My very good friend and former co-worker is applying to various universities to study literature. He has also been at the same job for five years. I can only imagine he hates money. But the man has simply awesome taste in books.
Blood Meridian (or the Evening Redness in the West).
Cormac McCarthy. The guy who wrote the book "No Country for Old Men". That was a book he wrote on an off day. An off day. Blood Meridian is considered the heir to the throne of greatest American Novel, just a stunning piece of writing that fuses an unmatched aesthetic value with a frightening insight into the violence that pervades the American psyche.
Professor Harold Bloom, a hater and elitist on a level that I can only aspire to (that is to say, a literary critic), says in another interview whose transcript I lost the url to,
It is--it's as close, I think, to being the American prose epic as one can find, more perhaps even than Faulkner, though there are individual books by Faulkner like "As I Lay Dying," which are perhaps of even higher aesthetic quality and originality than "Blood Meridian." But I think you would have to go back to "Moby Dick" for an American epic that fully compares to "Blood Meridian."
It is intense. It is unsettlingly violent. It is spare. It is dense. It is, by far, the most manly text I have ever read. I am not even a third of the way through, and there are so many lines that simply scream of this man's genius. There is no thought of why. There simply is. The language! The words! I swear to fucking god that my lexicon is larger than yours, but I spend half my time in this book wondering where the hell this man finds the words he uses.
Three simply astounding passages:
They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague.
Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?
He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescos. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel . . . . The facade of the building bore an array of saints in their niches and they had been shot up by American troops trying their rifles, the figures shorn of ears and noses and darkly mottled with leadmarks oxidized upon the stone. The huge carved and paneled doors hung awap on their hinges and a carved stone Virgin held in her arms a headless child.
The imagery is awesome. Not awesome like your frat party's ice luge. Awesome like the gods of old. The ones who would kick your ass. Leadmarks oxidized upon the stone? Motherfucker is gonna go out and be that accurate? How are the regular people going to compete?
But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be?
How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.
This book is the most horrifying, amoral, twisted, beautiful tome I've ever read. The man writes like he communes with Hemingway and Faulkner, Joyce and Hasek. It's like the book version of The Raft of the Medusa. Crossed with Rambo 4. Then set in the Wild West.How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.
That was deep. AND someone just had his head caved in. Just a stunning tour de force.
This book is good. So good. I can't put it down. Go. Go now. Go buy it now and read. Then weep that you will never, ever, match its genius. You poor bastards.
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