Rating: 
Summary: Overrated, James Joyce he is not
Review: Well first let me adumbrate my preference of literature; I abhor almost all contemporary authors, for a few reasons. one, usually the characterization of modern prose is as deep as a ford in a rill, second when they attempt to reach the masterful level they fail abysmally with a few exceptions namely salmon Rushdie and Martin Amis indeed all the modern authors who should be imbibed and lauded are of European residence. I am not here to give a tirade against Cormac McCarthy the author but we must not be taken in by the credulous nescient desire to be in the throes of the next Faulkner. In truthfulness as a non-elitist intellectual (forgive my preening) I am congruous in my deprecatory opinions about Blood Meridian, as a few readers here the only reason I picked it up was that it came highly recommended from Harold Bloom. In fact, Harold Bloom went so far as to say Mccarthy is the greatest American writer alive, and while he is simplistic compared to pynchon he is indeed a great author. However I think Bloom wasn't at his most objective when criticizing this book. For one as usual with literature the plot is thin and amounts to nothing as an author myself I cant be easily captivated by pseudo avant garde sentences scabbard in contemporized fiction, this is nothing more than pretentious dross. Don't feel as if you are somehow of inferior faculty because you fail to be captivated by this book (I enjoyed Finnegan's wake so before you elitist converge, heed the haggard). The method he uses to include characters appears as if it came from a discarded development sheet, and no he is not groundbreaking because he fails to use a single quotation mark, and run on sentences. If you college students wish to debunk your English professors critical pen, give him this, most elitist ignore the fact that this book is one big run on sentence. There is no true plot the kid and the judge are the only characters worth knowing and Mcarthy has a gift for describing acts of gory devilry with amazing detail it fails to generate into the story, its as if there are blocks amidst stones and the stones unfortunately are more prevalent and represent the novel. Aesthetic blood meridian is and if you enjoy works et al then by all means you might like this, but as far as literary westerns go my, this is a scourge to be avoided by all readers of excellence (read Vladimir Nabokov for real belletristic fiction)
Rating: 
Summary: One of the modern masterpieces of fiction.
Review: "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, 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."
Based on historical sources, written in an Old Testament style all its own, laced with gallows humor, synchronized with stellar and cosmological references, aglow with bright literary references to Melville's MOBY DICK and Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. It has been highly praised by such diverse literary figures as Harold Bloom, Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Steve Hamilton, and Madison Smartt Bell. To get some inkling of the brilliance of this novel, see John Sepich's NOTES ON BLOOD MERIDIAN or go to the Cormac McCarthy website.
Rating:
Summary: Blood, blood, blood.
Review: I know a mild-mannered guy who says he can't immerse himself in anything--be it a book, a play, a movie--where the protagonist is morally corrupt. "Blood Meridian" would probably send him into cardiac arrest. But he is a unique case. Most of us love to plunge into the darkness, though for many different reasons. The main reason to plunge into this book--which is horrifyingly violent from start to finish--is to look at a culture of violence from within. The Kid is swept up into the world of the Glanton gang as though he was born for it. The wasteland of the southwest--as painted by McCarthy with dizzyingly wide expanses of desert, strewn with human and animal carcasses, and blood red sunsets--is downright phantasmagoric. There is no consoling shoulder for the reader to cry on in "Blood Meridian". There is no character to turn to to reaffirm the goodness inherent in men's hearts. There is only the Judge--an awesome creation, quite supernatural, whose meditations on the perpetuation of war and violence are as chilling as the physical brutality he dispenses throughout the novel. It is a demanding book, but it is not difficult for the attentive reader. McCarthy's prose is archaic, sparse, and beautiful. And, being a western, the book is not without its harrowing action--most notably a brutal sequence on a volcano. It is, as Harold Bloom says, "the ultimate western."
Rating:
Summary: Answer to question from London reader
Review: The "I" in paragraph 2 of chapter one is the kid's father, drunk and reminiscing, speaking directly to the kid. McCarthy's eschewal of quotation marks does make this a little ambiguous, but not hopelessly so. The Leonids meteor shower of 1833 was one of the most spectacular in recorded history -- possibly 150,000 meteors per hour -- and it occurred on the night of November 12/13, pinpointing the kid's birthday. Notice also that at the end of the novel, when the now middle-aged kid walks out to the jakes in Fort Griffin to meet his grisly fate at the hands of the Judge, there is another spectacular meteor storm occurring -- possibly the Leonids again, which would mean the kid dies on his birthday.
Rating:
Summary: Question
Review: This is the best book I've ever read. Can someone answer the following: Who is the "I" in paragraph two of chapter one? The sentence is: "I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens"
Unlike the rest of the book, the first eleven paragraphs of chapter one are written by an observer. So who is it?
My guess is the Judge, but the tone is wrong for him.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm drowning in a bloody grammar quagmire!
Review: I want to soften the blow for the Cormac fans by saying McCarthy has penned some sequences in this book that are some of the most vivid imagery I've read but the images are few and far between but when they come they are like painting pictures with words. (There I even used a grammatical structure they would appreciate).Certainly the imagery is there, and that is what earns the second star for me. But the rest of the book is just bogged down in long-winded grammar and strained similes. I chose a page at random to give you an idea. Here is the first sentence on page 251: "On the day following they crossed the malpais afoot, leading the horses upon a lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood, threading those badlands of dark amber glass like the remnants of some dim legion scrabbling up out of a land accursed, shouldering the little cart over the rifts and ledges, the idiot clinging to the bars and calling hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates." You still with me? Alone, you could almost argue this sentence conveyes a lot of meaning... but try meandering through 335 pages of it! It's just plain aggravating! A college professor of mine recommended this author as his favorite. This professor was a bit of a grammar policeman in grading our essays. I chuckle to myself when I think what would have happened if I would have turned in a sentence like the one above. Out comes the red pen with the words "RUN ON" and big exclamation marks all underlined. But because it's... *Cormac*... it's okay.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read!
Review: You might find this novel a bit too gorey but there is one thing everyone has to agree with: it's written damn well. I guess all the Faulkner parallels originate from here: one might write a violent tale about murder and massacres in the far west but if he lacks the style, he'll just earn comparisons to a Tarantino film! There is a lot more here: brilliant writing, mesmerizing descriptions of the places and landscapes and a kind of "atmosphere" that reverberates though the book and that I can't justly put in words...
Rating:
Summary: Quentin Tarantino does literature
Review: This was not a page turner for me. Instead, it was a book I picked up with great difficulty each time. I would not have finished it if it had not come so highly recommended from a literary friend.
The violence is overstated. Like with Tarantino movies, MCCarthy has felt the need to slap us in the face with the worst kinds of violence to demonstrate his point that The West was not a glamorous place full of John Wayne heroics. There is child killing, animal killing, rape...all the worst sorts of death. It was just hard to get past these points and move with the story.
You don't need to be "sensitive" to be offended by a saturation of violence against innocent people.
The writing style is quite obnoxious. One more simile and he should apply for a patent on them. No quotation marks, which I realize is a writing tool to convey continuity and stream of consciousness, but here it just provides confusion.
I did like the movement of the story and there were some good scenes, but the redundance of the killing just ruined it for me. It could have been implied and kept historically accurate without being so graphic.
Rating:
Summary: A true masterpiece on violence
Review: The most grotesque novel ever written in modern literature, Cormac McCarthy should have earned the Pulitzer Prize for a novel so splashed with blood and massacre, it outranks all the horrific books published by Stephen King or Jews who have written about their concentration camp experiences during World War II. To read this book is like memorizing detailed instructions on how to butcher a cow in a meat plant. The novel could easily take the place of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as the number one book the FBI would find in a serial killer's home. The story is not about murder, although one see's it in each gripping chapter of Indian massacres, merciless bar fights, child killings, and simple I don't like seeing your face, so I'm going to chop your head off scenarios. Instead, the story gives us an understanding that world peace can never be obtained in a society ruled by competition and war-making genes flourishing in all of us. The novel is brilliantly executed and keeps the reader "with a strong stomach" reading until the climatic end. Cormac writes with a poetic style, distorting descriptions with brilliant metaphors, so one receives an exciting view of the landscape like only Melville and Faulkner can do. The highlight of the book is its haunting albino character, Judge Holden, a Moby Dick or Satan in human form who exploits the shortfalls of humanity. One could imagine Marlon Brando of Apocalypse Now in the character Judge Holden, but with white skin and a vocabulary as prolific as a Harvard graduate. The Judge kills with relish and gives creditable excuses for all his murders. If you have read Stephen King's The Stand, you will find many similarities between Holden and Randall Flagg, they are the same demonic entity, but the Judge is more brilliantly done up. In the end, the Judge is neither evil nor sympathetic to the human cause, but is a reminder to our mortality and how useless self-gain, entertainment, and love means in the end when all that invites us is death.
Rating:
Summary: An Astounding Read
Review: This book is haunting -- terrifying and beautiful. Read this excerpt. The main characters are attacking a column of mules packing mercury for the mines: "Every man of them was firing point blank at the muleteers. They fell from their mounts and lay in the trail or slid from the escarpment and vanished. The drivers below got their animals turned and were attempting to flee back down the trail and the laden packmules were beginning to clamber white-eyed at the sheer wall of the bluff like enormous rats. The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth's heart, the fleeing stag of acients fugitive on the mountainside and bright and quick in the dry path of the storm channels and shaping out the sockets in the rock and hurrying from the ledge to ledge down the slope shimmering and deft as eels."
|
