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Loading... Child of Godby Cormac McCarthy
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A quick and revolting read. (  ) ekebivibeke | Nov 15, 2009 |  Quite disturbing, but I'm very glad I read it. (  ) norinrad10 | Sep 25, 2009 | It's a very fast read. I think it is typical McCarthy - morbid, dark, easily-read. It is not nearly as good, or as dark as I had expected. The reviews said it involved rape... but it doesn't. The reviews indicated that it's about poverty and etc driving a man to become less than a man and it's not that either. It's about a crazy man, living an impoverished life in a by-gone era - the poverty didn't necessarily make him crazy - maybe he already was or would have been regardless. And the book is impoverished in empathy - we don't feel sympathy for him because he is portrayed as little more than an animal, just scrabbling up enough to survive. We don't even feel very revolted by his behavior because it's so 'matter of course.' And we don't even get the satisfaction of a just resolution in the end. All in all, we aren't led to care. ( ) crazybatcow | Sep 7, 2009 | An honest portrayal of a deranged man. McCarthy has managed to write another beautiful book, not letting a series of horrid events stand in his way. The power of his writing mirrors the meaning of the words themselves to form a coherent question, however dark and unanswerable that question may be. ( ) powervich | Jun 11, 2009 | A community's response to a man's descent into isolation, insanity, murder and necrophilia. This McCarthy stands apart from others i've read in that the focus stays on people's relationships with each other rather than civilization vs. nature. Even so, McCarthy plays with the idea of what constitutes natural/unnatural desires. By titling the book, Child of God, we are encouraged to understand the urges of a murderous necrophiliac. ( ) NativeRoses | Aug 29, 2008 | 
 But the carefully cold, sour diction of this book--whose hostility toward the reader surpasses even that of the world toward Lester--does not often let us see beyond its nasty "writing" into moments we can see for themselves, rendered. And such moments, authentic though they feel, do not much help a novel so lacking in human momentum or point.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679728740, Paperback)"Scuttling down the mountain with the thing on his back he looked like a man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs bowed akimbo like a monstrous frog." Child of God must be the most sympathetic portrayal of necrophilia in all of literature. The hero, Lester Ballard, is expelled from his human family and ends up living in underground caves, which he peoples with his trophies: giant stuffed animals won in carnival shooting galleries and the decomposing corpses of his victims. Cormac McCarthy's much-admired prose is suspenseful, rich with detail, and yet restrained, even delicate, in its images of Lester's activities. So tightly focused is the story on this one "child of God" that it resembles a myth, or parable. "You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you.... A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it."(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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