What is /lit/ opinion on Cormac McCarthy?

Sunset Limited is his only redeeming work.

>>9778789
He needs to work on his run on sentences

>>9778795
First post worst post
>Get it? Each guy represents a differing view!

garbage HACK FRAUD author thats overrated. Give blood meridian a shot tho.

>>9778789
Early stuff was good. He's just been adding a few descriptive sentences to screenplays for his last few novels though. Suttree, Blood Meridian and Child of God are worth reading.

a god among men
who will replace him when he's gone? who could?

>>9778789
Well above par. Makes me want to read more, to find authors like him

I watched the road which was pretty eh.
Is the book any better?

>>9778941
This. Reading blood meridian for first time and it's just like holy fuck how many times can someone use and in a sentence

>>9779068
Read it and find out

>>9778789
>>>9779068
>Read it and find out
The answer might surprise you

Despite whatever someone here tries to say otherwise, they love him and suck him off (rightfully so) at every turn.

Only work I've read is the road. Wasn't super impressed.

>Muh no named characters
>Muh bleak
>Muh suicide
>Muh journey vs. destination metaphors errrywher

At least the ending wasn't absolute garbador

>>9778789
I've read Child of God and Blood Meridian. Enjoyed Child of God much more because it was consistently interesting

Blood Meridian and Suttree are his only books worth reading. The border trilogy is alright for some nice cowboy genre fiction.

>>9779738
>implying you've read his early work

>>9779743
You're right, I haven't read any of his short fiction. Is it good?

>>9778789

corbcon mucorthy

I've only read the road and it was bretty gud. solid entertaining read, very visual and frank, would recommend to anyone wanting a spooky read.

>>9778789
Good early works, great with Suttree and Blood Meridian, quite good afterwards except maybe Cities of the Plain.

>>9779755
I clicked on this thred with this exact intention and exact wording you fucking cunt.

I genuinely consider him to be the one of the greatest contemporary authors.

Run on sentence and a run on sentence and a run on sentence and the kid spat and they rode on. Ye.

More Appalachia, fewer Southwest.

I'm reading the first few page of Suttree and this is so obnoxious:
> Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarabs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis. Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years. Earth packed with samples of the casketmaker’s trade, the dusty bones and rotted silk, the deathwear stained with carri..
I FUCKING GET IT, IT'S A GRAVEYARD

>>9780365

2 literary 4 u

>>9780365
flowery descriptions for not ready-to-hand things are an acceptable use of the literary device. what is the purpose of a graveyard? well a graveyard is for...

well it's not really clear. it's for burying bodies, but why do we bury bodies? why do we honor the dead? we don't fucking know and it's some deep seated need in the psyche that we do anyway even though we don't understand it and don't understand death. so say "boom here be a graveyard" is to understate the magnitude of what's really rumbling underneath the earth. understand death.

contrast this with his treatment of the everyday. for mccarthy a horse is a horse and a gun is a gun.

>>9778795
Unpopular opinion right here, folks.

He's an old fart who wrote a handful of worthwhile stories (yes, they are the usual suspects) in a dried up American style that I'm p sure only made him look legendary in contrast to the sheer amount of pretentious shit (see: po-mo) and airport paperbacks (see: your local airport) that were in abundance during his prime.

>>9780365
It's sarcastic, McCarthy is making fun of 'purple prose'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

>>9778789
He's the Zane Grey of emperors with no clothes.

this thread makes me want to kill every one in it

>>9778789
One of the greatest living American writers of our time.

Suttree, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy prove this. A modern day Faulkner-Melville hybrid.

>>9779068
Yes, the book is better. The film does a fair job of capturing its tone and pacing though so if that's what put you off with the film then maybe try another book of his.

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.

>>9779157
>>9778941
It genuinely depends on the context. A run-on sentence is often dreadful, but in the context of Blood Meridian, when the comanches chase after the caravan wearing the torn clothing and dresses of previous victims, the run-on sentence is perfect for encapsulating that desperate blur of trying to acknowledge every detail while also being caught up in what becomes a brutal confrontation.

Cormac knows what he's doing, fellas.

>>9780365
> Earth packed with samples of the casketmaker’s trade, the dusty bones and rotted silk

But this is beautiful, anon.

I like the stories he tells but find his constant use of and in a sentence to be very annoying and don't understand his total unwaivering hatred of punctuation which has worked for hundreds of years for every other author but is deemed beneath him and I don't understand why critics praise him for this and it upsets me that if as a younger man I wrote in his style in an English exam that I would almost certainly be given a terrible grade and justifiably so because punctuation is fucking useful and though I found I was able to enjoy reading No Country for Old Men and the Road wasn't too painful that I had to give up on Blood Meridian because the page long sentences deeply upset me and it is unfortunate because I want to read the story to find out how it ends but it has been so long since I left it that I would have to start again and I worry that I would run out of patience for it once again. I think I have to try though. Everyone seems to love it.

While McCarthy certainly is a dipshit about punctuation and employs a style that can appear forced and stilted, I love him with all my heart.

No other writer I know produced anything so gray and bleak. His works carry an aura.

>>9781630
Wow, we have a grammar teacher here. Have you considered that a lot of literature is not written with the viewpoint of "Would this get an A if I wrote a high-school essay in this style?"

Not only that, but how could you have enjoyed Proust if you can't handle page-long sentences? The page-long sentence has had its beautiful function in literature, and, moreover, your not liking it may be due to your own attention span and not the fault of the author for wanting to convey certain images, feeling, and tone which can't be expressed in any other way than by page-long sentences.

>>9780436
>summer

You sound 15. Jesus Christ.

>>9781756
>dipshit about punctuation and employs a style that can appear forced and stilted

Just because you don't understand the rhythmic flow of polysyndetic syntax, the style of writing's Religious connotations and what Cormac's saying about the 20th century with it, and how to register consonance doesn't mean he's a dipshit.

You're the dipshit. You like something that's been distilled by someone who's understanding of language is masterful.

/lit/ is the number one victim of the Dunning Kruger effect; if you don't get it, it's the author's fault; if you like it, you have to downplay it to appease the other morons who have a stilted understanding of everything.

Pretty great. It's a shame most people have only read his recent works - they pale in comparison to his older ones.

>>9778789
Blood Meridian alone puts him into the halls of the great living authors.

Several other books by him are good as well. Outer Dark is an excellent apocalyptic novel and is almost never discussed. The Road, if you haven't seen the movie, is a pretty compelling description of a world gone to grey. NCfOM is probably the best "genre-trash" crime novel of the last 50 years.

Honestly I thought Child of God was trash.

The Road, Blood Meridian, and All The Pretty Horses are god-tier though

Reading Blood Meridian right now
Prose is pretty good
The STOMACH-CHURNING VIOLENCE aspect of it is exaggerated by critics
There's nothing novel or unique about his anti-Western approach
The whole thing feels like a retreat into the barbarism of pre-civilization times, just tribal slaughter in a harsh land that has only barely been tamed
Read purely for the aesthetics it's excellent, but thematically I can't say McCarthy does much that's new

>>9780827
Can anyone translate this into plain english without leaving out any details?

>>9783387

who wrote something like Blood Meridian before Blood Meridian?

(not trying to be a dick, I'm actually genuinely curious)

>>9779751
If you liked Sutree you should also try Outer Dark/The Orchard Keeper/Child of God, yes

>>9783356
all the pretty horses is the only mccarthy i've read and i was very impressed. he really can craft a novel

>>9783768
John Williams and Oakley Hall

>>9778941
> attempt to read a part of Blood Meridian aloud to some people
> almost pass out due to lack of oxygen to the brain half way through a 6km long sentence.

I do really like him though, I'm not sure if it's because of his writing style or in spite of it, but McCarthy is one of my favourite authors.

I only ever read The Road and it came off as an attempt to sell a screenplay so I've always hated it. After this thread though I might read Blood Meridian.

>>9784635
The Road is one of his worst books. Blood Meridian is far better in every way.

>>9784635
don't
There are good american authors into whose oeuvres you could be digging; don't be fooled by the people who enjoy McCarthy.
If you haven't read each of the major works of Melville, Hawthorne, Foster Wallace, Emerson, and Faulkner (arranged in descending order of importance), you shouldn't be wasting your time with this talent-less hack. McCarthy is genuinely bad, and reading his works will degrade your mind. If you must read Blood Meridian (which is admittedly mediocre, as opposed to bad), promise me that you will read a chapter of Moby Dick aloud for every twenty pages you read of Blood Meridian.

Read the road and thought it was trash. I get that he was using a sparse kind of style to fit with the theme but I found it so fucking tedious. There was no sense of dynamics to the plot, the whole book was a long slow fart from start to finish.

>>9778789
He's alright in small doses. His style and humorlessness get kind of onerous.

>>9782270
That guy is spot on and your retort is childish. At least you're more entertaining when you let the verbose butthurt flow through you like here>>9781775 and here>>9782295

>>9783356
Why didn't you like Child of God, anon?

Blood Meridian astonished me. I was expecting a minimalist curt sort of style but instead was greeted by neo-Baroque richness, sensuously evocative imagery - tremendous descriptions. Very distinct - the work of a genius. McCarthty may be the finest writer living.

Why did Shakespeare say "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York?"

Why didn't he just write "Shit's good these days"?

I don't get it.

> Cormac McCarthy is a man

oh. I am an idiot.

I read 3 of his books under the assumption that it was a woman. I had an English teacher named Cathy McCormack and I think I just fused the two in my mind.

>>9785357
You're an absolute fucking retard. I sighed reading that shit, man.

Who let you out of /pol/?

>>9786031
How did you not figure that out though? He's about the farthest you can get from female-oriented.

>>9786031
....

>>9783915
Just because something is an anti-western doesn't make it like Blood Meridian. Asides from the anti-western element I can't think of any way in which Butcher's Crossing is anything like Blood Meridian.

>>9784766
>There was no sense of dynamics to the plot
>Reading for the plot
REEEEEEEEEE

>>9785161
>His style and humorlessness get kind of onerous
>humorlessness
>thinks that going to jail for fucking watermelons is humorlessness
>thinks that trying to blowup bats with dynamite is humorlessness

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413KB, 811x767px

>>9778789
>tfw had a nightmare that the judge was out to get me

>>9784761
>DFW is better then McCarthy

>>9788323
how did you thwart him?

>>9780365
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llIcg4CK86M

>>9780436
heeeeeelllllllloooooo reddit!

Pa. Why are eggs breakfast?

What.

You can put bacon on lunch.

Ye.

But if you put eggs on stuff it becomes breakfast?

The man spat and said the eggs are not for this world or from this world they come from the chicken but the chicken knows it not.

He wiped his chin and spat.

>>9784761
please never put wallace next to melville or faulkner or emerson again.

>>9780827
holy shit you captured it

>>9789136
it's pasta you tourist fuck

i've read blood meridian, child of god, no country, the road, the orchard keeper, and the sunset limited

would recommend them all except Sunset, which i thought was more or less a pile of shit

>>9788840
I woke up

>>9778789
Old Custer was good but Wildcat was rubbish.

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3KB, 635x19px

>>9789127

>He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her.

It's a shame Alexander Pope wrote Peri Bathous in 1727. In 2017, he would have a field day with McCarthy's writing.