>>24809887The narrative isn't just unreliable, it is deliberately deceptive at every level. Reading these books is like knife fighting an elderly (40 year old) pimp over a child prostitute that is already dead. Reading these books is like having a mystic experience on methaphetamine while sucking off a Mexican in an underpass in 2010.
>>24809922Reading your post is like seeing Chuck Wendig trying to be edgy and thinking you're having a seizure because you're rolling your eyes so much.
>>24810099Reading your post is like reading a post.
>>24809887I liked All the Pretty Horses, but honestly after all the praise I found The Crossing to be pretty underwhelming and meandering, albeit with some passages of beautiful writing. Not sure when I will read Cities of the Plain.
>>24810099All the Pretty Horses is a stolen horse story designed to give a magistrate plausible deniability. You, like Oprah, were fooled.
>>24810534All the Pretty Horses might be his best simply because it's more accessible than Blood Meridian. The first book of the Crossing made me weep, but I agree with the rest. It is a slow burn.
>>24810858The first book of The Crossing is designed to teach you how to read the rest of The Crossing. The obvious Jack London is your guide that The Crossing will be a collection of genre novellas, complete with over the top themes.
>>24810858Yeah the first book would've made an excellent novella. After that it kinda lost me. I know what he was going for but I just kind of had to force myself to read it because the story had so little momentum. I also didn't like how every random person engaged the MC in a philosophical dialogue. It happened in Blood Meridian too but it just felt like it worked better imho. My favorite is still BM followed by Suttree, then NCfOM, The Road, Outer Dark, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, then Child of God wayyy a the bottom.
>>24810948Well ya I mean nothing happens in the middle. They go to Mexico, eat some beans, meet a girl, get in a fight, eat some tortillas, get philosophized to, etcOne of Cormac's weaknesses are some of his plotting but it's usually offset by incredible imagery and heavy themes.When he gets it all correct, like ATPH, TR, or NCFOM, it's amazing.
>>24811077i gotta say, the book made me extremely hungry for some beans, tortillas, and steak.
>>24811104Me too lol I want a clay oven tortilla
The ending of The Crossing is both the best and saddest ending of anything I've read or seen
>>24810948>I also didn't like how every random person engaged the MC in a philosophical dialogue. It happened in Blood Meridian tooWhat are you talking about? Most characters in Blood meridian keep their speaking to a bare minimum. The only characters who speak as much as a full paragraph on anything other that a practical matter are the Judge and the Hermit.
>>24810948>I also didn't like how every random person engaged the MC in a philosophical dialogue.This is one of CM’s biggest weaknesses for me. It's noticeable in the Border Trilogy. Every single random Mexican peasant is a latter-day Schopenhauer.I tried to excuse it by thinking, well, I don't know any Mexican peasants; maybe they all DO spout text walls of cod philosophy. But no, he does it with non-Mexicans too, particularly in the later works. Side characters are just vehicles for him to say Cormac things.A lot of critics laughed at this in The Counselor. But in fact his original screenplay was much worse. They cut out half the philosophizing in the actual film. Or look at this bit in The Road where the guy is trying to persuade his wife not to walk off into the night and kill herself:—~~Please dont do this.I’m sorry.I cant do it alone.Then dont. I cant help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I dont dream at all. You say you cant? Then dont do it. That’s all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so dont ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you’ll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.~~I could just about buy the way she talks, to begin with. But I got to "A person who had no one . . . " I couldn't maintain immersion at all. That's not the wife speaking; it's Cormac having fun being Cormac.. He's got his hand up the wife's bottom and he's moving her mouth like a glove puppet.
>>24811744I think its corncobs best book.
>>24812892in the passage you linked, there isn't anything to suggest that the character actually said those words to his wife rather than thinking them. What is the rest of the passage?
>>24810105Reading your post is like entering the mind of an ugly loser and being appalled at the bleakness and emptiness of the world seen through With her hair down and we’re both drunk and I’m laughing with her. We’re looking at each other and And yet you thought your post was so clever. And what disgusts me most is Her eyes looked different. She was looking at me differently and her voice changed too. I could see everything then, that she was going to go away. I looked at the ground, I looked back at her, searching in her eyes maybe for some remnant or some ember A disgrace to literature. Think about that next time you carelessly Her voice sounded like she had just been laughing. I heard voices and music in the background. My chest felt tight and I gripped the phone and the beer and tried to keep my balance Stupid motherfucker.
>>24812892That's not a weakness, that's a feature. Mccarthy doesn't write realism, or at least he stopped with those tendencies starting with Blood meridian. The world that is revealed through the books aren't meant to be the perfect representation of the real world (read the epilogue of Cities of the plain; specifically the mexican man's justification of the dream world being its own thing). It's like the looking glass. The world on the other side is slightly off-kilter. In the Crossing, the whole setup is about the differences between experienced reality and interpreted reality. Billy's journey is of the first type, that the reader is brought in immediate contact with. The other monologuers give us second hand info of their lives. Lives that they have interpreted and have come to some conclusion.
>>24814943>read the epilogue of Cities of the plain; specifically the mexican man'sHard core gay meth sex under an overpass.
Obviously. Blood Meridian is too dark, No Country is inferior to the movie, and Suttree is hot garbage.
>>24815092Never read Suttree but I heard people love it
>>24815092>>24815479I just finished Suttree last night and I loved it. Very funny and relatable if you are or ever have been an alcoholic with low ambition.
>>24809922>Reading these books is like having a mystic experienceOr eating beans with cold tortillas and coffee. Cormac would approve.
>>24815646can confirmSuttree is my favorite of his and I'm an alcoholic, but I do have some ambition to quit and change, I just keep failing like the protagonist after great stretchesThe book hurts to read but it's really well done
>>24815092>No Country is inferior to the movieNah, the movie skips Moss explaining his philosophy of life
>>24815646Based
>>24815479The main character is a spiteful, spineless, nihilistic libertine who sits around moping and crying about how much smarter he is than everyone else for almost 700 pages straight. It's godawful, but I can see why a lot of people on here relate to it.
>>24818461Nah, other people say he's smart. He simply doesn't give a fuck. He is a bad person mostly, though.
Must read>The Crossing>Blood Meridian>SuttreeGreat, worth a read>All the Pretty Horses>No Country for Old Men>The Road>Outer DarkFine, read if you want>Child of God>Cities of the Plain>The Orchard Keeperwho cares>The Passenger and Stella Maris>the plays
>>24809887>best trilogy>people literally say you can skip the second book on your first readlol what a hack.
>>24809887I thought All the Pretty Horses was great, The Crossing was pretty good too, maybe dragging a little at times with the melodrama shit, but I really didn't like Cities of the Plain much at all. I thought the love story aspects of All the Pretty Horses worked pretty well, so I was disappointed that the whole book just ended up being him falling in love with prostitute with Billy just being around to go "no bro, don't do it bro.">>24818461I was really into Suttree at first, the drunken misadventures with random white trash were comfy and I really liked the part when he was in jail (same with All the Pretty Horses actually). But the part where he fills in his son's grave by hand is pure boomer tough guy fanfiction cringe. And the whole episodes with the random family he's fishing with and the hooker he lives with I wasn't much into.
>>24809887crossing is great, one of his best, atph is good, middle of the pack, cotp is one of his worst but the epilogue is some of his best writing, he pretty clearly rushed the book out to get the epilogue printed
>>24818984>skipping the best bookStop getting advice from retards
>>24810858I got 100 pages into all the pretty horses and dropped it. Nothing happening and once you've already read a couple books of McCormick prose, you're used to it and it's not nearly impressive if there's no actual story other than two fags riding around in the desert.
Would you guys consider John Williams analogue to Cormac McCarthy?
>>24812817He's probably referring to The Crossing because every Mexican that MC encounters detours into philosophical quandary. All The Pretty Horses was similar, but to a lesser extent.
>>24819114>I thought the love story aspects of All the Pretty Horses worked pretty well, You think Him making up bullshit to explain the "suspicious penetrative injury to his ``thigh'' in mexico" worked? None of that happened.>so I was disappointed that the whole book just ended up being him falling in love with prostitute This is exactly what he did and you enjoyed in All the Pretty Horses. Now you're upset because he's building a house.>with Billy just being around to go "no bro, don't do it bro." Billy's kind of in love with him you know. Billy's concealment of what he actually did in Mexico is, if anything, worse.…I bet you think Delores Hayes was her real name?
