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I don't want those images, written by a genius in creating powerfuldescriptive visual images. It was very well written and the story carried me along and I was conflicted about stopping but I am glad I stopped. Too many graphic images of torture, murder, mutilation, dead babies, excrement, flies, bloody body parts, agony and so on. I started reading Blood Meridian a few days ago. I don't want those images in my mind.I don't recommend the book. I took it back to the library earlier this evening and feel relieved and happy that I did not continue reading it.There is too much horrible imagery in Blood Meridian. I got about 80 pages into it and stopped. I don't want those images in my mind.
I greatly admire Mr McCarthy's gift for language. I understand why Harold Bloom writes in his introduction to the Modern Library Edition that he had several false starts with this difficult, challenging, mind-bending book. I can visualize "Blood Meridian" as a great movie. Character development, assuming the characters live long enough to develop, is limited, largely because the dialogue is so sparse.
I spent a sleepless weekend reading "Blood Meridian," and felt like I had a hangover afterward. This would have made a great short story or movie screenplay. Blood Meridian; Or the Evening Redness in the WestBy Cormac McCarthyFor some reason, I only recently discovered Cormac McCarthy, even though the bulk of his work was written 25 years ago. I am remiss for not reading many American writers since Faulkner, Hemingway and O'Neill. Others have done excellent plot summaries and reviews.so I'll stick with impressions. After a few hundred deaths and dismemberments, the shock effect becomes numbing, and we become inured to the violence - which may be the whole point.
I have less praise for his ability as a novelist. Like "No Country for Old Men," which was successfully adapted to film, most of the characters speak in monosyllables. The Judge. Maybe he is the Ultimate Judge. The first is visual; I'm reminded of Fellini, Sam Peckinpah, and Hieronymus Bosch. an obese, albino egoist, the likes of whom we have seldom encountered before (except, maybe, for Falstaff) is an enigma. I also learned that a little McCarthy goes a long way.
"The Kid", the anti-hero/protagonist, is amoral, illiterate, and inarticulate. His images are haunted and haunting: blood-smeared Indians rolling in gore after a massacre; a tree festooned with dead babies; the decapitated head of the Captain of the mercenaries displayed at a village fair. (Not that that's unusual). You could add Rainer Fassbinder for the sexual overtones and S&M.
I am beginning my third re read with anticipation and dread. I re read passages trying to fully understand the full intention. Characters are larger than life and some seemingly supernatural. Would somebody please buy McCarthy a puppy. Some familiarity of Spanish is helpful. I can not name a novel which affected me more.
The US merc's are not the only evil presence. I am totally puzzled by the epilogue and it meaning. Narrative about mercenaries and outcasts patrolling the SW US/ Mexico borders collecting renegade Comanche scalps for money. And as always McCarthy lack of punctuation takes some getting used to. Not for the squeamish. or at least that is where it starts.
Insanely violent without redemption, interleaved with the most poetic description of landscape and then the same poetic narration of unspeakable depravity.
As for Blood Meridian itself, it was so very troubling to me as to practically defy description or categorization. And it convinces. In the end, it is the kid's capacity for pity and sympathy that places him opposite the judge both physically and philosophically.Not surprisingly, Blood Meridian is written in a style that emulates (and sometimes parallels) the powerful scenes of Revelation.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, is unique in that the extreme violence depicted is not so much related to plot as it is the very nature of the characters and the scene in which the story is set. Blood Meridian begs for discussion, and I am very interested in what all of you have to say. When I first saw the movie Pulp Fiction, I remember thinking that certain lines had been moved with regard to popular acceptance of scenes of violence. Ultimately, however, the violence contained in Pulp Fiction and most mainstream Hollywood productions is more or less directly related to the plot; it is rarely gratuitous. Most of the story follows action on and around the Mexican border in the years 1849-1850, when violent encounters between whites and Native Americans were commonplace. Large and hairless, Holden and the kid are sometimes placed together among the same group, but the reader is always conscious of the tension between them.
I can only say that it is the work of a genius; whether I can count is among my favorites (or even most respected) will take a considerable amount of further contemplation. In McCarthy's version, however, it is the weak and innocent that are found wanting and are condemned to violent death. Precisely how that triumph is accomplished (whether by violent murder or homosexual domination) is a subject of some debate.I think that I have never been quite as unsettled by a novel as I have by Blood Meridian (though The Road comes close). Ultimately, I think that McCarthy's genius lies in his ability to dig deep into the places that many of us are afraid to go and show us the logical outcomes of some of our most troubling feelings and capacities as human beings. McCarthy creates characters that readers of his other work might recognize, at least in broad outline. It is considered by many to be McCarthy's greatest work and one of the most important works of our generation. Of course, the plotlines of horror and slasher movies revolve around depictions of violence, making them pillars of the plot itself.
Indeed, the end of the novel is as ambiguous and as apocalyptic as any I have ever read, wherein [**Spoiler Alert**] the reader can only be certain that violence has triumphed and firmly established itself as the nature of the world. Judge Holden is the novel's antagonist and represents the embodiment of the violent nature of man. "Man is a violent (and godless) animal by nature" appears to be the premise out of which the entire novel develops. "The kid" is the unnamed protagonist--a runaway from Tennessee with excellent gunfighting and survival skills, which lend themselves to violence only when necessary for the kid's protection.
This strikes me as unnecessary to the telling of the story (calm yourselves, McCarthy fanatics); we only need to know that the Kid is struggling through a parched, mountainous area and that he's come upon a bit of trickling water. First of all, there is the beauty of McCarthy's style:"They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. After you've traveled halfway through this novel, believe me: you will read these words as you've never read them before.Lexically, BM both frustrates and rewards (often simultaneously) and there have been few times when I was so hard-pressed to use a dictionary. The vocabulary also pulls from different scientific fields such as geology and paleontology.
American prose cannot be the same after this book. I have undergone my baptism and now ritually subject myself to the intermittent sprinklings of different works. I will not spoil any of his delicious monologues in this review but he is a character that could only have been conceived in hell amidst the howling of Iago and Edmund and Milton's Satan. At other times, he lets the words "scalp" and "hang" and "rape" simply speak for themselves. He is a creature of nightmare--and not the silly nightmares we awake from and chuckle at but the ones we awake from screaming, soaked in sweat and then meditate on for hours after.
The sheer lyricality of his prose both belies and augments the horrific acts of violence it conveys. The magnitude of what McCarthy has accomplished troubles me in the sweetest way and in his language I hear (as many have heard) the iron and sand of the Old Testament. This book challenges any serious reader to reevaluate the depth of his or her own word-hoard. Sometimes these usages seemed gratuitous:"The seep lay high up among the ledges, vadose water dripping down the slick black rock."For those who do not know the meaning of the word "vadose" (and I was just recently among your number), it means that the water is located above the water table. Oftentimes, the words are regionally significant to the Southwest United States and therefore help set the atmosphere of the book. For me, reading is job that I love and take seriously. Blood Meridian challenged me on various levels. But as it frustrates so it rewards, and in equal if not greater measure.
Does the origin of the water truly matter enough to use this word. At times one does not know whether to marvel at the beauty of some especially vivid killing or to be physically ill from the richly evocative prose. Many of these foreign words are context-specific--that is, McCarthy uses the names of actual parts of wagons or clothing or what not. For those attracted by reviews touting the novel's violence and depravity: you will not be disappointed. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing."It has been said before but it bears repeating: McCarthy's style is enviable. BM, more often than not, is not character-driven. Books are not passing entertainment but the records of the best we have dreamt and thought (which I believe is Matthew Arnold), and for the reader to comprehend such intricate emotional states and philosophical concepts he must immerse himself in the words of his language. There is precious little plot and no internalized dialogue to convey the psychology of the characters.
McCarthy has a tendency to intersperse powerful scenes of violence with alien adjectives or nouns or verbs--instant tension breaker because I suddenly have no idea what the hell has happened. McCarthy describes massacres and scalpings and hangings and rapes with painstaking attention to detail. Some of these things irked me at first, but I respected McCarthy's vision. The words do enrich his language and the descriptive quality of his scenes, but one must know these words to appreciate their power on a first reading. Most of the characters are nothing more than sketches and I only found the Kid to gel for me as a real person towards the end of the story. The power of McCarthy's style strikes like a hammer on iron and the echoes still haunt me.And now for the unconventional structure of BM.
Everything exists on the surface and must be interpreted for what it is worth--much like real life. If ever a character from literature will resonate with you, it will be this man.I have refrained from quoting my favorite passages from this book because everyone deserves to experience them as I did--unprepared for both their horror and their beauty.
While the characters of BM are virtually all distasteful and violent and the very landscapes seem aching to tear men apart, the Judge stands alone as the book's enigmatic center. However, the vocabulary checked me at times.
And then I met the Judge. I do not consider myself an amateur reader.
I have mentioned in several reviews that I particularly admire and enjoy the character-driven novel. However, I do not completely blame him for this--at times I was annoyed by what I perceived to be my own limited vocabulary.
And yet nothing in my experience prepared me for the difficult vocabulary of this book. I refuse to admit that anything is completely pointless about this book--such was its power--and I would much prefer a writer who used his vocabulary as opposed to one who allowed it to molder with disuse because his readers were either too lazy or stupid to appreciate it.
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