Is this book worth reading? I'm new to literature and the themes of this book intrigue me

>and they rode on and the judge was violent and nihilistic and the kid ate some tortillas and spat and it was hot and Glanton was mean and the ex priest said something and spat and the landscape was pretty and...

if you like 200 pages of that then you'll love this book.

>the judge was very nihilistic
Nah it's more like hedonism but with violence plus "muh progress can only come through conflict".

How is it compared to Child of God? It's the only McCarthy book I've read.
I wouldn't exactly call it confusing, but it was kinda weird to read.

The real question is whether Suttree is worth reading or not.

It follows in the footsteps of Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick but sets the story in the American west to depict the rebirth of mythos, drawing parallels between the past centuries, ancient myth, and the modern day. It delivers this through an appropriately epic prose style that is both beautiful and relentless. It is a good one user.

Harold Bloom says Suttree is the only other corncob that comes close to Blood Meridian. The Passenger will probably be his last book so lets hope that goes up there as well.

I'm not holding my breath for the passenger considering how mediocre the road is and how awful the counselor is.

You're probably right but from the interviews about the Passenger I can't help but be excited. Sounds like aesthetics, mental health, and stemfags, + he has been working on it since the 80's.

Wrong on all accounts. Read the book again

Its not even a remotely difficult book.
Do you people literally only read genre fiction or something?

blood meridian is genre fiction you god damn moron

>Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is plot-driven fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre. Genre fiction is generally distinguished from literary fiction.
>plot-driven
>Blood Meridian

What the heck are you talking about user, Blood Meridian clearly isn't genre fiction

>not being able to tell the difference between readability and ideas captured

I've read Blood Meridian once, I can't imagine someone reading it multiple times and not understanding it. it's not like there is some mystery to be solved.
Could someone enlighten me on what might not make sense?

Bad bait.

Same retard.

WTF IS GOING ON

2-3 YEARS AGO Veeky Forums HERALDED MCCARTHY AS ON THE SAME LEVEL AS THE BEST OF PYNCHON

NOW EVERYBODY SEEMS TO HATE ON IT

AND THEY HAVE NO DISCERNABLE OR CONSTRUCTIVE REASON

WTF

PLEBS GET OFF MY BOARD

Go to bed, Dave

Read all of McCarthy his work is incredible.

And Blood Meridian is not fucking genre fiction.

ah, blood meridian, monsieur?

I've read the book. Its not bait. Blood Meridian sucked.

Very much agree with you

Kek.

Yes, certainly if the themes already capture your interest. I would recommend starting with a shorter work by McCarthy though, just to familiarise yourself with his style of prose and to see whether it's for you or not. Blood Meridian frustrates a lot of people because sometimes people will dive straight into it ignoring McCarthy's other work and not realising he has an unconventional way of writing (scripture like simplicity mixed with a lack of punctuation, heavy on the dialect).

ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

I don't believe you've even read it, user. You say a lot of the same things as the Corncob memers without actually having any substance behind your criticism.

kek

calm down, user
cormac lovers are still here, they're just not too vocal

corncob tortillas

corncob tortillas

corncob tortillas

Good post!

Suttree is great. If you are a kind of fringe character in terms of your material, social, and/or intellectual existence it will make for a commiserative read.

Its style is also considerably different from anything else he's done. It's way more imitative of Joyce and Gaddis, to pleasant effect. BM is the better work, without a doubt, but if you can't stand it then Suttree is a good foothold on Corncob.

>undoubtedly the best living american author
>cultural marxists shit on his masterpiece

I miss Veeky Forums

It consciously positions itself as part of the 1850 - 1950 wild west genre. It's easy to forget what a strangle hold the west had on the popular imagination during that span. McCarthy, as a boy, was no doubt steeped in frontier lore.

But the book is only genre fiction in the sense that it considers its own form and speaks to the metaformal aspects its genre. When Bloom and others talk of it, they often describe it as a canonical closing text of sorts. I can't really think of another work that works as a canon closer like that, other than Revelations maybe. I've never read Watchmen but I assume it's similar to that in how it manages to be both of-genre and out-of-genre simultaneously.

That's really interesting, you could say something similar of The Recognitions, although modernism is not as easily closed as pulp westerns.

wah

Really I think the book's intertextuality with the bible is much more relevant and important than any artifacts of homage to the western genre it contains. I think you're off by quite a bit by dismissing it as genre-fiction (not there is anything wrong with reading that).

Yeah, I think you could make a case that, whether they succeeded or not, most major literary figures are trying to arrest discourse to some degree.

It gets pretty ticklish though. Like if an author tries to actively guard against misprision and revision, they risk irrelevance. FW could be one of those closing texts, but it will never affect enough people at once to reach a critical mass in the discourse. The Recognitions aswell. Gaddis occupies a kind of murky, temperamental headspace between the lightning rods of Ulysses and GR.

All of this comes from The Anxiety of Influence by Bloom, if you're interested.

>dismissing

Don't get me wrong BM is one of my favorite novels. And the connections to Milton and the Bible and gnostic texts--and I guess Moby Dick, I've never read that--make the work all the stronger and richer.

Calvin and Hobbs is another good one I think. Bill Waterson is OF comic strips but he is not limited by them.

What a coincidence, I just picked up a copy of anxiety of influence earlier today after my music teacher used it to describe the position of early romantic composers following Beethoven.

The thing about The Recognitions is that it feels like an urtext to many of the great postmodern novels, but most of those writers had not read Gaddis while they were composing the works that we now discuss as following in the tradition of The Recognitions. The irony being that Gaddis seems to preempt many of the ideas of the major postmodern novelists, occasionally even refuting them. For example remember the passage wherein a man is going to jump off a building and a crowd has gathered on the sidewalk (I don't have the book with me or else I would give page numbers, it's in the first half of the second section). The dry and plotting prose style, the masses personified as a single cultural entity, the overbearing fascination with death, within a few pages Gaddis seems to have distilled the core elements of Don Delillo's fiction, the section is distinct to the point of feeling like simulacram, a parody preempting its own original. What I am getting at is this: it is easy to see The Recognitions as the beginning of a literary style stretching from Pynchon to Gass to Mcelroy to Mano, and in some ways it is, but for the most part it is seen as the origin point of these styles not because it influenced the next generation of writers (with some exceptions (Gass mostly)) but because it described the oncoming world that those authors would labor to understand. The irony being that the failure of The Recognitions allowed these authors to unknowingly escape some of the anxiety of influence, and labor to represent the real world, as opposed to representing the real world described by Gaddis.

(keep in mind that I am really only talking about William Gaddis's period of relative obscurity in the 60s and 70s, although this is when much of the great postmodern work was written.)

I don't know if this makes any sense.

good post.

this is too good to be a shitpost

Yep. Best American novel of the 20th century.

Come get memed with us.

Dostoevsky is overrated as fuck on this board, and europleasants seriously need to leave. You are a blight not just on this board, but site wide. That's why flags should be on every board so we can see the shitposter's country of origin every time they decide to say something retarded.

>literally fellating a mediocre detective novel writer
Fucking kill yourself.

yeah, if you're gonna fellate a detective novel author make it Chandler.

>implying I haven't already read BM when I was a teenager

read moby dick first and maybe the bible if you can be bothered

I actually noticed a typo so it's not the best shitpost tbqh

The real question, is there any book of his worth reading OTHER than Blood Meridian?

newbs pretending to hate on it to make you mad

It's good, you should read it.