Blood Meridian

I had this on my radar for a while, but a book conversation with a doctor during an interview for an article that wasn't about books had me move it to the top of my list.

I think Cormac McCarthy's brutality makes Chuck Palahniuk seem tame. While the characters are horrible with no redemption and no effort to make them sympathetic, the writing is phenomenal.

McCarthy takes you on a journey - should you choose to go along - and points out the horror and the beauty in that journey every step of the way. This novel also provides, in the Judge, the greatest literary antagonists I've ever encountered.

Un libro sanguinosissimo, di una violenza inaudita, molto spesso apparentemente gratuita, se non si pensa che tutto quello che è qui descritto è successo veramente, più e più volte.
Un libro scritto benissimo, in cui ogni parola ha un suo peso e non suona mai vuota, ma assolutamente necessaria, perché è una pennellata che dipinge la storia sulla tela della mente.
Un libro che ha pochissimi dialoghi e nel quale i dialoghi sono parte integrante della parte descrittiva, perché tutto il libro è un lungo discorso sull'uomo e sulla sua indegna grandezza.
Va bene, ho un debole per Cormac McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is a violent American odyssey through the Southwest. Loosely based on historical events, the novel follows a fictitious 14-year-old called only ''the kid'' - born in 1833, exactly 100 years before the author - as he drifts through the Southwest. He soon joins an outlaw band of Indian hunters who have been hired by a Mexican governor to return Apache scalps at $100 apiece. These misfits - including an ex-priest, a man with initials tattooed on his forehead and a mysterious, erudite judge named Holden - have a taste for blood and death that Mr. McCarthy seems to revel in.

I have since found out that the Glanton Gang that McCarthy wrote about is actually a historical gang show more that actually went around killing and scalping Native American tribes in the 1850s and actually got paid to do so.

Blood Meridian aims to, like most of McCarthy's fiction, explore the nature of violence. The Kid is contrasted by The Judge Holden. The Judge is a terrifying character, devoid of emotion and any humanistic traits. He is a giant, hairless murderer and psychopath. The Judge had monologues that displayed his philosophical thinking and his inhumanity that were in some parts exhilarant and in more parts just ridiculously menacing. He is spine-chilling and every line within this book about him will disturb you. The Judge is very reminiscent of a later McCarthy character: Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men. Chigurh is a hitman who is devoid of conscience, remorse, and compassion much like The Judge. The Judge in many ways is Satan.

Blood Meridian will keep you glued to the page due to McCarthy's god-like prose and his dark story-telling. It is in many ways a gothic, bloody coming of age story of a kid traversing the realms of hell. The Kid is literally baptized a man in the blood of the Southwest and it is there, in his 40s, after years of drifting meets his fate - the fate that awaits every man. The narrative closes with ambiguity pertaining to the final state of the kid, or the man. But the reader can only infer that the kid has meant his end.

Blood Meridian is also an exercise in theodicy. A recurrent theme in the novel the issue of the general justification of metaphysical goodness in the presence of evil. Does God exist in the universe of McCarthy's Southwest?

That's for the reader to question.

McCarthy's magnum opus, Blood Meridian is one of the greatest works of American Fiction and one of the most harrowing tales ever put to the page. show less

The set-up is simple- The “Kid” is fourteen, when he flees Tennessee, hops a flatboat down the Mississippi and ends up in Texas. He soon hooks up with a group of ruthless, scalp-hunters and from then on, nothing is simple anymore, just a steady diet of bloody carnage. A razor-sharp indictment of Manifest Destiny. I could have shared many more quotes from this apocalyptic western tale but I felt a taste was enough. McCarthy’s prose is jaw-dropping and his vocabulary is dazzling, which is probably the only reason certain readers may continue this violent narrative. This was a reread for me and I got so much more out of it, this time around. I also think the “Judge” is one of the best and most memorable villains in literature. A show more masterpiece. show less

Cormac McCarthy certainly knows how to tell a story and to tell it well, but, boy, was this a difficult book to get through due its brutality and body count. The narrative features a gang of Americans between the Mexican and US Civil Wars hired by Mexicans to kill Apaches. The gang does that with violent abandon then "goes rogue" (though it is dominated by rogues from the beginning) and is likely as not to kill anybody who gets in their way. McCarthy's style is to tell the story without sensationalism, but its matter-of-factness almost makes the profligate killing feel even more brutal.

This is a gang that would take the Mexican bandits in The Magnificent Seven and have them for breakfast. As if it isn't evident that the band is evil show more enough, McCarthy even has them scalping children and shooting puppies. "Enough already!" I almost wanted to scream.

I certainly enjoyed McCarthy's atmospheric writing. And if the lesson to be taken away is that a man can be a brutal son-of-a-bitch, he succeeded at that, too. show less

There is no bleaker or more bitter book. There is no better or more beautiful one, either. This novel, Cormac McCarthy's finest, depicts violence so depraved as to be almost unbearable, and doesn't ameliorate its impact by confining the evil within one or two sociopathic characters. His violence is institutionalized and endemic. His vision indicts the entire project of Western expansionism, and goes farther to become a threnody for the debased human condition.

The writing in this book, though, is so careful and pure that the act of reading it is itself redemptive. As the story grows ever more horrific and threatens to engulf the reader in despair, the cumulative power of detail and diction elevates the spirit and mind. More than almost show more any other book, "Blood Meridian" shows art's ability to ennoble us while it illustrates our worst aspects.

The experience is exhilarating. show less

I was puzzled, then mesmerized, then annoyed, then repelled, then mesmerized again, and then puzzled again.

At its violent, bloody peak I have almost abandoned this book. "The cornucopia of senseless killing, utterly devoid of reason, surrounded with austere beauty of the landscape described in a extravagant style" - I coined this phrase and was ready to put the book away. Somehow, I read on and after a while I could not stop, the book held me in its madness, in its macabre dance of death - finally, a modicum of meaning started forming in the rivers of blood and the message, when it finally crystalized, was staggering, more vicious than all the brutality preceding it. The judge, ever present as a curious character on the sidelines, show more finally took the center stage, pronounced his sentence to humanity as a whole and there was no escape from the finality of this judgement.

As in his other books, Cormac is very pessimistic about the human nature. It's almost as if the author shakes his readers in order to wake them up, to rouse them from their self-deluding gratifying slumber to the reality of horror, to the heart of darkness within us all. Our noble aspirations, our bottomless curiosity to the wonders of the world are twisted inside out and appear as terrible images of desired future carnage. Our dream to reach the stars is perceived in this red-tinted light as a drive to find new horizons for destruction and pain. Ultimately, Cormac's message is a moral one, very clearly has its roots in Christian values as a possible antidote to evil. This is also something one can feel as the basis, the coordinate system of all his books. The delivery of this message is anything but orthodox, especially in Blood Meridian - reductio ad absurdum.

The judge in this book, like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, is a personification of the ultimate evil. Unlike Bulgakov's Woland, this evil has no room for irony. It is as dead serious as it is deadly. show less