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(4.16) | 449 | Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen. |
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 Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. ▾Conversations (About links) No current Talk conversations about this book. » See also 449 mentions » Add other authors (13 possible) | Author name | Role | Type of author | Work? | Status | | Cormac McCarthy | — | primary author | all editions | calculated | | Bloom, Harold | Introduction | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Delgado, Lluís | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Faria, Paulo | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Fort, Luis Murillo | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Gyllenhak, Ulf | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Hansen, Jan | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Hirsch, François | Traduction | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Kooman, Ko | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Montanari, Raul | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Murillo, Luis | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Pennington, Mark | Cover artist | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Poe, Richard | Narrator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Roig, Esther | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Sivill, Kaijamari | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Sudół, Robert | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed | | Svoboda, Martin | Translator | secondary author | some editions | confirmed |
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| Epigraph |
Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.
-- Paul Valery  It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.
-- Jacob Boehme Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.
-- The Yuma Daily Sun
June 13, 1982 | |
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| Dedication |
The author wishes to thank the Lyndhurst Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He also wishes to express his appreciation to Albert Erskine, his editor of twenty years. | |
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See the child. | |
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It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets. The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that? Every man in the company claims to have encountered that sootysouled rascal in some other place. But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent ... Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.
That would be one hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so. It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? | |
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Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language. Problem CK:
Date de première publication :
- 1985 (1e édition originale américaine)
- 1988-04-14 (1e traduction et édition française, Gallimard)
- 1992-10-16 (Réédition française, Le Loire, Gallimard)
- 1998-10-21 (Nouvelle édition française, Editions de l'Olivier)
- 2001-02-10 (Réédition française, Points, Seuil)
- 2016-09-01 (Réédition française, Points, Seuil)
- 2021-03-25 (Réédition française, Bibliothèque, Editions de l'Olivier) | |
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Information from the Italian Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (3)
▾Book descriptions Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
Blood Meridian chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. | |
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6
Quite simply, McCarthy has to be the most descriptive writer I’ve ever been exposed to. I’m reminded of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and can only imagine the kind of writing that would result if McCarthy turned his talents to borderline pornography. As it is, McCarthy’s description of life, and the kind of violence found in the early 19th century American West is stunning.
There were several issues I had when reading this book. First, there are sections with significant dialogue in the Spanish language, without any context or translation. Some of the prose is confusing and difficult to follow. Yet, even faced with this, I found myself being blown away by the writing, time after time. (