Monday, November 03, 2008

what i'm reading now


One of the reviews printed on the cover of Blood Meridian describes the book as Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. I liked All The Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men better. This is the story of a 14 year old kid who falls in with a band of renegades who murder whole Indian tribes for the bounty of their scalps. The violence is graphic and horrific, yet told with poetic prose. The elaborate prose is sometime near opaque. For example, here is a description of the band riding across the desert: "Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all." Not the language usually found in the Western genre is it?

6 comments:

Darlene said...

No, it isn't but it sure is a long sentence. I think I can do without the violent gore ,though.

lucylocket said...

I love elaborate. even flowery, prose, but this makes me want to say, "Huh?"

ml said...

McCarthy's latest: "The Road," which Oprah picked for her book club and which later won a Pulitzer Prize, I think, was even worse than what you've quoted. It was a horrible book, desolate, misogynist (as most of his work is), with gore and violence for its own sake, and pretentious. I think he's pulled the wool over people's eyes with his stilted prose. He's like a cult: all show, no substance.

dawn said...

You've convinced me to take one book off my list...

Lorna said...

he's a little dark for me, but some of my family find his take on man's prediliction for the violent to be not only true but compellingly written.

Kelly said...

If this is what you are reading now you need to pass on the new Nelson Demille book!!!