
Checked, but you're both dumbdumbs. He just said that he thinks most punctuation is superfluous and ugly.
>>7583784
Including quotation marks gives their omission meaning. Refusing them is only good insofar as it is novel. Defending their complete removal from the grammatical structure of the english language is myopic and pretentious.
Randy?
>>7583796
>He just said that he thinks most punctuation is superfluous and ugly.
so? just because he doesn't like it doesn't make him a special little snowflake. it's pretension for the sake of pretension, and i have no respect for him for it.
>>7583018
I can see how one may not enjoy his writing style, but it can't be denied that there are some amazing passages in Blood Meridian.
>>7583777
Lol!!! You are such a better person than her, so superior, and so much smarter!
Read Child of God in a day. Had no idea what I was in for.
It's good, it just made me feel grimy in the end. Success?
Why does every author and philosopher have these gay black and white glamour shots
>>7583389
What does difficulty have to do with being good?
>>7583807
Nah there are plenty of other ways to mark speech. A lot of grammatical rules are there more from tradition than anything else.
Some languages get really weird.
>>7583955
the story wasnt even about me. youre def projecting familia
>>7583736
>valuing "muh proper English" over readability and aesthetics
RETARD ALERT
>>7583777
Who cares what some dumb bitch said. McCarthy is a brilliant writer.
I have thoroughly enjoyed everything he has published, I've read all but two screenplays, but I could not see the value in Child of God.
That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.
If I had a go to prose spankbank BM would be it.
>>7582805
I'm reading Blood Meridian right now. It's good.
>Everyone knows how good McCarthy is
>Scaruffi says Suttree is his best
>Harold Bloom says Blood Meridian is his best
who do I believe?
>>7583946
>so? just because he doesn't like it doesn't make him a special little snowflake. it's pretension for the sake of pretension, and i have no respect for him for it.
imo it works brilliantly in the whole mythological vibe of blood meridian. like, the whole book is written as if it's just stating self-evident facts about the world, and the dialogue's style feels like a similar systematic atmospheric description.
>>7583781
>he's so stylistically unique
This. Give yourself some time to get into the weird rhythm of his prose and his storytelling.
>>7582805
>Airport novel
I've seen Pynchon being sold at my local airport, only because Inherent Vice was out that month.
>>7584213
>deciding between a /mu/ meme and a /lit/ meme
i'll take the latter
>>7584213
I've never known Bloom to be wrong on stuff like this, though the old dude is real into "muh barbaric glory".Except maybe that King is a Cervantes
>>7584239
So, what you're saying is: Tommy Pinecone writes airport novels? Pleb.
>>7584122
But also Pinecone though.
I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night.
>>7584231
cool interpretation anon. i see how that could be very evocative of that. thanks for giving me a legitimate answer and not just
>lol, pleb
bullshit.
>>7584237
NOT REALLY HE PARROTS MELVILLE AND HEMINGWAY
hack
>>7583975
hacks
>>7582805
his fans are really lame
any [people who get mad at others for not liking him as the bestestestest writer in the whole world tells you more about the type of readers his work attracts and what that says about his quality
tl;dr: plebs galore
ye
>>7584213
>taking anything scaruffi says seriously
you got meme'd friendo
>>7583946
i always thought, in blood meridian especially, that the writing style (devoid of most grammar rules and quotations) lend the prose, and the look of a page itself, a very archaic aesthetic. Almost like a legend, from a time before language was sophisticated enough for grammar, carved into stone tablets and transferred into a book. It also evokes the King James bible (in its lack of quotation marks) which i think certainly fit, McCarthy and Blood Meridian.
"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."
Blood Meridian
The man is a painter.
>>7587980
I had to read that like five times to get it out of my system. It's easy to be an edgelord and shit on McCarthy, but his prose are so viscerally powerful
>>7587980
My personal favourite:
"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A herladic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before the torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."
>>7582826
Kek, annoys my more than "pushes hands out, and leans back in chair."
