Hide this

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Loading...

Child of God (1973)

by Cormac McCarthy

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,415224,844 (3.79)90

None.

Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

English (20)  Spanish (1)  All languages (21)
Showing 1-5 of 20 (next | show all)
McCarthy takes the grotesque tradition, heads out the back, shoots it with a shotgun and pisses all over its corpse. McCarthy does not flinch, does not turn away from what is awful in our world. He writes what he sees in it and what he sees is Lester Ballard, a child of God much like yourself. Depraved and hilarious and perfectly phrased. Masterful.
( )
  pessoanongrata | Mar 30, 2013 |
A lean, jet-black character study. ( )
  Matt_Sessions | Sep 23, 2012 |
The book is nasty, brutish and short. Everything Thomas Hobbes could want to show what life in a state of nature would be like. The main character - Lester Ballard - gets my vote for being the most despicable characterization of a human being imaginable; yet, in some way, McCarthy seems to want, at some level, to create some sense of sympathy for Ballard.

McCarthy's works tend to be blunt, uncompromising (and frequently unsympathetic) looks at humanity - the sort of stuff one doesn't want to acknowledge - that hit too close to home to be comfortable. He has an eye for precision in his narration that is stark, uneasy, yet - in its own way - quite beautiful.

This may not be a book for everyone, as some parts approach the absolutely disgusting. But if you want to experience real American literature as few other authors dare present it, Child of God may be a masterpiece. ( )
1 vote jpporter | Jan 4, 2012 |
That kid at school who always had a runny nose and a rash around his mouth from licking his lips, and he smelled funny, and used to eat out of the bin and expose himself to other kids...he grew up and Cormac McCarthy wrote a book about him ( )
1 vote goddamn_phony | Dec 10, 2011 |
McCarthy’s style was recognisable immediately to me – that descriptive prose used to convey landscape, the way it’s not clear immediately in places what is happening, partly because of the sparseness of the prose in places or because he uses a pronoun leaving the reader to work out who this person it, the lack of quotation marks for direct speech, the way we get brief but insightful characterization and then the disturbing main character, a forerunner of Chigurh in ‘No Country for Old Men’ except Ballard has that ambiguity about him summed up in the title - ‘Child of God’, an idea explored in a conversation where an unnamed old man says he thinks ‘people are the same from the day God first made one’ when asked if he thought people were meaner now.

McCarthy is able to create characters and places which seem so real and yet so different. He readily creates an atmosphere and his prose is inviting to read. He doesn’t make us feel too happy about what we’re like, though. ( )
1 vote evening | Aug 19, 2011 |
Showing 1-5 of 20 (next | show all)
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.
 
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Series (with order)
Information from the Norwegian Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Dedication
First words
They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Publisher series

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (1)

Book description
Haiku summary

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (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, 04 Jan 2013 13:28:20 -0500)

(see all 4 descriptions)

A violent, dispossessed man roams the Tennessee hill country caught up in his own depravity.

Quick Links

Swap Ebooks Audio
1 avail.
352 wanted
3 pay

Popular covers

Rating

Average: (3.79)
0.5
1 9
1.5 2
2 14
2.5 3
3 93
3.5 28
4 149
4.5 23
5 76

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

Help/FAQs | About | Privacy/Terms | Blog | Contact | LibraryThing.com | APIs | WikiThing | Common Knowledge | Legacy Libraries | 81,823,264 books!