The NBA metaphor is a good one because this is really does feel like the apex of the first half of his career. Excited to read your thoughts on All the Pretty Horses, which I just read last week, since that's the book that turned him from obscurity to award winning bestseller (his first five books sold fewer than 5,000 copies while All the Pretty Horses, by itself, sold nearly 200k copies within six months of winning the National Book Award).
This was a fantastic review of Blood Meridian. The slaughter, the strange alignment to historical facts and biblical text - there’s a lot going on in this book. It’s one of those “big American” works, right up there with Moby Dick, that’s spinning so many plates at once, I often forget there’s just one writer behind it all.
Also, the point you bring up at the end hits hard. The way he wrote this one begs to be taken as fact, and sometimes feels more true than the history we’re told in schools.
I came away from this book convinced that we humans can be terrible creatures when the borders of history aren’t laid out ahead of us. Not sure that’s a great way to see our civilization but McCarthy makes a strong argument for it
Great write up, as always.
Interestingly, the book is very historically based! Even the Judge is based on an allegedly real person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Holden
The NBA metaphor is a good one because this is really does feel like the apex of the first half of his career. Excited to read your thoughts on All the Pretty Horses, which I just read last week, since that's the book that turned him from obscurity to award winning bestseller (his first five books sold fewer than 5,000 copies while All the Pretty Horses, by itself, sold nearly 200k copies within six months of winning the National Book Award).
This was a fantastic review of Blood Meridian. The slaughter, the strange alignment to historical facts and biblical text - there’s a lot going on in this book. It’s one of those “big American” works, right up there with Moby Dick, that’s spinning so many plates at once, I often forget there’s just one writer behind it all.
Also, the point you bring up at the end hits hard. The way he wrote this one begs to be taken as fact, and sometimes feels more true than the history we’re told in schools.
I came away from this book convinced that we humans can be terrible creatures when the borders of history aren’t laid out ahead of us. Not sure that’s a great way to see our civilization but McCarthy makes a strong argument for it
A military character in my WIP just used “The evening redness in the west” as code for the book’s otherworldly antagonist.