How does Veeky Forums feel about McCarthy?

How does Veeky Forums feel about McCarthy?

I'm currently reading The Crossing and I'd like to hear some thoughts on the author.

Probably the biggest hack to be taken so seriously by so many people who should've known better. An absolute disgrace.

Care to elaborate?

corncobber.

basicallyw hat said.

I haven't read him. I've only glanced at The Road briefly, but I remember he had very simple, or minimal prose. Kind of like Hemmingway I remembered thinking. I'm interested in reading him, Veeky Forums memes on him a lot but he's highly regarded by everyone from Oprah to Harold Bloom.

He's a genius, but he mostly blew out his talent after Blood Meridian. That book is the single best work of fiction after WWII, stunning language that evokes Melville, Milton, the KJV and the classic oral tradition of storytelling. It's so dense and richly allusive, you could read it for years and still pick up new things.

Don't listen to the samefag here who always puts him down, he's the real fucking deal, even if his newer books are disappointments.

There's comparisons to be made with Melville, especially with his earlier works. He creates very vivid and detailed set pieces with allusions toward God and antiquity.

But in his more recent works you do see a lot of similarities to Hemingway. Much of The Road actually brings to mind A Farewell to Arms in regards to setting especially.

>How does Veeky Forums feel about McCarthy?
McCarthy is a touchy subject around here because like two faggots couldn't make it past page 50 of BM and feel the need to shit on every McCarthy thread.
We like him but we don't talk about him much.

People either really fucking love him or really fucking hate him.

I found that most people who hate him drop him after the first 20 pages while the people that love him start appreciating him 100 pages in. You just have to get past that uh, attenuating phase I guess.

>Blood meridian is prob my favorite book of all time, All the Pretty Horses is a pretty book (lol), The Road is surprisingly fantastic, and Child of God is underrated as hell.

I also read most of Outer Dark but haven't finished the last 40 pages since school started. It's decent enough.

The Road doesn't come close to Blood Meridian but imo it's his second best book.

That isn't a knock on his other works but a testament to how great BM really is.

>That book is the single best work of fiction after WWII
lol

>haven't finished the last 40 pages
Literally the best part of OD. It's the most chilling thing McCarthy has written, in my opinion.

>while the people that love him start appreciating him 100 pages in.
Not going to fall for this shit after Infinite Jest

good one user desu

having read 6 yecarthy books, i can safely say there's nothing you're missing if you drop his books 20 pages in, or, better yet, skip altogether.

>A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

It's certainly not like Infinite Jest.

100 pages might be an overstatement for most but that's how long it took me to get used to the flow of his writing. It's really not particularly complicated, idk why it took me that long.

If this isn't bait I'm kinda interested in knowing what motivated you to read 6 McCarthy books if you presumably don't like him.

i read a lot. he's kinda like murakami (i read 4 murakami books). like, he's not really offensively bad (except the road, holy shit what a trainwreck) but you're not missing out anything that sublime by skipping. there are better books to read.

if you -have- to read corncob lit read suttree.

Daily reminder Willa Corncobber and Flannery O'Corncob are the superior Corncob Writers. Butcher's Corncob is also superior to anything Tortilla Man wrote.

On a side note, do you have a favorite author?

the fuck is corncob

A jab at Cormac because of the southern influences in his writing.

Some of his books are written from very hill billy, yeehaw, tortillas-and-beans perspectives.

it's hard to pick 1

Isn't a reference to Faulkner? In Sanctuary with the corncob rape

His voice is so goddamn ostentatious, I can't stand him. He also seems to have this attitude that novelists are supposed to solve life's great mysteries, which I find makes for boring fiction.

PURPLE
U
R
P
L
E

I didn't know Nicholas Sparks frequented Veeky Forums

Garbage. I've read The Road and it comes off as some Hemingway fanboy purposely trying to write the most obtuse story possible.

What the fuck has happened to this board to where we cannot have ONE fucking thread discussing McCarthy without all the shitposters taking over?

Where the hell am I supposed to go to talk about books now?

r/literature, r/Truebooks

>actually recommending reddit

End yourself.

You are oblivious son, must seek the sun.

Smaller subreddits like the ones mentioned above aren't that bad in all honesty. As a general rule the larger a subreddit is the more shit posting and general foolery people have come to associate with reddit are more common.

Anyhow, I'm nearing the end of The Crossing. I've read The Road, Blood Meridian, and Child of God. Should I pick up the other installments in the Border trilogy before moving on to his other works? As of right now I'm leaning towards picking up No Country For Old Men.

try talking about literature instead of genre fiction then

I have a reddit account and have spent a lot of time there. Shit sucks, bro. The format of the website is counter-intuitive and upvote culture stifles any kind of discussion before it can happen. Here I can call you kike loving Faggotron 6000 but we can actually have a dialogue without it being hidden away automatically. Also fuck the reddit bots they're not cute and are never useful.

Don't bother. It just reads like the screenplay for the movie.

Read Suttree next.

No Country is McCarthy's weakest book. Feels like it started as a screenplay that he halfheartedly turned into a book. One of the very few instances where the film adaptation of a novel is the superior version.

I recommend you pick up Suttree. It's going to be very different at first but it's absolutely one of the greatest books I've ever read.

No country for old man and the road are mediocre, read suttree

Sut-mind.

Seems like a lot of support for Suttree. Yeah I'll go and check it out soon enough. How is it considered very different from his other works?

People who hate Cormac haven't read Suttree.

Needless to say he was the most popular writer on Veeky Forums before the corncob meme and "rediscovered" flavor of the month authors (Gass, Vollmann, etc) posters obsess over now.

It's about a dude who lives in a houseboat and hangs out with his pals and bumbles about the countryside. It's very funny but communicates a powerful amount of feeling.

I see that it's been compared to a darker Huckleberry Finn of sorts

It's more stream-of-consciousness in the traditional Joyce/Faulkner way. It gets compared to Ulysses because it focuses on the interiority of the protagonist as he traverses a city.

Can someone give me a thorough explanation of Blood Meridian? I read it and ended up feeling like I hadn't grasped much of it at all. I'm particularly confused on the Judge, why did he destroy artifacts he found? What was his deal with the kids and the puppies in the river?

He doesn't believe in moral law at all. Natural law, to him, "subverts it at every turn." He believes in exhibiting strength without mercy.

>his voice

hasn't he only done one interview with Oprah? He sounds well-spoken, southern, but not ostentatious.

Blood Meridian is a really good book, but the wandering in the desert was well-written but boring.

When he wrote that, he should've had Chekov's gun firmly planted in his head tbqh.

Literally DUDE REDDIT THE AUTHOR LMAO

So it's just tryhard highbrow pretension?

So that's literally the actual reason you don't like McCarthy? Because reddit? How worthless, pseudo and feeble-minded can you possibly be? McCarthy has been publishing for fifty years and no one cares about reddit.

I didn't mind it so much but then again I had just read Moby Dick around the time I picked up Blood Meridian so the long, drawn out descriptions of scenery didn't bother me as much.

I definitely wouldn't insinuate that the page long descriptions of the desert set pieces weren't relevant to the story. In a way I'd say they were integral to Blood Meridian's prose in creating a savage and wild setting as depraved and disconnected from moral goodness as the characters inhabiting it. Yeah it got a bit tiresome at times, especially when he would essentially go on to describe seemingly mundane aspects of the environment; "this rock was of an off white beige coloration while this other rock was of a more rouge color." I'm paraphrasing but you get the idea.

One of my favorite authors, been enjoying his books for almost 20 years.

>The Road
>Better than Suttree
I want to rape you like the judge raped the kid.

How do you know the Judge raped the Kid?

Cornmac McYetortillato is pulp.

corncob tortillas YeCarthy

Is The Road one of his worst works? I'm currently reading it and I'm not impressed, both the prose and story are very weak. How does it compare to Blood Meridian?

Blood Meridian reads very differently. It comes across as something out of a fever-dream. Despite its setting being grounded in the stark and unforgiving reality of the American Southwest in the 1800's the book and the dialogue come across as something surreal.

This

holy god, fucking go away you have never been funny

I like McCarthy more than I like shitty trolls, and I thought it was funny. The amount of dedication to their shitposting is so monomanical it's like they forgot their pills.

Compared to his more acclaimed stuff, are The Orchard Keeper or Outer Dark worth reading?

I just wish someone could praise McCarthy without channelling Bloom.

"Evoking Melville" lmao

They're channeling McCarthy's actual inspirations, not Bloom.

The Old Testament, Moby Dick, and Paradise Lost were key parts of BM's development.

He's okay

you can think he's fine and still a fad that's thankfully being moved on from, his imitators are much worse than him

was he ever really a fad? I know he's had film adaptations and James Franco has a massive hard on for him but it's not like I hear his name come up that much.

I read Blood Meridian and I don't care what people say about it, legitimately one of my favorite books of all time. Ending is still stuck with me though, no idea what happened, although I don't think he raped the kid. I think he raped the little girl in the town, perhaps the kid participated.

He just fucked the kids shit up so badly that the people that walk in and see it have the only actually shocked reaction to violence anywhere in the book

I definitely think the Kid was raped. It'd make sense, clearly the judge had it out for killing him but if it was just left at that it'd hardly be considered an unspeakable act the way it was. The entire book is filled with descriptions of gratuitous violence of all kinds, and there's also descriptions of the aftermath of the Judge's child rape and molestation throughout the novel. So if it was just the Kid or even the little girl's body and nothing else there'd be little sense in leaving things as ambiguous as they are.

As far as I remember aside from a brief note on how the natives sodomized the wounded after a battle the book never really touches on the rape of men. What could be more taboo in the extreme masculine warrior culture present throughout the novel other than homosexual rape? Nothing in the world of blood meridian could be more embarrassing and shameful. That's why when the cowboys stumble upon the outhouse they're left speechless.

Basically.

But some of his characters do fuck each others sisters and stuff so I guess that gives e/lit/ist something to jump on.

>Saving Suttree for when I have time to get comfy and ready

But I've heard some damn good things about Suttree.

The rules are what generally work. Someone can go off-book if it's better.

Wow, just wow. I can't believe people think like that. Downvoted :^) (you have been banned)

He means his authorial voice, you dunce, not his literal voice.

No Country for Old Men = bad
Suttree = good

Consume less memes, it's rotting your brain.

OP here, just finished The Crossing and man what an ending. Left me feeling pretty damn upset. Everything that transpired throughout the book, especially towards the end, was saddening. But the end with the dog left me feeling somber in a way no other book has in a long time.

Poor Billy Parham. I hear he comes back in cities of the plain and I'm honestly inclined to pick up that next before Suttree.

he's not wrong

Why did you decide to start the trilogy on a book that isn't the first one?

The first two books aren't linked at all and which order you read them in are unimportant. The third novel ties the first two together.

I had the exact opposite experience actually. Blood Meridian was readable for the first 50 pages or so. It only became intolerable once I realized it'd be the same vapid shit for the entire book, though I still finished it.

You'd have to be a really inexperienced or impressionable reader to be taken in by it.

He was in Oprah's book club. Everyone who makes that list can be called a fad for however long her devotees pay attention to them.

Totally agreed. I just finished it and really did not enjoy the read.

How many times does he have to describe flowers in the desert. It's not even interesting or enlightening, it's just tedious.

Suttree is best read in the discomfort of heat or cold while working labor

The judge explains the actions of the unnamed protagonist at the very end of the book. Or maybe it's the other way around.

>spits
>ye

just siting here twiddling my thumbs patiently waiting for the release and inevitable disappointment of The Passenger. word is it's a two-volume publication set for spring of 2017.