This book is only enjoyable if you are american
>>25492675I'm Irish and thought it was great (but it's not my favourite McCarthy)
>>25492675Everyone is American. You grow up watching our movies, listening to our music, reading our books. We take hold of you from a young age and pollute your souls and no matter how hard you try you will never purify yourself of us.
>>25492678Wich one is your favorite?>>25492681Yes, but this is the rare case that only americans can enjoy. Like country music.
>>25492685>Wich one is your favorite?It's not his best but my favourite is The Road
>>25492691Thats the only one I have read and I really didnt like it. I guess I just dont like the author, but I wanted to give this one a try, so far its not clicking.
>>25492697If you have a bad relationship with your father then the road won't speak to you
>>25492681>You grow up watching our movies, listening to our music, reading our books.It's funny being from a muttmericanized country when you step across the border to a country that still dubs english and suddenly the cultural staples of fatburgers are not universally known but tend to be for just shutin always online autismos.
>>25492698nuke of truthular
>>25492675I'm British, love Westerns, and enjoyed this book and its atmosphere but it is severely overrated.
>>25492675Pretty sure lots of people like westerns
>>25492675It's is steeped in Americana and American language yes. I could see Mexicans interested too
>>25492698But you can ponder what could have beenThe prose is pretty sparse so your inner eye needs to do some heavy lifting, but it also does a great job communicating the bleak sparseness of the setting. I feel cold reading it.
>>25492685>Like country music.I'm British and love country music more than any yank I've ever met. Mutts literally said Beyonce is a great country singer and nobody batted an eyelid. Nancy Whiskey is a Scott and sings great country music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69YPMh9PIA4
I enjoyed Blood Meridian and Child of God a lot. The border trilogy and other corncobby Mccarthy tales are unreadable. The road is one of the worst books I've ever read.
>>25492923Outer Dark is worth a read. Have you read Suttree?
I'm Canadian and I liked it, but we're right next door
>>25492925I haven't read those, I will attempt to read Suttree because at least it appears to be written in good humour. I can't take his serious writing seriously anymore, it's like if eeyore stopped taking his SSRIs and wrote books
>>25492675It makes a lot more sense if you've spent time in the West.
>>25492938a FUCKING leaf
The Border trilogy is his best workYou could try to debate me, but you would be wrong.
>>25492681I don't have corn syrup circulating my veins. All American media and culture is crap and you have to be a coprophage to enjoy it. Your most shilled cultural achievement are the TV shows and it's all either comedy or melodramatic garbage.
>>25493270Least hysterical yuropoor
>>25492681The only reason I can speak English is because of picrel and Agatha Christie's Poirot TV series. You shouldn't flatter yourself too much Miles.PS: No one reads American books.
>>25492675Yeah, as people slowly forget the subtleties of Southern dialect I expect it to fall out of favor. Sad because it really is a masterpiece.
>>25492675Or, are you ready to accept that it's a wildly overrated book? Putting this next to the book it tries to imitate. It's a fucking brutal skill gap. If I wrote this and just glanced at a single page of Moby-Dick I would scrap the whole thing out of embarrassment. Even the most throwaway lines from Ahab beat Holden's best.
I'm Austrian and I enjoyed it.
>>25492675This is the one book where I don't see the appeal at all.
>>25493764Holy filtered
>>25492675Same goes for all books written by americans.
>>25493764>retarded ESL melvillenpc tries something else for the first timeMcCarthy was a better stylist than that one-hit wonder btw
>>25493870Insane cope. You wenditroons are getting ridiculous now.
>>25493764manchild image. manchild post
>>25493848A gritty, ultra violent wild west tale of a gang of scalp hunters and a demonic entity in their midst. You really can't see the appeal at all? The premise sounds objectively interesting to a vast majority of people with testosterone.
i'm convinced these kinds of threads have to be made by americans ragebaiting other americans. europeans do not get so obsessed over nationality
>>25493881Don't make me post the manchild core jpg.
>>25493901No, I get the surface level appeal. But I don't get the circle jerk about it, and you also make it sound like some heart-pumping action thriller, which it is obviously not.
>>25493938it would only be projection weeb manchild
>>25493949>Amazon page for Blood Meridian>Customers who bought this item also bought: Dungeon Crawler CarlHow does /lit/ recover from this one?
>>25493944There's an immense amount of subtext and if you are familiar with the history of the settlement of the west the way corncob blends Appalachian, lowland southern, Spanish, and more generically american language and other anglophone dialects into a chaotic mass of teeming characters that emerge from the flat text is quite beautiful, even though the story itself is peppered with revolting atrocities I have no inclination to re experience any time soon. It's why I posted >>25493701. I don't think most ESLs will ever get that part of it and it's a huge part of why I like it. It's like reading In Parentheis by David Jones without knowing anything about Latin or Welsh or older British dialects and ignoring the footnotes.
>>25494023Jones is far superior to corncob btw You should all read In Parenthesis (and the footnotes)
>>25492681Indeed. To deny the global hegemony of the US is to deny reality.
>>25493944The actual action isn't the violence. It's the travel and the crushing harshness of the desert.
>>25494023I really do love the amount of redneckisms on display in Corncob's work. Child of God is basically a killer black comedy despite its subject matter because of the dialogue
>>25493879You're just retarded and an ESL
>>25494023>I don't think most ESLs will ever get that part of it and it's a huge part of why I like it.What does that have to do with being ESL though? A Brit or Scot or Irishman won't understand the subtleties of southern american dialect and better either. And I imagine neither would an american that didn't grow up in the south.
>>25492675I can't collect my scattered thoughts well enough to make a meaningful contribution to this thread, or the book's discussion, but I just wanted to say that the confrontation between The Judge and The Kid in the desert is pure, unadulterated fucking kino.
>>25495496>A Brit or Scot or Irishman won't understand the subtleties of southern american dialect and better either.First of all the "branches" aren't clean, and there are some common features between Southern dialect and the various British ones. You'll hear both white trash from the Appalachians and English businessmen say "reckon". Even as late in the 2000s some isolated communities in the South almost sounded more British than American:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upKqzxuJ5L4I've heard certain Dutch speakers that sound more "generic American" in accent, even in Dutch, than many southerners do. I suspect the linguistic shadow of New Amsterdam is longer than most think.Secondly and more importantly: Being a native speaker inherently makes you more sensitive to dialect, and you'll pick up on representations of other dialects very quickly even from brief depictions in media. You're right in that it won't be exactly the same but it isn't either/or. For a weak example, I can speak (really just understand) a bit of German but I literally cannot hear the difference between the Vienna dialect (example) and north German dialects even when I intellectually know it's there. Native speakers (for now, it will fade :c) also naturally pick up on the cultural associations without having to consciously learn them which will impact differently.
>>25496175A lot of this appeals to backwoods WASP New Englanders as well, but i think of them as being even more of a dying breed than we are due to the Irish and Italians.
>>25496179*Applies not appeals
>>25492675on the contrary, it's only enjoyable if you're not american, if you're american you hate yourself and read tolstoevsky and wish you had le based aids and lived in le comfy commie blocks
>>25496175Most ESLs, at least the ones from Europe, speak it at a proficiency that is on par to that of many native speakers. Couple that with the popularity of American movies, tv shows, video games and music and the vast majority of people who speak English at a C2 level will have very few issues with discerning southern dialects in Blood Meridian or any other media. Obviously I don't have the same ear for subtleties as someone who actually grew up in the American South, but neither does some random guy from Ireland.
Yes, it's not enjoyable and that's the point, specially if you are from south America and all the native tribes genocide shit happened and you are somehow the descendant of both the victims and the rapists that are somewhat depicted on the book. The crossing is way better tho.
>>25492685Country music is huge in rural Australia lol>t. Was psychologically tortured by having to listen to my boss blasting "RIDE DAH LIGHTING" for 4 hours straight while we were castrating Steers under 40 degrees heat
>>25499458>Country music is huge in rural Australia lolThey were talking about human beings, not Australians.
>>25492678The Irishman likes a book by a dude called cormac color me surprised
