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Blood Meridian : Or the Evening Redness in the West |
List Price: $14.00
Your Price: $10.50 |
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Product Info |
Reviews |
Rating: Summary: BRUTALITY IS MANKIND'S TRUEST GENIUS Review: The story of a movable abattoir, a desert flower in fullest bloom wrought in bold, panoramic arcs of blood and dust. It is as though Huck Finn staggered southward without aim to coat himself in filth and toil at the grinding work of murder for pay, never blinking once to the possibility of a hell or burning in that sulphur through eternity.McCarthy's novel is an epic driven by minute, horrifying description. Though most of the characters are drawn in variant shades of sociopathic indifference, each depiction is crafted in expertly effected understatement (the exception is 'The Judge' who looms as large and strangely sympathetic as any Kurtz or Ahab). Still, one cannot help being fully taken under by McCarthy's portrayal of humanity. That this is so is testimony to the author's seemingly effortless command of razor-blade prose which cuts clean to an undeniable truth born of the animal within us all. To have that truth branded on one's heart is to feel the painful exhileration of evolution by way of thoughtless deceits and homicide. Seldom if ever again will the reader pass through a story wherein the savagery is so beautifully and unerringly sustained. Finally, once the tale has closed, despite the intricate detail of harrowing,feral ignorance and lusty violence, the end is sad only because there is no more. Such is life and the high-bore power of this novel.
Rating: Summary: The vocabulary keeps learning,quite accessable. Review: This review is picture driven, a book so easly read and understood by anyone with shared experience can have a good read. You can see the deception with this man's eyes who knows he is living on borrowed time.
Rating: Summary: Blood Meridian is a two-read book Review: Like great poetry, Cormac McCarthy's books must be read twice to be fully appreciated. Of McCarthy's two main subject areas (Tennessee and the American Southwest/Mexico) Blood Meridian is the darkest of his novels set in the Southwest. Akin in horror to Outer Dark, Blood Meridian is a sentence-by sentence feast of fabulously woven prose by one of the few modern masters of the American novel. Rife with symbolism, Blood Meridian presents an often surreal picture of horror, augmented by McCarthy's uncanny ability to place the reader in the atmosphere and environment of a "wild west" of undescribable beauty, fear, and pure evil.
Rating: Summary: Blood Meridian--pure circulation without system Review: Simultaneously one of the most beguiling and unsettling novels to be found. Beyond staggeringly vivid depection of the totality of social relations in a pure culture of death and killing, the violent yoking of discourses produces a kind of language virus which infects the reader. Blood Meridian offers a powerful and quite frightening example of the linguistic constructedness of the subject, or how the speaker is spoken by the language of another. Just try not talking or writing like McCarthy after Blood Meridian. McCarthy's Elizabethan/Tex-Mex/Nietzschean prose perfectly exemplifies the heteroglossia which, accoring to Russian critic Bakhtin, is the very essence of the novel. Picture Ahab and the Great White Whale conjoined and set loose in Death Valley, as purveyor of the new religion, War. McCarthy presents an America of infinite, "borderless" landscapes that will not be possessed and monstrously chimeric figures which resist all synthesis and defy any readerly fealty to the principles of psychological depth, unity and humanity.
Rating: Summary: BLOOD MERIDIAN is as much history as it is fiction Review: As remarkable as it may seem, BLOOD MERIDIAN was a novel that carefully follows actual historic events. Though the relatively innocent observer (The Kid) and the satanic dark power (The Judge)are surely fictional creations, Glanton was an actual leader of a band of scalphunters. History hints that he was every bit as murderous as McCarthy portrays him, and he justly met his end at Yuma Crossing much as he did in the book. For a nonfiction historical account of the career of a scalphunter, try SAVAGE SCENE; THE LIFE OF JAMES KIRKER. You will see that, no matter how horrific the portrayal in BLOOD MERIDIAN, truth remains stranger (and scarier) than fiction.
Rating: Summary: One of the greatest novels ever written Review: This is a novel that, after reading the first time, you can never forget. The Judge towers over the book, your imagination, and most every other character in the literary canon. Cormac McCarthy writes a beautiful and horrific novel that is best the book written in the last half of this century and among the best ever written. With touches of magic realism, McCarthy can show Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie a few things. This is the only book that I've read which has actually caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end. You will never forget this book, you will never forget the Judge--"He says he will never die."
Rating: Summary: In my personal top-ten list. Review: I just finished this novel for a college class and it was wonderful. While I was reading it, I kept saying to myself, "I hate this, I hate this" because so much of the novel presented horrible, grotesque events, but as I was reading the last ten pages, I found myself wanting to cry and wondering why on earth I was so affected. I was sorry the experience was over. The lyric quality that McCarthy writes with is totally engaging. I was struck by what this novel had to say on the human condition, about what part we play in our own destinies, and what the end result of evolution might be. Things in this novel happen for no reason whatsoever but this too is a theme. Humans look always for patterns in their existence, but sometimes there aren't any to be found
Rating: Summary: Cormac's Best Book Review: What can one say? The best American novel of the 1980s. Violent, epic and hilariously funny McCarthy subverts and scares like no other writer in the country. One page of Blood Meridian is worth a whole forest of Stephen King.
Rating: Summary: A surrealist masterpiece that captures the essence of the US Review: Unbelievable in all respects. This book offers a Greek tragedy rendering of the usually jingoistic and romantically blinkered historical telling of the American West. The punishing precision of the writing is worthy of marvel and the story line resonates with the perpetual folly of man's vanity in the face of Earth's bounty. Nothing less than a complete and profound annihilation of Manifest Destiny and the primal, violent stupidities it engrained into American life. Should be required reading for all grade school students. Too bad Ronald Reagan was too busy reading Louis L'Amour
Rating: Summary: Very Powerful Novel Review: At first the style of writing takes some getting use to. But when you find your rhythm for reading the prose, it's actually quite beautiful. Of course this isn't for everyone. Incredibly violent. Hard to read and digest for most. Off-putting style for others. But an important work from a uniquely talented writer. I must admit, I loved reading the violence and the Judge's discourse about the beastly nature of man and his propensity for evil. He is one of the iconic figures in literature in my opinion. If he was a real person, he would be someone to truly fear. A half-mad genius with a mind for violence that has absolutely no conscience. Then again, he can be taken as a supernatural figure. A demon, a wraith. An embodiment of the evil of man. This should be required reading for college literature classes.
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