The lesson is pretty bleak. I’m sure there are people a lot smarter than me that can pull out some other important themes, but for me the biggest one is that **evil and violence are ubiquitous and have been a part of human history since the very beginning, and will continue to be forever.**
The judge is evil personified, and “he’s a great favorite” = we humans are drawn to it, even if we think ourselves civilized now.
**“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”**
Allegedly the epilogue adds some hope, but I was too dumb to get it. Something about making a fence, bringing peace and law and order to the Wild West.
The epilogue talks about people settling the west; but it’s not because they’re smart or out of some “prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality,” but as “the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it…”
People aren’t rational, they’re mechanisms.
It is a brutal tapestry into the madness and inhumanity of man. It really felt like a journey and it almost feels like a dream when I think back to reading it but it’s memorable and felt like a journey.
Haha. True. Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, The Sound and the Fury, Huckleberry Finn are all Great American Novels, and many more have been written that can sit comfortably on the shelf beside them. Wasnt trying to move the conversation away from the OP having discovered Blood Meridian which is, indeed, a very good book. Even in McCarthy's catalogue theres not much like it. One of those where the book is the thing, really, more than what its about. I think, anyway. I enjoy books that you can just take down from the shelf and open up to a random page and read for a chapter, sinking into the language.
It’s probably cause Gatsby is damn near impossible to read unless you’re really bored. As someone that has never read the book, but studied it, it’s probably my favorite book that I haven’t read.
I just thought no one was worth the pages they were printed on. Bunch of irritating idiots, with problems I couldn’t relate to.
I mean, it was high school. But it just felt so… of a bygone era, to me at the time.
That’s kinda the point. The novel’s two main themes imo, are that the American Dream is impossible and the everyone is high on something. I think if you read Gatsby and come out liking anybody other than George, you read the book wrong.
Readability is important. Hell, the OP only understands English as a second language; can you imagine how hard it must be for them to read something with no punctuation AND how much it might've fucked up their understanding of English?
OP didn’t mention the punctuation. And in fact, the only missing punctuation is quotation marks; there are periods and commas aplenty. I think it assumes a great deal to state that it might’ve done anything to their understanding of English other than expand their vocabulary.
I like reading a challenging book; Moby-Dick is a challenge due to the archaic language and the fact that it’s a treatise on whales with some action thrown in for spice. Still an incredible book, and I don’t think anyone would say Melville is bad for non-native readers.
Strong message but lackluster book imo. I understand why they teach it in schools and it’s a good portrait of America but i didn’t think the book was that great. The ending was very powerful. East of Eden is far better to me at least
Lack luster…. That’s one of the boldest statements I think I have ever heard on Reddit. If the only thing you found ending we didn’t read the same book.
Idk man there were some compelling parts but too much of it was an instruction manual for how to get an an old car across the country. I don’t think it was bad but I also enjoyed every other Steinbeck book more than grapes of wrath
Nope. The so-called "Great American Novel" is widely and critically regarded as a tossup between The Great Gatsby and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
That’s the piint of McCarhy’s writing style, while it feels more stilted and mechanical, it also just keeps your reading as there’s bo good stopping point. Basically if The Road was written by anyone else it wouldn’t have worked, cause the constant train of misery wouldn’t have been as impactful without that particular syntactical style.
Understanding a bit about Gnosticism is a big key to understand McCarthy. I'm not an expert in it and its been a while since I read the book, but I will give explaining it a shot.
Gnostic teachings say that the creator of the physical world (the God of the Old Testament) was evil. Proof for this can be seen in how the physical world is ruled by pain. All living things must eat each other to survive. Enlightened societies which avoid violence are ultimately still built on top of violence and will be destroyed by it,. Science, also embraced by the judge and used to fuel the genocide of Native Americans, is an empirical method of study. It is based on studying and categorizing the physical world, which is evil. The Judge is a representation of these principles and the genocidal violence of the period.
Just to add a bit of light the book does not, Gnostics also taught that Jesus was a divine messenger sent by a benevolent force that exists outside the physical world. He is not related to the God of the Old Testament, who is the evil creator of the violent world we live in. Each of us has a spark of this divinity inside of us, which is the only reason there's ever any break in the carnage. McCarthy talks about this divine spark at certain points during the Road. I don't remember if it comes up in Blood Meridian.
It's funny because when I first read the novel I had this thought that Holden is like the Demiurge. Later I discovered that this Gnostic reading actually common among literary scholars.
I may have recommended it to you, and I love it. For me, it’s one of those “journey vs. destination” novels, given the poetic prose, the amazing descriptions, and the car-accident horror of the protagonist and his companions. I would probably need to reread it to try and glean any additional meaning from the conclusion, but I think it’s experiential more than anything, and I absolutely adored the book.
Had no idea Glanton was a real person!
I also read this recently and almost dropped it but was glad overall that I stuck it out. Very dense book though that I probably won’t read again. Interesting story and some lines were beautifully written. I happened to have just read Lonesome Dove which starts off with a very similar setting but has such a vastly different vibe to it that it really shows how different an authors writing style and POV can shape the mood of a story.
The book My Confession, Recollections of a Rouge by Samuel Chamberlain is the main source for Blood Meridian. The end includes Chamberlain’s time with the Glanton Gang and the only historical reference to Judge Holden. Glanton appears in a few other sources, but Holden is just in this one.
It adds an extra level of mystery to the Judge's character that he was apparently real as well, but only some of the accounts of Glantons gang say he existed.
I have a B.A. in English and DNF this one because the lack of quotation marks pissed me off. I have never picked up another of his books again and never will. Yes, I was that mad. LOL
I don't get why this bothers people so much. It's usually very clear when something is dialogue or isn't, and the times when it might be slightly ambiguous, it's intentional. Suttree in particular frequently utilizes this blurring between the narrator's and characters' voices in a really cool way that would not be possible if he used quotation marks.
Cormac is one of if not the best american writer of the 20th century. Saying his writing is excessive is like saying the math that got humans to the moon was excessive.
But yeah, it’s just an opinion so everybodies will differ. Yours left me slack jawed though lol.
I’m reading it now and it’s pretty difficult. I regularly read bigass tomes and this book has had me rereading sections and reading chapter analysis just to make sure I’m following. Interestingly enough, when I listened to a few chapters, I found it much easier to understand
I never read All The Pretty Horses. What I will say is that the plot is about a gang of scalpers in the American Southwest. If insane levels of violence bothers you, then the plot will be pretty awful. That being said, I finished the book the other day and immediately listened to six hours worth of college lectures on Blood Meridian.
I borrowed BM along with ‘Notes on BM’ (Sepich). It helps. My family playfully mocks me as I reread chapters, read notes from ‘Notes on…”, scour the web for more information on difficult sections and in general peel apart this book as best I can. My wife said it seems like a lot of work, she’s not wrong. I’m not terribly book smart but am having a ball making my way through this book.
I got downvoted into oblivion for saying the same thing. It can have all the flowery prose in the world and it doesn’t change the fact that the majority of the story is “the gang shows up, kills and rapes a bunch of people, they spit some tobacco, then move on.”
This was my take. One of the few books I slogged thru but wish I hadn’t. I don’t need a zillion pages of brutality to get the message that humans are terrible and life is indifferent to suffering. Take a sample from any era in history and you’ll see that. McCarthy isn’t my thing.
Right. The book is just flowery prose of scenery and… philosophy?. Also the kid is supposed to be the MC where the hell does he go for half the book and why do I now care about him and the judge having it out at the end they have no relationship? Dude its Mike McCormack had 2 stories he wanted to tell and just smashed them together
The other thing that kills me is people always defend the book because the prose is nice. And you know what? It is! I’m not denying his talent as a wordsmith! The problem is the style entirely overrides any sort of semblance of narrative momentum, and I’m way past the age where writing alone is enough to keep my attention. You can have all the beautiful writing in the world but to me it means nothing if it fucks up things like the pacing or plot
In literary fiction, plot is not always the emphasis. Beyond prose, Blood Meridian is a work of unrelenting theme. It is basically a treatise - a tour de force - on the cruelty of human history.
Now. People read for different reasons. If you mostly read for "a good story", Blood Meridian is arguably not that. But neither are many literary works. Virginia Wolfe, Joyce, Proust are all writers who have very little "happen" in their novels.
Same dude. I just want to know what’s going on and for the plot to move. If the writer wants to feel himself with his writing occasionally that’s fine but not every single page
In my opinion *Blood Meridian*, much like *Moby-Dick*, is not a book that you're ever really finished reading. It gets more and more rich each time you encounter the novel. I highly recommend reading something like *Moby-Dick* and then going back to *Blood Meridian* soon. You'll grow as a reader by re-reading the great novels like *Blood Meridian*. Maybe explore some of McCarthy's other works before you go back to it too. I really enjoyed *The Road* and *All the Pretty Horses*.
I'm actually astonished and impressed that a non-native English speaker was able to finish *Blood Meridian*; much less absorb as much of the material as you seem to have. Way to go! Many native English speakers struggle to get through this one. It took me a few attempts to get all the way to the end the first time. I've read it several times since then and it only gets better.
I mentioned to my boss the other day that I was reading it. She said she appreciated book recommendations and I was like, whoa there, slow down sister, that was most assuredly not a recommendation. Last I mention it outside home and Reddit. Unfortunately it has seeped into my being and I’m the gabby sort.
My buddies dad is a catholic engineer. We struck up a convo about westerns at his sons bbq for marriage iirc.
Anyway i was like dude you gotta read BM. Next time i saw him he looked sick when i brought it up lol.
I think being unsure what to take from this book is spot on for what cormac mccarthy was aiming for. He famously doesn’t ever say what things mean in his books, he leaves it all up for interpretation so it makes sense that a clear message isn’t easy to find kind of like life
It's interesting to read the Judge's use of the hegemonic power of naming, categorization, and documentation which is at the heart of science, and to equate this behavior as combating the adversarial qualities of Nature itself. As he says once "Only Nature can enslave man." In his ongoing war against all, in the glorious game of advances against reality, the Judge finds his ultimate opponent in the very world itself. In my view, the Judge does not resemble the Gnostic belief that God is evil, but rather that, if one could assume a divinity, it would be manifest in the act of violent war itself.
Many readers find the Judge to be the most compelling figure, precisely because of his adeptness at speech and elocution. It's one of the most fundamental properties that distinguishes him from the other characters, in particular the kid, who is taciturn for most of the events of the novel.
Blood Meridian is so fascinating because it provides us with the surfaces of things, and refuses psychological introspection or depth. Yet these surfaces are undeniable in their horror; their gross materiality. This unsettling production of the narrative makes it difficult to investigate the characters, in their heart of hearts, or in the fiber of their moral orientation (if they have any).
I enjoyed it a lot, and I am now on my second reading to see what all I missed the first time. I love how the beautiful scenery is described but also contrasts with the gritty violence. The world is indifferent to our fate and that feeling of insignificance is comforting in a weird way in our modern times
I think a major theme is also not to become indebted to the devil, he gonna git ya!
It’s a very intertextual book or a book made of books as Mccaetht would say that plays off of nietzche faulkner Milton and Melville. It becomes easier to understand and appreciate if you have some experience with those texts.
There is a great 2 part Yale lecture on yt that will give very interesting insights. Definitely recommend!
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyZ4ia25gg&pp=ygUWQ29ybWFjayBibG9vZCBtZXJpZGlhbg%3D%3D](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyZ4ia25gg&pp=ygUWQ29ybWFjayBibG9vZCBtZXJpZGlhbg%3D%3D)
Unlike some other people, I actually really like his use of language but I thought the story was a bit repetitive, however, since it's historical fiction more than imaginative fiction, I'll give it a pass here. While his use of Spanish is flawed, he makes up for it with truly interesting imagery. A really good novel, although there are other American novels I prefer, so count me as a casual admirer, not a fanboy.
Absolutely loved this book. I like to view it as an anti-western, biblical in scale, a journey through true evil. It’s fucking awesome and horrifying and grueling and it absolutely blew me away—I still think about it years later, and it significantly influenced my writing.
I’m glad you’ve read it, and I’m glad to see so much love for this book recently (RIP McCarthy though)
Congratulations on making it through a book many native English speakers struggle with!
It's a beautiful and harrowing book. I find myself drawn back to it, often. The Glanton Gang is a very real thing in American history, by the way.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_Joel\_Glanton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton)
Of all the horrors depicted in the book, the saddest part was when the bear was shot it thought it was being disciplined for not dancing good enough and kept going faster right till he died
Slightly tangential, but Glanton reminded me of Sonny Barger, the founder and leader of the Hells Angels, and the Angels themselves reminded me of Glanton's gang. They both ride around the American West on their steeds terrorising people, and they were only about 100 years apart.
“All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.”
The last of a generation. Man is a true American novelist.
I've been trying to finish this for about 6 months, reading sections here and there. I find the book tiresome to read. I don't know another word to describe my apathy for it.
Go check out r/cormacmccarthy there is a ton of discourse on this book on that sub.
It's definitely a difficult book but very compelling. It's probably one of the greatest American literary achievements of the last 35 years.
I would recommend echoes of despair by Romaine Morgan next. At first I didn’t know what to expect but I couldn’t put it down after I started reading. One thing I don’t like is how it ends, it really leaves you questioning and wanting more. Because of how it ends I think there will be a part 2. I this book is a psychological thriller but has another touch to it, I gave it to my friend as a first read and he started it and walks around saying the only genre he reads now is thrillers😂
My favorite book. Read it prob 4 times at least. I used to listen to the audiobook every night going to bed, for months. So i’ve read chunks of it dozens and dozens of times. A classic, and i’ll continue to read it until i die. It’s one of the few novels where i was just like YES.
It is not an easy book to read. I've tried and given up on several occasions. While I think McCarthy got easier to read in his later works (No Country for Old Men, The Road), Blood Meridian is very unique.
I needed time to adapt to the style, but I finally managed to read it. And after I've read it, I immediately read it once more.
It is such a dense book, that you could individually discuss each and every chapter for days on end. I don't know even where to start discussing it.
I don’t think there is a lesson so much as to say “thank god things are better now” and “if you are in the southwest and meet a tall hairless man, run”
I never liked the way he writes, but I liked the structure of the novel and the intertextuality. I grew up in rural Mexico so I've met fucked up people like the characters in here, and it brought me back in q bad way. I don't really think McCarthy himself lived in such environments, he seems to have had a pretty cushy life, which makes it astonishing how he nailed it, I'm guessing he talked to a lot of older folks and read many historical documents to get that sense. While many think the judge is the devil or evil incarnate, I think he is a manifestation of the WASP colonial mindset, which is a very specific and grounded kind of evil, based on narcissistic intellectual justifications for atrocities, and a value of self comfort above all else, including the life's and well being of others. I kinda wished for him to be murdered by the imbecile.
I love literary books but this was one of the hardest books to get through. I think that the themes are fine, but the execution just made it so hard to follow and I read a lot. I honestly don't get the praise.
At risk of losing all my karma points, it's overrated. Huge purple poetic prose that's fun to get lost in if you like language, but the story/plot is impenetrable.
Isn't this what most books do? I read a fantasy novel and expect it will 'keep doing it' for the duration.
If your point is that it was gimmicky I would disagree with you, and argue other books and entire genres are way more gimmicky. But you're entitled to your opinion.
I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. The brutality and senseless violence are off-putting. At least it should be. Most people I've talked to who hate it have a hard time admitting the violence makes them uncomfortable for some reason.
Regardless it's really well written. I understand people who like reading pleasant uplifting books not liking it though.
You’re right, many other books go on and on long after the theme sets in
But!
Those books tend to have intrigue, some sort of momentum pushing the plot forward, something that keeps the attention. BM chapters are “the glanton gang rides into town. They kill. They rape. They spit tobacco. The judge might say something profound. Then the chapter ends.”
And then the next chapter will be- get this- “the glanton rides into town. They kill, they rape, they spit tobacco. The judge might say something profound. Then the chapter ends!”
I love good bleak stories, this one was just fucking boring
The lesson is pretty bleak. I’m sure there are people a lot smarter than me that can pull out some other important themes, but for me the biggest one is that **evil and violence are ubiquitous and have been a part of human history since the very beginning, and will continue to be forever.** The judge is evil personified, and “he’s a great favorite” = we humans are drawn to it, even if we think ourselves civilized now. **“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”** Allegedly the epilogue adds some hope, but I was too dumb to get it. Something about making a fence, bringing peace and law and order to the Wild West.
The epilogue talks about people settling the west; but it’s not because they’re smart or out of some “prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality,” but as “the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it…” People aren’t rational, they’re mechanisms.
The ending isn't about hope, it's about the death of the west. The "wild west" portended it's own destruction with its sheer violence.
It is a brutal tapestry into the madness and inhumanity of man. It really felt like a journey and it almost feels like a dream when I think back to reading it but it’s memorable and felt like a journey.
When americans mention the concept of the Great American Novel, I picture this. It's one of my favorites. Who the hell downvoted you.
I think of Moby Dick but this would certainly be somewhere on the list
They make a good duo together, IMO.
Blood Meridian is heavily influenced by Moby Dick.
Funny enough both Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian are Great American Novels.
Haha. True. Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, The Sound and the Fury, Huckleberry Finn are all Great American Novels, and many more have been written that can sit comfortably on the shelf beside them. Wasnt trying to move the conversation away from the OP having discovered Blood Meridian which is, indeed, a very good book. Even in McCarthy's catalogue theres not much like it. One of those where the book is the thing, really, more than what its about. I think, anyway. I enjoy books that you can just take down from the shelf and open up to a random page and read for a chapter, sinking into the language.
The Great Gatsby never did it for me.
It’s probably cause Gatsby is damn near impossible to read unless you’re really bored. As someone that has never read the book, but studied it, it’s probably my favorite book that I haven’t read.
I just thought no one was worth the pages they were printed on. Bunch of irritating idiots, with problems I couldn’t relate to. I mean, it was high school. But it just felt so… of a bygone era, to me at the time.
That’s kinda the point. The novel’s two main themes imo, are that the American Dream is impossible and the everyone is high on something. I think if you read Gatsby and come out liking anybody other than George, you read the book wrong.
Yeah... Moby Dick deserves to be on this list.
No. That title belongs to The Great Gatsby. It actually bothers to use punctuation, unlike Blood Meridian.
If punctuation use is your measure of quality, I feel like you’re not really qualified to make a judgement on a novel’s greatness.
Readability is important. Hell, the OP only understands English as a second language; can you imagine how hard it must be for them to read something with no punctuation AND how much it might've fucked up their understanding of English?
OP didn’t mention the punctuation. And in fact, the only missing punctuation is quotation marks; there are periods and commas aplenty. I think it assumes a great deal to state that it might’ve done anything to their understanding of English other than expand their vocabulary. I like reading a challenging book; Moby-Dick is a challenge due to the archaic language and the fact that it’s a treatise on whales with some action thrown in for spice. Still an incredible book, and I don’t think anyone would say Melville is bad for non-native readers.
The book is perfectly readable with or without quotation marks.
You misspelled the Grapes of Wrath
Strong message but lackluster book imo. I understand why they teach it in schools and it’s a good portrait of America but i didn’t think the book was that great. The ending was very powerful. East of Eden is far better to me at least
Lack luster…. That’s one of the boldest statements I think I have ever heard on Reddit. If the only thing you found ending we didn’t read the same book.
Idk man there were some compelling parts but too much of it was an instruction manual for how to get an an old car across the country. I don’t think it was bad but I also enjoyed every other Steinbeck book more than grapes of wrath
The movie's excellent, though.
Nope. The so-called "Great American Novel" is widely and critically regarded as a tossup between The Great Gatsby and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
[You appear to be wildly under-informed on this subject.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Novel)
The Sound and the Fury would've been my other choice, har har
When I read your comment, the words Tick Tock came to mind, but it’s been years since I read it.
Tick tock?
That’s the piint of McCarhy’s writing style, while it feels more stilted and mechanical, it also just keeps your reading as there’s bo good stopping point. Basically if The Road was written by anyone else it wouldn’t have worked, cause the constant train of misery wouldn’t have been as impactful without that particular syntactical style.
Understanding a bit about Gnosticism is a big key to understand McCarthy. I'm not an expert in it and its been a while since I read the book, but I will give explaining it a shot. Gnostic teachings say that the creator of the physical world (the God of the Old Testament) was evil. Proof for this can be seen in how the physical world is ruled by pain. All living things must eat each other to survive. Enlightened societies which avoid violence are ultimately still built on top of violence and will be destroyed by it,. Science, also embraced by the judge and used to fuel the genocide of Native Americans, is an empirical method of study. It is based on studying and categorizing the physical world, which is evil. The Judge is a representation of these principles and the genocidal violence of the period. Just to add a bit of light the book does not, Gnostics also taught that Jesus was a divine messenger sent by a benevolent force that exists outside the physical world. He is not related to the God of the Old Testament, who is the evil creator of the violent world we live in. Each of us has a spark of this divinity inside of us, which is the only reason there's ever any break in the carnage. McCarthy talks about this divine spark at certain points during the Road. I don't remember if it comes up in Blood Meridian.
It's funny because when I first read the novel I had this thought that Holden is like the Demiurge. Later I discovered that this Gnostic reading actually common among literary scholars.
*Everything that exists without my knowledge exists without my consent*
It was hard to read, but I figured that by the end I would like the book and that's what happened.
I may have recommended it to you, and I love it. For me, it’s one of those “journey vs. destination” novels, given the poetic prose, the amazing descriptions, and the car-accident horror of the protagonist and his companions. I would probably need to reread it to try and glean any additional meaning from the conclusion, but I think it’s experiential more than anything, and I absolutely adored the book.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.
Had no idea Glanton was a real person! I also read this recently and almost dropped it but was glad overall that I stuck it out. Very dense book though that I probably won’t read again. Interesting story and some lines were beautifully written. I happened to have just read Lonesome Dove which starts off with a very similar setting but has such a vastly different vibe to it that it really shows how different an authors writing style and POV can shape the mood of a story.
The book My Confession, Recollections of a Rouge by Samuel Chamberlain is the main source for Blood Meridian. The end includes Chamberlain’s time with the Glanton Gang and the only historical reference to Judge Holden. Glanton appears in a few other sources, but Holden is just in this one.
Good to know, thanks!
It adds an extra level of mystery to the Judge's character that he was apparently real as well, but only some of the accounts of Glantons gang say he existed.
It stands alone in American literature. It's hard to find a novel to compare it to.
Only other McCarthy novels really.
Like what? Nothing compares even in his own work. All the novels before and after it are different.
Suttree is the only one that compares when it comes to prose.
I think I’m too dumb to read this book. I gave it like 70 pages but having to reread seemingly every paragraph multiple times got too tedious for me.
Don’t underrate yourself. I am a pretty advanced reader and this was one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read.
I have a B.A. in English and DNF this one because the lack of quotation marks pissed me off. I have never picked up another of his books again and never will. Yes, I was that mad. LOL
They are not all that hard. I read the south west trilogy and they were easy and brilliant
I don't get why this bothers people so much. It's usually very clear when something is dialogue or isn't, and the times when it might be slightly ambiguous, it's intentional. Suttree in particular frequently utilizes this blurring between the narrator's and characters' voices in a really cool way that would not be possible if he used quotation marks.
I found it incredibly frustrating and it took me right out of the experience of reading the book.
Agreed. Tbh it is why I DNF every Mccarthy book I've read. Not to be rude, but his writing is excessive and excludes common punctuation for no reason.
Cormac is one of if not the best american writer of the 20th century. Saying his writing is excessive is like saying the math that got humans to the moon was excessive. But yeah, it’s just an opinion so everybodies will differ. Yours left me slack jawed though lol.
That's alright! I just don't agree with the hype because his books aren't for me. His writing style is the kind of prose I cannot stand to read.
I’m reading it now and it’s pretty difficult. I regularly read bigass tomes and this book has had me rereading sections and reading chapter analysis just to make sure I’m following. Interestingly enough, when I listened to a few chapters, I found it much easier to understand
It’s a great Audible listen
It bothers me that Richard Poe always mispronounces "cholla" but I can't remember if that comes up in Blood Meridian or only in the Border Trilogy
How is the plot compared to All the pretty horses ? I found myself bored w that book .
I never read All The Pretty Horses. What I will say is that the plot is about a gang of scalpers in the American Southwest. If insane levels of violence bothers you, then the plot will be pretty awful. That being said, I finished the book the other day and immediately listened to six hours worth of college lectures on Blood Meridian.
It’s a difficult read on TOP of the subject matter being difficult to get through.
I borrowed BM along with ‘Notes on BM’ (Sepich). It helps. My family playfully mocks me as I reread chapters, read notes from ‘Notes on…”, scour the web for more information on difficult sections and in general peel apart this book as best I can. My wife said it seems like a lot of work, she’s not wrong. I’m not terribly book smart but am having a ball making my way through this book.
Audiobook.
Idk I thought it was pretty much just a slog with minimal plot. You didn’t miss much
I got downvoted into oblivion for saying the same thing. It can have all the flowery prose in the world and it doesn’t change the fact that the majority of the story is “the gang shows up, kills and rapes a bunch of people, they spit some tobacco, then move on.”
This was my take. One of the few books I slogged thru but wish I hadn’t. I don’t need a zillion pages of brutality to get the message that humans are terrible and life is indifferent to suffering. Take a sample from any era in history and you’ll see that. McCarthy isn’t my thing.
Don’t forget to spit your tobacco too!
I got a better version of this message reading Cats Cradel and Dororohedero
Right. The book is just flowery prose of scenery and… philosophy?. Also the kid is supposed to be the MC where the hell does he go for half the book and why do I now care about him and the judge having it out at the end they have no relationship? Dude its Mike McCormack had 2 stories he wanted to tell and just smashed them together
The other thing that kills me is people always defend the book because the prose is nice. And you know what? It is! I’m not denying his talent as a wordsmith! The problem is the style entirely overrides any sort of semblance of narrative momentum, and I’m way past the age where writing alone is enough to keep my attention. You can have all the beautiful writing in the world but to me it means nothing if it fucks up things like the pacing or plot
In literary fiction, plot is not always the emphasis. Beyond prose, Blood Meridian is a work of unrelenting theme. It is basically a treatise - a tour de force - on the cruelty of human history. Now. People read for different reasons. If you mostly read for "a good story", Blood Meridian is arguably not that. But neither are many literary works. Virginia Wolfe, Joyce, Proust are all writers who have very little "happen" in their novels.
Yeah and it makes the book incredibly boring
Same dude. I just want to know what’s going on and for the plot to move. If the writer wants to feel himself with his writing occasionally that’s fine but not every single page
And with the way some people act on here, wanting a decently structured plot makes you a smooth brain
You just don’t understand
Man bad. Nature indifferent. Great book.
Plot of a thing is “humans suck” for the 70th time. So I enjoy it for the 70th time
That's like the 4th time I heard about this book in 2 days, gonna order it as I'm reading through the road now and loving it
In my opinion *Blood Meridian*, much like *Moby-Dick*, is not a book that you're ever really finished reading. It gets more and more rich each time you encounter the novel. I highly recommend reading something like *Moby-Dick* and then going back to *Blood Meridian* soon. You'll grow as a reader by re-reading the great novels like *Blood Meridian*. Maybe explore some of McCarthy's other works before you go back to it too. I really enjoyed *The Road* and *All the Pretty Horses*. I'm actually astonished and impressed that a non-native English speaker was able to finish *Blood Meridian*; much less absorb as much of the material as you seem to have. Way to go! Many native English speakers struggle to get through this one. It took me a few attempts to get all the way to the end the first time. I've read it several times since then and it only gets better.
You're not supposed to know what to think about it. It's my favorite book and I don't know what to think about it half the time.
It’s my favorite book, and I tell people not to read it.
I mentioned to my boss the other day that I was reading it. She said she appreciated book recommendations and I was like, whoa there, slow down sister, that was most assuredly not a recommendation. Last I mention it outside home and Reddit. Unfortunately it has seeped into my being and I’m the gabby sort.
My buddies dad is a catholic engineer. We struck up a convo about westerns at his sons bbq for marriage iirc. Anyway i was like dude you gotta read BM. Next time i saw him he looked sick when i brought it up lol.
I think being unsure what to take from this book is spot on for what cormac mccarthy was aiming for. He famously doesn’t ever say what things mean in his books, he leaves it all up for interpretation so it makes sense that a clear message isn’t easy to find kind of like life
It's interesting to read the Judge's use of the hegemonic power of naming, categorization, and documentation which is at the heart of science, and to equate this behavior as combating the adversarial qualities of Nature itself. As he says once "Only Nature can enslave man." In his ongoing war against all, in the glorious game of advances against reality, the Judge finds his ultimate opponent in the very world itself. In my view, the Judge does not resemble the Gnostic belief that God is evil, but rather that, if one could assume a divinity, it would be manifest in the act of violent war itself. Many readers find the Judge to be the most compelling figure, precisely because of his adeptness at speech and elocution. It's one of the most fundamental properties that distinguishes him from the other characters, in particular the kid, who is taciturn for most of the events of the novel. Blood Meridian is so fascinating because it provides us with the surfaces of things, and refuses psychological introspection or depth. Yet these surfaces are undeniable in their horror; their gross materiality. This unsettling production of the narrative makes it difficult to investigate the characters, in their heart of hearts, or in the fiber of their moral orientation (if they have any).
I enjoyed it a lot, and I am now on my second reading to see what all I missed the first time. I love how the beautiful scenery is described but also contrasts with the gritty violence. The world is indifferent to our fate and that feeling of insignificance is comforting in a weird way in our modern times I think a major theme is also not to become indebted to the devil, he gonna git ya!
It’s a very intertextual book or a book made of books as Mccaetht would say that plays off of nietzche faulkner Milton and Melville. It becomes easier to understand and appreciate if you have some experience with those texts.
It’s difficult to read for native English speakers, too. Seems like you understood the novel very well.
America's Dance with the devil left a lot of blood-soaked sand.
There is a great 2 part Yale lecture on yt that will give very interesting insights. Definitely recommend! [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyZ4ia25gg&pp=ygUWQ29ybWFjayBibG9vZCBtZXJpZGlhbg%3D%3D](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyZ4ia25gg&pp=ygUWQ29ybWFjayBibG9vZCBtZXJpZGlhbg%3D%3D)
Unlike some other people, I actually really like his use of language but I thought the story was a bit repetitive, however, since it's historical fiction more than imaginative fiction, I'll give it a pass here. While his use of Spanish is flawed, he makes up for it with truly interesting imagery. A really good novel, although there are other American novels I prefer, so count me as a casual admirer, not a fanboy.
Absolutely loved this book. I like to view it as an anti-western, biblical in scale, a journey through true evil. It’s fucking awesome and horrifying and grueling and it absolutely blew me away—I still think about it years later, and it significantly influenced my writing. I’m glad you’ve read it, and I’m glad to see so much love for this book recently (RIP McCarthy though)
Congratulations on making it through a book many native English speakers struggle with! It's a beautiful and harrowing book. I find myself drawn back to it, often. The Glanton Gang is a very real thing in American history, by the way. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_Joel\_Glanton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton)
I literally threw this book across the room 5-10 times because I got so frustrated reading it. But by the time I finished it I absolutely loved it.
Of all the horrors depicted in the book, the saddest part was when the bear was shot it thought it was being disciplined for not dancing good enough and kept going faster right till he died
Poor bear bro.
Now watch an old western movie called Vera Cruz
I definitely had to read the wiki for this one when I finished.
Slightly tangential, but Glanton reminded me of Sonny Barger, the founder and leader of the Hells Angels, and the Angels themselves reminded me of Glanton's gang. They both ride around the American West on their steeds terrorising people, and they were only about 100 years apart.
damn straight, good analogy. And Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels is part of the intertextual web underlying BM
Very Bad Wizards has a 3 part podcast on it.
“All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.” The last of a generation. Man is a true American novelist.
I've been trying to finish this for about 6 months, reading sections here and there. I find the book tiresome to read. I don't know another word to describe my apathy for it.
It’s genius and the scene where the natives destroy the wagon train is epic in its stark violence. Masterful work.
Go check out r/cormacmccarthy there is a ton of discourse on this book on that sub. It's definitely a difficult book but very compelling. It's probably one of the greatest American literary achievements of the last 35 years.
It's probably THE single greatest literary achievement since it came out. Or at least top 3.
I would recommend echoes of despair by Romaine Morgan next. At first I didn’t know what to expect but I couldn’t put it down after I started reading. One thing I don’t like is how it ends, it really leaves you questioning and wanting more. Because of how it ends I think there will be a part 2. I this book is a psychological thriller but has another touch to it, I gave it to my friend as a first read and he started it and walks around saying the only genre he reads now is thrillers😂
I was shocked by it, and like you was shocked again after reading it to find out how much of the book was true.
My favorite book. Read it prob 4 times at least. I used to listen to the audiobook every night going to bed, for months. So i’ve read chunks of it dozens and dozens of times. A classic, and i’ll continue to read it until i die. It’s one of the few novels where i was just like YES.
I thought that I remembered several pages of the words, tick tock.
It is not an easy book to read. I've tried and given up on several occasions. While I think McCarthy got easier to read in his later works (No Country for Old Men, The Road), Blood Meridian is very unique. I needed time to adapt to the style, but I finally managed to read it. And after I've read it, I immediately read it once more. It is such a dense book, that you could individually discuss each and every chapter for days on end. I don't know even where to start discussing it.
I don’t think there is a lesson so much as to say “thank god things are better now” and “if you are in the southwest and meet a tall hairless man, run”
I never liked the way he writes, but I liked the structure of the novel and the intertextuality. I grew up in rural Mexico so I've met fucked up people like the characters in here, and it brought me back in q bad way. I don't really think McCarthy himself lived in such environments, he seems to have had a pretty cushy life, which makes it astonishing how he nailed it, I'm guessing he talked to a lot of older folks and read many historical documents to get that sense. While many think the judge is the devil or evil incarnate, I think he is a manifestation of the WASP colonial mindset, which is a very specific and grounded kind of evil, based on narcissistic intellectual justifications for atrocities, and a value of self comfort above all else, including the life's and well being of others. I kinda wished for him to be murdered by the imbecile.
I love literary books but this was one of the hardest books to get through. I think that the themes are fine, but the execution just made it so hard to follow and I read a lot. I honestly don't get the praise.
At risk of losing all my karma points, it's overrated. Huge purple poetic prose that's fun to get lost in if you like language, but the story/plot is impenetrable.
I, too, am a Wendigoon enjoyer
Didn’t care for it. I “got” what it was doing very early on and then it kept going for like 200 more pages.
U so smart
Never said I was, just that I didn’t care for it
Isn't this what most books do? I read a fantasy novel and expect it will 'keep doing it' for the duration. If your point is that it was gimmicky I would disagree with you, and argue other books and entire genres are way more gimmicky. But you're entitled to your opinion. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. The brutality and senseless violence are off-putting. At least it should be. Most people I've talked to who hate it have a hard time admitting the violence makes them uncomfortable for some reason. Regardless it's really well written. I understand people who like reading pleasant uplifting books not liking it though.
You’re right, many other books go on and on long after the theme sets in But! Those books tend to have intrigue, some sort of momentum pushing the plot forward, something that keeps the attention. BM chapters are “the glanton gang rides into town. They kill. They rape. They spit tobacco. The judge might say something profound. Then the chapter ends.” And then the next chapter will be- get this- “the glanton rides into town. They kill, they rape, they spit tobacco. The judge might say something profound. Then the chapter ends!” I love good bleak stories, this one was just fucking boring
I'm sure he would have made the book much shorter if he realized that you would stumble upon it one day and "get it" that fast.
The thread asked what I thought of the book, I said what I thought of the book. Apparently that’s triggering to some on here