23 ms·

Cormac McCarthy has died

856 points by benbreen 3y ago

secret-noun 3y ago
https://archive.ph/eWeoO https://archive.ph/eWeoO
- ErikAugust 3y ago
  https://trimread.org/articles/38980 https://trimread.org/articles/38980
- neonate 3y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20230614005318/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230614005318/https://www.nytime...
haroldp 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230613194612/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230613194612/https://www.nytim...
tptacek 3y ago
Interesting fact about McCarthy: he had a sort of residency, I think pretty recently, despite his fame! as a copyeditor for science papers at the Santa Fe Institute. Here's a thread about a Nature piece with his advice for science writers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611829 Edit Meant to link the HN thread, not the original source.
- javajosh 3y ago
  It costs $30 to read that article. Here is a summary from https://kottke.org/19/09/advice-from-cormac-mccarthy-on-writing-great-science-papers https://kottke.org/19/09/advice-from-cormac-mccarthy-on-writ... > Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can. > Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn't be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn't fool anyone into thinking you're being objective: "Earth is the centre of this Solar System" isn't any more objective or factual than "We are at the centre of our Solar System." > Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can't please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own. EDIT: you posted the wrong link, I was trying to help YOU, and the readers of your comment. You removed the original nature link, and then post a condescending reply to me. It's insulting and makes me think less of you and I now deeply regret trying to help.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    The original is on sci-hub under its DOI, of course. Later (I wrote "of course" here, as a sort of clumsy acknowledgement that I'm not posting an actual sci-hub link, not as any sort of commentary on the preceding comment --- that comment was appreciated, as I'd originally posted the wrong link, to the paywalled Nature story and not the HN thread. Sorry if it reads any other way!)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- unignorant 3y ago
  I spent a summer at the Santa Fe Institute in 2010 and can say that McCarthy certainly spent a lot of time there. I'm not sure he was a copyeditor, exactly, but SFI is a nice place to hang out for any sort of creative work -- beautiful building and landscape, and very open and collaborative atmosphere. The institute is on the top of a big hill and I'll always remember how he gave me a lift one day as I was walking up.
bklyn11201 3y ago
Read The Border Trilogy first (a coming-of-age story set on the US-Mexico border): * All the Pretty Horses * The Crossing * Cities of the Plain Then Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men.
- cgh 3y ago
  Calling the Border Trilogy a coming-of-age story is...one way to look at it for sure, given how it all ends. I love "The Crossing", top three McCarthy for me (the others being "Blood Meridian" of course and "Child of God").
  - zls 3y ago
    Blood Meridian is getting all the praise, and that’s probably right, but I’d put The Crossing right up there with it. The last scene with the crippled dog conveys so much about the journey Billy has gone through, abba what it’s done to him… I don’t know if “coming of age” is so apt as “loss of innocence”
    - jiscariot 3y ago
      That stuff with the wolf in The Crossing was as deeply affecting to me as an adult as say, The Never Ending Story's Atrax in the Swamp of Sadness was for me as a kid.
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  I would second that, and add Suttree towards the end. I personally found The Road a little awkward, it felt unfortunately like an experiment in the SF / post-apocalyptic genre that was less successful than his surreal westerns.
  - tmountain 3y ago
    And if you still want more westerns after that, Lonesome Dove and Paradise Sky. Neither are McCarthy, but they’re both amazing and will resonate with the same audience.
rbtprograms 3y ago
McCarthy was one of my bigger introductions to what I could call a more "adult" form of literature. He was one of my favorite novelists when I was in my late teens and early 20's, and I believe him to be a master of setting a tone in a novel. Truly will never forget the first time I read Blood Meridian.
boredumb 3y ago
Feel silly but I didn't know what Darker America was. Maybe i'm in the minority but The Road, No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian seem to be massively more popular so it seems a bit odd for the title to mention what I perceive as a lesser known book.
- applepizza 3y ago
  They are referring to his little known novel “Darker America, Is dead at 89”
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I believe that’s a descriptor of his works, not a title of one.
  - boredumb 3y ago
    Thank you, I just spent 5 minutes trying to find the book anywhere on line and was starting to feel a bit nuts.
- nostromo95 3y ago
  You might be a non-native speaker, but the title is trying to say his works evoke a darker America rather than that being a work he's written.
  - boredumb 3y ago
    I assumed with Darker being capitalized it was a title. Perhaps the NYTimes editors are no longer native english speakers?
    - FemmeAndroid 3y ago
      It’s part of the title of the article, which is in titlecase. That’s why ‘Novelist,’ ‘is,’ and ‘dead’ are capitalized.
    - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
kalverra 3y ago
Well that's a real bummer, one of my top 3 authors, and the only one that was still alive.
AJRF 3y ago
God I will miss his writing. I finished (and adored) The Passenger a few weeks ago. Rest In Piece. This is a nice interview; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrUy1Vn2KdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrUy1Vn2KdI
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Why not read Stella Maris? I'm reading The Passenger right now, and enjoying it.
- cakemedia 3y ago
  One of my favourite McCarthy quotes is from The Passenger: “Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it.”
ageisopolis 3y ago
One of the greatest authors of the postmodern era if not the greatest. Blood Meridian is that "great american novel" in my mind. RIP
rgrieselhuber 3y ago
Goin on ahead and fixin to make a fire. RIP.
ericboggs 3y ago
I read "The Road" in a single sitting one night while my wife was working a late shift. I laid in bed staring at the ceiling all night.
- Xenoamorphous 3y ago
  Is that where the movie with Viggo Mortensen came from? I didn’t know it was based on a book, the movie was soul crushing.
  - ewjt 3y ago
    It is the only book I wish I could forget completely. Serious advice: think twice before reading The Road if you’re susceptible to doom and gloom about the human race.
    - bamfly 3y ago
      Damn. I must have exceptionally dark taste in media, because I've definitely got a few "well, that was good, but I kinda wish I hadn't read/watched it" things in my history, and The Road wasn't even close to qualifying. I'd say the film Threads hit me harder, to pick something with similar setting and circumstances, though that's still not quite in that category. (It Comes at Night is probably my #1 in that category for film, and I guess Watts' Blindsight in books—both messed me up for days after, the former with some depressive nihilism, the latter with days of fairly intense derealization that weren't too fun—and I'm not normally especially prone to either of those, I don't think)
      - dreamcompiler 3y ago
        Blindsight is a masterpiece about intelligence without consciousness. De-linking those ideas can be seriously jarring for humans, because we usually consider them two sides of the same coin. Plus one of the more normal characters investigating the phenomenon just happens to be a vampire who--surprisingly enough--is neither formulaic nor boring.
jnsie 3y ago
I was not ready for this...such a huge loss.
DontchaKnowit 3y ago
I know its bad form to speak ill of the dead but - A friend gave me a copy of "Child of God" amd frankly it was the most disgusting, dark, unrewarding, unethical, uninspired, uniteresting, poorly written books ive ever read. I was flat out offended by the book and repeatedly had to set it down and fume about how unnecessarily disgusting he was being. I never finished it. I got the impression that cormac was a thoroughly disturbed individual with a macabre fascination with the most fucked up 0.00001% of humanity. To make matters worth he cant write worth a damn. I will say his metaphors can be quite beautiful hut they often make no sense grammatically. Tldr : Cormac Mccarthy is not for me.
- gerry_shaw 3y ago
  Your review is almost spot on for me. I’m agreeing with it all along with the exception that I really like his writing and, well, I would say “enjoy” his novels, I do respect and value the time spent reading them.
- asdasd213123 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stvltvs 3y ago
  There's early McCarthy and then there's late McCarthy. The difference is stark. You should try one of his later books. I read "Suttree", and it was a mixed bag for me. I loved "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Road".
- serf 3y ago
  >I got the impression that cormac was a thoroughly disturbed individual with a macabre fascination with the most fucked up 0.00001% of humanity. you should separate yourself from that notion. it's true that authors can be damaged individuals with little personal hope, but some of the most macabre things ever written have been conjured by perfectly normal/well-functioning/happy individuals who enjoy fairly well-balanced lives -- it's simply not a good indicator of the person behind the pen. as for the grammatic non-sense (to which I agree can be exactly that, non-sense) I always read it as if it were sort of styled similarly to the concept of 'beat poetry'. Grammar and syntax goes out the door for prose/beauty/imagery and style.
projectileboy 3y ago
It’s not often that someone passes who is legitimately a giant, someone whose impact will be felt generations from now. A sad day.
smarri 3y ago
My favourite author, Blood Meridian was like nothing I ever had read before. Rest in peace.
dvt 3y ago
I read The Road years ago, but I was probably too young to fully understand it; more recently, I read Blood Meridian a few months ago for my book club. Few novels have had me think about them as much (Dostoevsky's Demons and Melville's Moby Dick come to mind). McCarthy was an absolute American treasure. Rest in peace. His poetic Blood Meridian epilogue really stuck with me: "In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than 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 there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again."
- Solvency 3y ago
  Why do you suppose Blood Meridian hasn't been put to film yet?
  - alpineidyll3 3y ago
    Who would you cast as the judge?
    - googlryas 3y ago
      Kane - aka Glenn Thomas Jacobs. 7'0, 330 lbs, light complexion, looks good hairless, has acting experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_(wrestler)#/media/File:The_big_red_machine.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_(wrestler)#/media/File:Th...
2devnull 3y ago
CAPS MATTER1
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  Punctuation sentence structure not.
voisin 3y ago
Man, this is crushing news. He was uniquely capable of capturing the worst of the human experience in the most beautiful manner. "Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
nielsbot 3y ago
In Memoriam "Yelping With Cormac: Ritual Roasters" https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/10442344603/ritual-coffee-roasters https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/10442344603/ritual... Always gives me a chuckle
candlemas 3y ago
I think you're supposed to follow the unofficial Hacker News death announcement title format of "[name of person] has died". https://hn.algolia.com/?q=has+died https://hn.algolia.com/?q=has+died
cwdegidio 3y ago
I grew up in Ohio. I moved west the year I turned 30. I always felt like the West never made sense to me. Through his words, I feel like I got some understanding. Fantastic writer and a definite loss to American prose.
- jebarker 3y ago
  What aspects of the West didn't make sense to you?
  - cwdegidio 3y ago
    Just my experience with living in Texas, there is a major individual independence vein that runs through a lot of folks here. In NE Ohio, sure... there were those that didn't follow the norms, but for the most part attitudes were very collective. Texas? Don't tell them what they can do with their land. Don't tell them they need to ditch their truck. Not saying it was a 1:1 illustration in his novels, but it did give me a better insight into how folks west of Austin 'tick'.
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  Growing up in Ohio as well, I was fortunate to encounter in high school Ursula Le Guin's short story "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" which helped me feel like I understood it better. After spending more time in the West and Southwest, those feelings were confirmed.
voisin 3y ago
Tangential: check out “Yelping with Cormac”, a tumblr that I think did a great job of capturing his style with humorous results.
Quequau 3y ago
Cormac McCarthy was an optimist.
memling 3y ago
I read _Stella Maris_ just after reading a bio of Gödel and history of the Vienna Circle. Serendipitous to come across it, and would recommend it. _The Road_...I was warned, but not prepared.
- alangibson 3y ago
  I read The Road a couple of months after my first kid was born. I don't think I ever really mentally recovered.
  - cypherpunks01 3y ago
    I listened to The Road on audiobook while falling asleep, over a week or so. Amazing book, but not a recommended setting! Don't think I've recovered yet either.
voisin 3y ago
His famous “Legion of Horribles” quote below. I often think of “death hilarious”: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horse’s ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. Oh my god, said the sergeant.”
- trefoiled 3y ago
  As fantastical as this passage may sound, most of the details McCarthy provides are historically accurate, and based on a particular event: The Great Raid of 1840 [1]. A thousand Comanche warriors conducted an extremely deep raid into Southeast Texas, where they sacked the port of Linnville. An exceptionally large amount of trade goods were present in the port that day, including clothes bound for various settlements across the Texas frontier. The bits about umbrellas, stovepipe hats, and even the wedding veil come directly from eyewitnesses to the raid. The bit about a Comanche warrior wearing the armor of a conquistador is also real [2]. The Comanche were known for being exceptionally flamboyant, prizing extravagant clothing dyed in vibrant colors. It must have had quite a psychological effect on their enemies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840 [2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comanches/Cqh8qSexvU4C?hl=en&gbpv=0 https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comanches/Cqh8qSexvU4C?...
briga 3y ago
Wow, The Passenger really was his last. He never compromised, he was true to his creative vision right up until the end. Truly one of the greats
- dieze 3y ago
  Actually Stella Maris was published after The Passenger
  - briga 3y ago
    They're essentially the same book, I suspect the publishers pushed hard for it to be published in 2 volumes
squeegee_scream 3y ago
https://readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com/ https://readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com/ > READING MCCARTHY is a podcast devoted to the consideration and discussion of the works of one of our greatest American writers, Cormac McCarthy. Each episode will call upon different well-known Cormackian readers and scholars to help us explore different works and various essential aspects of McCarthy’s writing.(Note these episodes try to offer accessible literary criticism and may contain spoilers from different McCarthy works.)
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
I just finished The Road last week. It was worth reading. By sheer coincidence, the e-book version is currently on sale (at least I sure hope it's coincidental): https://www.amazon.com/Road-Vintage-International-Cormac-McCarthy-ebook/dp/B000OI0G1Q/ https://www.amazon.com/Road-Vintage-International-Cormac-McC...
pastor_bob 3y ago
I always heard the "Big 4" (white guys) were John Updike, McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. I think somebody like, the disgraced, Harold Bloom at one point said they were the last 'great', living American Authors. To my surprise, Don DeLillo is still alive.
- cgh 3y ago
  Bloom isn't a fan of Pynchon? Not sure how you could exclude him from such a list.
- peruvian 3y ago
  Bloom considered McCarthy the best living American author and Blood Meridian one of the best American novels, right up there with Moby Dick in terms of importance.
- Rant423 3y ago
  Bloom actually lists Roth, Pynchon, McCarthy, and DeLillo
ryanfreeborn 3y ago
Some of my favorite quotes, from my favorite McCarthy book, Blood Meridian: War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. -- Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. -- In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god. -- They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.
- ali_m 3y ago
  And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
- Tao3300 3y ago
pizzafeelsright 3y ago
This knowledge exists without my consent.
DubiousPusher 3y ago
For me, McCarthy is among a few authors ( Sherman Alexie, Edward Abbey, Octavia Butler, etc) who truly broke the Northeastern cultural stranglehold on American literature. His voice is brutally and uncompromisingly continental.
thereticent 3y ago
Rest in peace. I had a harebrained fantasy of taking a sabbatical to do a visiting fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute while he was there. I figured he would like talking brain-behavioral science and I would like hearing anything he had to say, plus would have gotten to talk with mathematicians and other technical experts with a visionary tinge. I never did it (too early in my career to try), but it was fun to imagine. My spouse got me his final novel(s), which he had the prescience to announce as such, and I almost started reading them a few days ago. Now I know it will be a memorial read, also content that he assumed it mostly would be.
arandomsapien 3y ago
I came across his work far too late and am catching up, having only read The Road Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men so far. I've never read an author who can paint such a vivid picture in my mind with so few words. I wasn't much of a fiction reader prior to picking up his work, and it's certainly reignited a love of reading for me. His books don't resonate with a good number of friends, and I can understand why. But for me it's a strange mix of dark and comforting, with words that make my neurons dance like they're listening to jazz.
- tmountain 3y ago
  The Road is really good and a quick read. I read it in one sitting, and really loved it. Check out Sutree for something completely different but really well rendered. McCarthy is one of my favorite authors. He gave us so many gifts.
- drc500free 3y ago
  The border trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) is understated compared to many of his other books, but gets to something about young men becoming who they are that I haven't found elsewhere.
cypherpunks01 3y ago
“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.” —Cormac McCarthy, The Road
andyjohnson0 3y ago
Not unexpected, and he had a long life well used, but this is still such a loss to the world. Personally, the Border Trilogy and The Road are among my most favourite novels. RIP
__abc 3y ago
Fudge, I loved that guy and his work. I still remember how fun it was to binge The Road in a single day. I don't think I left my couch from the early morning on through to the late evening. Such a compelling and gripping writer.
tehnub 3y ago
I only started reading his books within the last year, but McCarthy quickly became one of my favorite authors. Suttree in particular I think is quite wonderful. I also immensely enjoyed the Passenger and have been thinking about it for months. Allow me to quote some of the late critic Roger Ebert's remarks about him, which had an influence on me to pick up a McCarthy book: At first when I could not speak, I could not read easily, because sedation had undermined my attention span. I was depressed. I could turn on the TV, but why? My wife brought a wonderful DVD player to my hospital room, but I could not make myself watch movies. My life was stale and profitless. I would spend hours in a murky stupor. Knowing I had always been reading a book, my concerned wife began reading to me: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. Curiously, my love of reading finally returned after I picked up Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a book I had already read not long before my first surgery. Now I read it two more times. I was not "reading the same book." I was reentering the same experience, the same occult and visionary prose, the life of Suttree so urgently evoked. As rarely before, a book became tactile to me. When Suttree on his houseboat pulled a cord and brought up a bottle of orange soda pop from the cool river, I savored it. I could no longer taste. I tasted it more sharply than any soda I've ever really had. When Suttree stopped at the bus station for a grilled cheese, I ate it, and the pickle, and drank the black coffee. I began to live through this desperate man's sad life. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-mind https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-... McCarthy, the heir of Faulkner, who mines the Southwest and Mexico for the way they can break your heart before they kill you. McCarthy is best known for his Border Trilogy, about men, horses, pain and loyalty; All the Pretty Horses was directed by Billy Bob Thornton. McCarthy's best book is said to be Blood Meridian, which Harold Bloom said he hated so much for its violence he threw it across the room twice, and then read it, declared it a masterpiece, and wrote the introduction for the Modern Library edition. My own favorite is Suttree, with its closely-woven mosaic of unusual and unknown words and its heartbreaking story. It's about a man fallen from grace who lives in a houseboat, catches catfish for a living, has hallucinatory alcoholic adventures and episodes of sentiment, pity and loyalty. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/coen-country https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/coen-country As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his "Blood Meridian", and as in his "Suttree," especially in the scene where [...], the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men-2007 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men-20...
krylon 3y ago
I read The Road while doing a lengthy daily commute via train, leading through a kind of lush rural area in western Germany. I vividly remember the stark contrast between the bleak world described in the novel and the vibrant, colorful abundance of life outside the window when I came up for air. It was a very unreal experience, switching back and forth between these two realities. Blood Meridian was another monstrosity that lured me into a very dark inner space. I think it expresses the USA's relationship to violence better than anything else I have read, fiction or non-fiction. But there is a lot more going on at the same time, and I don't think I ever fully explored that. It didn't help that for a relatively short novel, it's so exhausting to read, both intellectually and emotionally.
- SemioticStandrd 3y ago
  Absolutely. His books are like slabs of lead (in the best way). Sitting down to read Cormac is a decision
- vector_rotcev 3y ago
  I read The Road under similar circumstances (though the commute was more like ~30+ minutes on a stifling and oppressively densely packed underground train) - I felt numerous times that my vision, or my perception, or my perception of my vision, went from greyscale to vibrantly full colour when I looked away from my kindle to get ready to alight the train, and even in the grimy setting with the exhausted dejection of the commuters stuck where they didn't want to be, everything and everyone looked so optimistic and joyful and it all felt so, so happy to be in, compared to where I had been moments before.
oli5679 3y ago
Cormac McCarthy - The Road "Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
- gabaix 3y ago
  The epilogue of The Road shows its purpose. Make us appreciative of today’s nature beauty.
tehnub 3y ago
One of my favorite quotes from Suttree: He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.
sharadov 3y ago
RIP McCarthy The Road was a hard book to read - sparing with words but yet very effective at describing the dystopian landscape and the grueling journey that father and son are on. I could not stop thinking about it for weeks after having read it - had a profound effect on me.
cbfrench 3y ago
Being a native East Tennessean, I’ve always had a slight preference for Cormac’s Appalachian novels, perhaps in part because the people (at least some of them…) and locations seemed familiar to me. What a loss. I was pleased to see that the local NBC affiliate had made the announcement of his passing[0] the top story, but I was especially gratified that it describes him as “the author of Suttree, The Road, Child of God and several other novels.” It’s probably the only obit that will lead the list of novels with Suttree and relegate Blood Meridian to “several other novels,” haha. [0] https://www.wbir.com/article/news/local/cormac-mccarthy-dies-at-89-years-old/51-f5009113-5f6b-4507-993a-4d89667725b6 https://www.wbir.com/article/news/local/cormac-mccarthy-dies...
- turrican 3y ago
  I wasn’t aware he wrote books based in Appalachia! Do you have a recommendation?
  - colinflane 3y ago
    Suttree is maybe my favorite of all his novels. If, as others here have suggested, you regard Blood Meridian an epic. Suttree is a picaresque, like reading Pickwick Papers on salvia.
  - cbfrench 3y ago
    His first four novels—The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree—are all set in East TN. I’d highly recommend Suttree. It’s superb. Child of God is also quite good, especially for a novel about a necrophiliac serial killer. ;)
- whiddershins 3y ago
  Suttree is a masterpiece.
  - kamranjon 3y ago
    It is the best book I have ever read and I didn't think I would feel that way so firmly about a book so late in life. I read it last year and it is unequivocally a masterpiece for me.
the_af 3y ago
Everyone is praising McCarthy and in particular mentioning how The Road impacted them, so allow me to go against the grain here. First, I do like downbeat, apocalyptic fiction. I sometimes enjoy reading fiction that evokes anguish or that portrays failures. Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite English language writers. But... I didn't like "The Road" at all. I think I get the point, but to me it was essentially "apocalypse porn". It was about pointlessly and joylessly describing a dying, hopeless world, but in a way that wasn't interesting to read. I didn't even like how it was written, after a while I started counting how many times McCarthy saw fit to write "the last of [food]". "They ate the last of the biscuits". "They ate the last of the beans". Etc, etc. I'm sorry but I cannot find better words for this, The Road felt like "hopelessness porn". I expect people won't agree with me. So be it.
- retinaros 3y ago
  I read all of his books and tbh the road is a minor work of him. a small book that is easy to enter into and tell a story to a lot of people. blood meridian, sutree, the border trilogy are not that. they are work of art where words are crafted in ways that go beyond the pages. it is really the work of a master like very few writers ever did in history. a small excerpt of blood meridian. with so many little words, .. « And by and by they came to a place where the road was darkened in a deep wood and in this place the old man killed the traveler. He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the road. Then he went home.. The harness maker lived until his son was grown and never did anyone harm again. As he lay dying he called the son to him and told him what he had done. And the son said that he forgave him if it was his to do so and the old man said that it was his to do so and then he died. But the boy was not sorry for he was jealous of the dead man and before he went away he visited that place and cast away the rocks and dug up the bones and scattered them in the forest and then he went away. He went away to the west and he himself became a killer of men. »
- zwieback 3y ago
  I couldn't get into The Road either and I know others that feel the same. I've always wanted to try a different McCarthy but haven't yet, maybe this will give me the final impetus.
scranglis 3y ago
In light of the LLM break throughs in the last couple of years, I've been returning his speculative essay about the source of symbolic thought every few months: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/
mahathu 3y ago
I will never remember this Yelp Review a fan of his wrote: Three stars. See that false burrito. See it swaddled in tinfoil on the desk in the bowels of that great tower, a bundle of meat and sauce in a place long ago ceded to silicone and copper. The stooped man eating that peasant food as if in consuming it he can escape to a farmfield in a verdant valley and look down and see blood running from his blisters and say, yes this is work. This is work. Instead his hands are clawlike and ruined by the keyboard and the mouse for he is a thing of bone and sinew in a sprawling contraption electric and of man’s creation but not of man at all. And were he to saw his breast open with that plastic knife and soak the carpet black with his hot blood and were he to look ceilingward like some stigmatic enraptured and with the bellows of his lungs let forth a soaring wail in that subbasement his screams would be swallowed by the acoustic panels and repulsed by the good steel door as if he had made no sound and spilled no blood at all. https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/15243208646/chipotle-mexican-grill https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/15243208646/chipot...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pugworthy 3y ago
  Hah I see I am not the only fan!
spaceman_2020 3y ago
RIP. One of the modern literary giants. The Road remains one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read, and Blood Meridian, the most disturbingly beautiful.
bitcurious 3y ago
The Road is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read. Highly recommend. Warning though - it broke a game my friends play “how would you survive X apocalypse?” My answer for many switched to “wouldn’t want to.”
- sh34r 3y ago
  Threads (1984) has the same effect. On the bright side, it's a great antidote for anyone who's falling too deep into the prepper rabbit hole. YAGNI.
- prawn 3y ago
  To recover, watch The Last Man on Earth.
austinprete 3y ago
Since I haven't seen mention of it yet, let me recommend one of his (seemingly) lesser known works: The Sunset Limited. It's a play of 2 characters and 1 setting, and has an (IMO very good) HBO adaption starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. Like most of his work, it's an existential contemplation of sorts and perhaps raises more questions than it answers. But I find myself going back to it a lot, maybe as a divining rod for my own meaning to life and death. RIP, Cormac.
toomanyrichies 3y ago
As others have mentioned here, John Hillcoat (director of the film adaptation of "The Road") is taking a crack at filming the "unfilmable" "Blood Meridian". I'm stoked to see how he handles BM, especially who he casts as Judge Holden. I feel like Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been perfect for the role, but I'm confident Hillcoat will find someone equal to the task. My favorite Judge quote from BM: “This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance, in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned, and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale, there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event, the history of all is not the history of each, nor indeed the sum of those histories, and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence, for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know, he might well absent himself, and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan, if plan there be.” RIP.
- zxexz 3y ago
  A friend of mine has been saying for years now, and I fully agree, that Puddles Pity Party[0] would be perfect casting for Judge Holden. Not just his height and that he’s bald. Watch the way he moves, listen to his voice. I can’t imagine anyone else playing the role now. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=VBmCJEehYtU https://youtube.com/watch?v=VBmCJEehYtU (Linking his version of Royals, as it’s my favorite, but there are are plenty of other wonderful covers and originals)
  - kjs3 3y ago
    Was not expecting a Puddles callout...am very pleased.
wellthisisgreat 3y ago
Oh god no. What a sad sad day.
next_xibalba 3y ago
I think this paragraph, from The Road, is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever read: “Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
downut 3y ago
Two short phrases seared into my brain almost 4 decades ago: "Et en Arcadia ego" and "Ruder forms survive". Different books.
- whiddershins 3y ago
  Suttree
Wonnk13 3y ago
RIP. Blood Meridian deserves a Nobel imho. “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
usehackernews 3y ago
Cormac got me back into reading as an adult. I read The Road and I was astounded. Still have yet to read another book I’ve liked as much, but at least he got me reading to find it!
fallinditch 3y ago
Blood Meridian is a rendering of the actual history of that period. McCarthy based the main characters on real people. The kid is Samuel Chamberlain who wrote about his time with the Glanton Gang in his memoir My Confessions: Recollections of a Rogue. Here's a fascinating article that discusses Blood Meridian as an important work of American history. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/crossing-the-blood-meridian-cormac-mccarthy-and-american-history/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/crossing-the-blood-merid...
richardatlarge 3y ago
I think McCarthy believed that telling a story and conventional grammar had no necessary relationship. Whether you like few or none of his novels, recognize that he was brave enough to forfeit fame and fortune to tell the story he wanted to tell, and the way he wanted to tell it. Fiction publishing today would squash CM like a bug. That’s the bad news
x86hacker1010 3y ago
So I finished reading The Road last night and sufficiently spooked by news of his death.
BMc2020 3y ago
Ctrl F Wendigoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu6STuj4njw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu6STuj4njw Wendigoons 5 hour review of Blood Meridian. 3.7M views in 4 weeks.
thetopher 3y ago
Here are two lectures about Blood Meridian from a Yale literature course. https://youtu.be/FgyZ4ia25gg https://youtu.be/FgyZ4ia25gg https://youtu.be/7ZFmf4T5L3o https://youtu.be/7ZFmf4T5L3o
- kamranjon 3y ago
  Thank you for this - after reading Blood Meridian I have been looking for something exactly like this to help me process it.
da39a3ee 3y ago
Suttree
sandkoan 3y ago
Something which may not be known to many, McCarthy was also quite interested in math, philosophy, cognition. A piece of his non-fiction work which made a lasting impression on me was "The Kekule Problem" [0], exploring the power of the unconscious, combative with consciousness, as an unveiler of Truth. 0: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/
- zls 3y ago
  If you’ve read his final two books it’s incredible clear how fascinated he is by math, physics, and their interaction at philosophy. Stella Maris is basically just a long exploration of the philosophical implications of math, in dialogue form.
whiddershins 3y ago
Although the preface to Suttree is my favorite, the preface to The Passenger is beyond the best: * It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones. One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she’d dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered. That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures. The hunter knelt and stogged his rifle upright in the snow beside him and took off his gloves and let them fall and folded his hands one upon the other. He thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing. He bowed his head. Tower of Ivory, he said. House of Gold. He knelt there for a long time. When he opened his eyes he saw a small shape half buried in the snow and he leaned and dusted away the snow and picked up a gold chain that held a steel key, a whitegold ring. He slipped them into the pocket of his huntingcoat. He’d heard the wind in the night. The wind’s work. A trashcan clattering over the bricks behind his house. The snow blowing out there in the forest in the dark. He looked up into those cold enameled eyes glinting blue in the weak winter light. She had tied her dress with a red sash so that she’d be found. Some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation. On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.*
- tehnub 3y ago
  It hits even harder when you finish Stella Maris and consider the significance of that red sash — that she put it on despite her despairing solipsism. It breaks your heart.
bmitc 3y ago
Damn. I immediately got chill bumps reading this. I'm not one to fawn over so-called celebrity deaths, but here, we have lost a philosopher and a thinker who also told great stories. It feels like ideas and perspectives will be lost forever, referring to the ones he never wrote down or spoke about. I have always been in love with McCarthy's deep philosophy in his writing. I like the following two examples, not for any particular relevance of their content but just for the deepness that they get at. One is one of the final scenes in the No Country for Old Men film adaptation by the Coen brothers, and the dialogue is in the book as well. Sheriff Bell visits his cousin Ellis about feeling overmatched by the violence he's seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdOPJKocMWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdOPJKocMWg > "What you got ain't nothing new. This country's hard on people. You can't stop what's comin'. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity." The other is one of the final scenes in The Counselor, which is, as far as I know, McCarthy's only screenplay, at least that was actually filmed and released. The Counselor is on the phone begging for some way to get his wife back from the cartel, the Jefe of which explains the impossibility of the request regarding situation he has created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIn7y4ejIFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIn7y4ejIFM > "It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There's only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago. I don't mean to offend you, but reflective men often find themselves at a place removed from the realities of life. In any case, we should all prepare a place where we can accommodate all the tragedies that sooner or later will come to our lives. But this is an economy few people care to practice. ... You continue to deny the reality of the world you're in. You are at that crossing. At the understanding that life is not going to take you back. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist." This is pure brutality in the form of prose and dialogue.
- sixstringtheory 3y ago
  I also liked the line from the first: "All the time you spend tryin' ta get back what's been took from ya, more's goin' out the door." Haven't seen The Counselor before, but that's a tough scene to watch. Definitely on the queue now!
losvedir 3y ago
Is he worth reading if you don't have a vivid visual imagination? From the glowing praise here I feel like I should finally check him out, but all these comments sharing people's favorite quotes are just falling flat with me. I don't picture things in my head real well, and usually skim over description. I'm generally more captivated by interesting ideas than interesting ways of expressing the ideas.
- mmierz 3y ago
  For what it’s worth I have nearly complete aphantasia and I enjoy mccarthy’s descriptions very much. But if the quotes do nothing for you, his stories probably will not either.
an-allen 3y ago
My favourite CMC quote. The evil of automation. “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.”
scop 3y ago
A phenomenal artist. Thank you Cormac for bringing honest beauty to my life. Some of my past HN comments re McCarthy: - When I read both Melville and McCarthy, I'll often find myself mid-run-on-sentence and think to myself, "welp, he's gone too far this time" only to find, by golly, they pull it off in the end. What would otherwise be complete pretension and chaos is, when wrought by true literature artists, simply breathtaking. There are times when I'm reading McCarthy and I literally, out loud, utter "Lord have mercy" for the beauty/fullness/meaning that man can lay upon us. — This quote from Blood Meridian is one of my favorite in all of literature and I think capture McCarthy's magic. He has such great talent to describe simultaneously with vivid details yet inexact clarity/meaning. > It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
pugworthy 3y ago
One of my favorite bits of writing is “Yelping with Cormac”, a series of short humorous pieces written by E.D.W. Lynch. An excerpt from “The Apple Store”… “… There was folks outside just standin there. Line stretchin round the block. Maybe a hundred people. I saw a man who’d brought his own chair. He had a shirt on with the same logo as the one on the store. I figured he worked there so I asked him what the line was all about. What were all these people waitin for. He told me it was for a apple phone or some such. I said dont these folks have telephones already? He told me they all had apple phones but it was the older one. I asked him what would happen to the old apple phones. He told me about a fella named Craig had a list and everbody sold their old telephones on it. A telephone sellin list.” https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/best https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/best
- lordfrito 3y ago
  OMG thanks for the link, funniest thing I've read in a while.
anjanb 3y ago
Is this McCarthy the one on whom the McCarthy Blvd in Milpitas, CA is named after ?
gbjw 3y ago
Adding to the list of favourite passages. This is from The Road, when the father holds his son: “No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”
nologic01 3y ago
"he fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until he fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved him forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was"
- tehnub 3y ago
  This quote is about a donkey or something falling off a cliff IIRC. Lol.
tehnub 3y ago
Here's a nice essay from Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian (FYI: Full of spoilers): https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir-to-melville-and-faulkner/ https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir...
david_shaw 3y ago
I posted a few months ago[1] about Suttree, and was surprised at how many people connected with the book (which I agree is great). I haven't read The Road or Blood Meridian, but when you consider the different styles and structures of McCarthy's prose, it's easy to agree that he was a remarkable writer. RIP. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561915
krelian 3y ago
I have never connected with any artist as much as I have with Cormac McCarthy. His writing brings forth feelings and ideas that seem to have always existed inside me but were waiting for his words to take shape. Throughout his work runs a line of thought that is never explicitly explained or can be easily summarized but some of his sentences and paragraphs nod at it. Here's one of my favorites: "He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."
thx 3y ago
No Country is one of the best books i’ve ever read
dclowd9901 3y ago
Aw damn. I figure he’d say “Alright”
sampa 3y ago
I liked this too-simple of a quote, that hits hard, when you have read the book. "When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf."
wageslave99 3y ago
I read The Road like 10-15 years ago. It was the first or one of the first books I fully read in English (I'm not a native English speaker). The simplicity of the grammar and lexicon helped me to follow the story, and although the crude environment that happens in the book is daunting and somber, I loved the book. From that time, when I see some news piece about Cormac McCarthy I cannot thank him enough for doing a masterpiece accesible to ESL speakers. RIP.
ftxbro 3y ago
> "In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field." if you write a novel with something like that then you know what will go in your obituary if you get famous

856 points by benbreen 3y ago

secret-noun 3y ago

https://archive.ph/eWeoO https://archive.ph/eWeoO

ErikAugust 3y ago
https://trimread.org/articles/38980 https://trimread.org/articles/38980
neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20230614005318/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230614005318/https://www.nytime...

haroldp 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230613194612/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230613194612/https://www.nytim...

tptacek 3y ago

Interesting fact about McCarthy: he had a sort of residency, I think pretty recently, despite his fame! as a copyeditor for science papers at the Santa Fe Institute. Here's a thread about a Nature piece with his advice for science writers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611829 Edit Meant to link the HN thread, not the original source.

javajosh 3y ago
It costs $30 to read that article. Here is a summary from https://kottke.org/19/09/advice-from-cormac-mccarthy-on-writing-great-science-papers https://kottke.org/19/09/advice-from-cormac-mccarthy-on-writ... > Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can. > Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn't be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn't fool anyone into thinking you're being objective: "Earth is the centre of this Solar System" isn't any more objective or factual than "We are at the centre of our Solar System." > Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can't please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own. EDIT: you posted the wrong link, I was trying to help YOU, and the readers of your comment. You removed the original nature link, and then post a condescending reply to me. It's insulting and makes me think less of you and I now deeply regret trying to help.
- tptacek 3y ago
  The original is on sci-hub under its DOI, of course. Later (I wrote "of course" here, as a sort of clumsy acknowledgement that I'm not posting an actual sci-hub link, not as any sort of commentary on the preceding comment --- that comment was appreciated, as I'd originally posted the wrong link, to the paywalled Nature story and not the HN thread. Sorry if it reads any other way!)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
unignorant 3y ago
I spent a summer at the Santa Fe Institute in 2010 and can say that McCarthy certainly spent a lot of time there. I'm not sure he was a copyeditor, exactly, but SFI is a nice place to hang out for any sort of creative work -- beautiful building and landscape, and very open and collaborative atmosphere. The institute is on the top of a big hill and I'll always remember how he gave me a lift one day as I was walking up.

bklyn11201 3y ago

Read The Border Trilogy first (a coming-of-age story set on the US-Mexico border): * All the Pretty Horses * The Crossing * Cities of the Plain Then Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men.

cgh 3y ago
Calling the Border Trilogy a coming-of-age story is...one way to look at it for sure, given how it all ends. I love "The Crossing", top three McCarthy for me (the others being "Blood Meridian" of course and "Child of God").
- zls 3y ago
  Blood Meridian is getting all the praise, and that’s probably right, but I’d put The Crossing right up there with it. The last scene with the crippled dog conveys so much about the journey Billy has gone through, abba what it’s done to him… I don’t know if “coming of age” is so apt as “loss of innocence”
  - jiscariot 3y ago
    That stuff with the wolf in The Crossing was as deeply affecting to me as an adult as say, The Never Ending Story's Atrax in the Swamp of Sadness was for me as a kid.
blacksmith_tb 3y ago
I would second that, and add Suttree towards the end. I personally found The Road a little awkward, it felt unfortunately like an experiment in the SF / post-apocalyptic genre that was less successful than his surreal westerns.
- tmountain 3y ago
  And if you still want more westerns after that, Lonesome Dove and Paradise Sky. Neither are McCarthy, but they’re both amazing and will resonate with the same audience.

rbtprograms 3y ago

McCarthy was one of my bigger introductions to what I could call a more "adult" form of literature. He was one of my favorite novelists when I was in my late teens and early 20's, and I believe him to be a master of setting a tone in a novel. Truly will never forget the first time I read Blood Meridian.

boredumb 3y ago

Feel silly but I didn't know what Darker America was. Maybe i'm in the minority but The Road, No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian seem to be massively more popular so it seems a bit odd for the title to mention what I perceive as a lesser known book.

applepizza 3y ago
They are referring to his little known novel “Darker America, Is dead at 89”
ethanbond 3y ago
I believe that’s a descriptor of his works, not a title of one.
- boredumb 3y ago
  Thank you, I just spent 5 minutes trying to find the book anywhere on line and was starting to feel a bit nuts.
nostromo95 3y ago
You might be a non-native speaker, but the title is trying to say his works evoke a darker America rather than that being a work he's written.
- boredumb 3y ago
  I assumed with Darker being capitalized it was a title. Perhaps the NYTimes editors are no longer native english speakers?
  - FemmeAndroid 3y ago
    It’s part of the title of the article, which is in titlecase. That’s why ‘Novelist,’ ‘is,’ and ‘dead’ are capitalized.
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago

kalverra 3y ago

Well that's a real bummer, one of my top 3 authors, and the only one that was still alive.

AJRF 3y ago

God I will miss his writing. I finished (and adored) The Passenger a few weeks ago. Rest In Piece. This is a nice interview; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrUy1Vn2KdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrUy1Vn2KdI

karaterobot 3y ago
Why not read Stella Maris? I'm reading The Passenger right now, and enjoying it.
cakemedia 3y ago
One of my favourite McCarthy quotes is from The Passenger: “Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it.”

ageisopolis 3y ago

One of the greatest authors of the postmodern era if not the greatest. Blood Meridian is that "great american novel" in my mind. RIP

rgrieselhuber 3y ago

Goin on ahead and fixin to make a fire. RIP.

ericboggs 3y ago

I read "The Road" in a single sitting one night while my wife was working a late shift. I laid in bed staring at the ceiling all night.

Xenoamorphous 3y ago
Is that where the movie with Viggo Mortensen came from? I didn’t know it was based on a book, the movie was soul crushing.
- ewjt 3y ago
  It is the only book I wish I could forget completely. Serious advice: think twice before reading The Road if you’re susceptible to doom and gloom about the human race.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    Damn. I must have exceptionally dark taste in media, because I've definitely got a few "well, that was good, but I kinda wish I hadn't read/watched it" things in my history, and The Road wasn't even close to qualifying. I'd say the film Threads hit me harder, to pick something with similar setting and circumstances, though that's still not quite in that category. (It Comes at Night is probably my #1 in that category for film, and I guess Watts' Blindsight in books—both messed me up for days after, the former with some depressive nihilism, the latter with days of fairly intense derealization that weren't too fun—and I'm not normally especially prone to either of those, I don't think)
    - dreamcompiler 3y ago
      Blindsight is a masterpiece about intelligence without consciousness. De-linking those ideas can be seriously jarring for humans, because we usually consider them two sides of the same coin. Plus one of the more normal characters investigating the phenomenon just happens to be a vampire who--surprisingly enough--is neither formulaic nor boring.

jnsie 3y ago

I was not ready for this...such a huge loss.

DontchaKnowit 3y ago

I know its bad form to speak ill of the dead but - A friend gave me a copy of "Child of God" amd frankly it was the most disgusting, dark, unrewarding, unethical, uninspired, uniteresting, poorly written books ive ever read. I was flat out offended by the book and repeatedly had to set it down and fume about how unnecessarily disgusting he was being. I never finished it. I got the impression that cormac was a thoroughly disturbed individual with a macabre fascination with the most fucked up 0.00001% of humanity. To make matters worth he cant write worth a damn. I will say his metaphors can be quite beautiful hut they often make no sense grammatically. Tldr : Cormac Mccarthy is not for me.

gerry_shaw 3y ago
Your review is almost spot on for me. I’m agreeing with it all along with the exception that I really like his writing and, well, I would say “enjoy” his novels, I do respect and value the time spent reading them.
asdasd213123 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
stvltvs 3y ago
There's early McCarthy and then there's late McCarthy. The difference is stark. You should try one of his later books. I read "Suttree", and it was a mixed bag for me. I loved "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Road".
serf 3y ago
>I got the impression that cormac was a thoroughly disturbed individual with a macabre fascination with the most fucked up 0.00001% of humanity. you should separate yourself from that notion. it's true that authors can be damaged individuals with little personal hope, but some of the most macabre things ever written have been conjured by perfectly normal/well-functioning/happy individuals who enjoy fairly well-balanced lives -- it's simply not a good indicator of the person behind the pen. as for the grammatic non-sense (to which I agree can be exactly that, non-sense) I always read it as if it were sort of styled similarly to the concept of 'beat poetry'. Grammar and syntax goes out the door for prose/beauty/imagery and style.

projectileboy 3y ago

It’s not often that someone passes who is legitimately a giant, someone whose impact will be felt generations from now. A sad day.

smarri 3y ago

My favourite author, Blood Meridian was like nothing I ever had read before. Rest in peace.

dvt 3y ago

I read The Road years ago, but I was probably too young to fully understand it; more recently, I read Blood Meridian a few months ago for my book club. Few novels have had me think about them as much (Dostoevsky's Demons and Melville's Moby Dick come to mind). McCarthy was an absolute American treasure. Rest in peace. His poetic Blood Meridian epilogue really stuck with me: "In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than 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 there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again."

Solvency 3y ago
Why do you suppose Blood Meridian hasn't been put to film yet?
- alpineidyll3 3y ago
  Who would you cast as the judge?
  - googlryas 3y ago
    Kane - aka Glenn Thomas Jacobs. 7'0, 330 lbs, light complexion, looks good hairless, has acting experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_(wrestler)#/media/File:The_big_red_machine.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_(wrestler)#/media/File:Th...

2devnull 3y ago

CAPS MATTER1

pizzafeelsright 3y ago
Punctuation sentence structure not.

voisin 3y ago

Man, this is crushing news. He was uniquely capable of capturing the worst of the human experience in the most beautiful manner. "Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

nielsbot 3y ago

In Memoriam "Yelping With Cormac: Ritual Roasters" https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/10442344603/ritual-coffee-roasters https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/10442344603/ritual... Always gives me a chuckle

candlemas 3y ago

I think you're supposed to follow the unofficial Hacker News death announcement title format of "[name of person] has died". https://hn.algolia.com/?q=has+died https://hn.algolia.com/?q=has+died

cwdegidio 3y ago

I grew up in Ohio. I moved west the year I turned 30. I always felt like the West never made sense to me. Through his words, I feel like I got some understanding. Fantastic writer and a definite loss to American prose.

jebarker 3y ago
What aspects of the West didn't make sense to you?
- cwdegidio 3y ago
  Just my experience with living in Texas, there is a major individual independence vein that runs through a lot of folks here. In NE Ohio, sure... there were those that didn't follow the norms, but for the most part attitudes were very collective. Texas? Don't tell them what they can do with their land. Don't tell them they need to ditch their truck. Not saying it was a 1:1 illustration in his novels, but it did give me a better insight into how folks west of Austin 'tick'.
rgrieselhuber 3y ago
Growing up in Ohio as well, I was fortunate to encounter in high school Ursula Le Guin's short story "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" which helped me feel like I understood it better. After spending more time in the West and Southwest, those feelings were confirmed.

voisin 3y ago

Tangential: check out “Yelping with Cormac”, a tumblr that I think did a great job of capturing his style with humorous results.

Quequau 3y ago

Cormac McCarthy was an optimist.

memling 3y ago

I read _Stella Maris_ just after reading a bio of Gödel and history of the Vienna Circle. Serendipitous to come across it, and would recommend it. _The Road_...I was warned, but not prepared.

alangibson 3y ago
I read The Road a couple of months after my first kid was born. I don't think I ever really mentally recovered.
- cypherpunks01 3y ago
  I listened to The Road on audiobook while falling asleep, over a week or so. Amazing book, but not a recommended setting! Don't think I've recovered yet either.

voisin 3y ago

His famous “Legion of Horribles” quote below. I often think of “death hilarious”: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horse’s ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. Oh my god, said the sergeant.”

trefoiled 3y ago
As fantastical as this passage may sound, most of the details McCarthy provides are historically accurate, and based on a particular event: The Great Raid of 1840 [1]. A thousand Comanche warriors conducted an extremely deep raid into Southeast Texas, where they sacked the port of Linnville. An exceptionally large amount of trade goods were present in the port that day, including clothes bound for various settlements across the Texas frontier. The bits about umbrellas, stovepipe hats, and even the wedding veil come directly from eyewitnesses to the raid. The bit about a Comanche warrior wearing the armor of a conquistador is also real [2]. The Comanche were known for being exceptionally flamboyant, prizing extravagant clothing dyed in vibrant colors. It must have had quite a psychological effect on their enemies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840 [2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comanches/Cqh8qSexvU4C?hl=en&gbpv=0 https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comanches/Cqh8qSexvU4C?...

briga 3y ago

Wow, The Passenger really was his last. He never compromised, he was true to his creative vision right up until the end. Truly one of the greats

dieze 3y ago
Actually Stella Maris was published after The Passenger
- briga 3y ago
  They're essentially the same book, I suspect the publishers pushed hard for it to be published in 2 volumes

squeegee_scream 3y ago

https://readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com/ https://readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com/ > READING MCCARTHY is a podcast devoted to the consideration and discussion of the works of one of our greatest American writers, Cormac McCarthy. Each episode will call upon different well-known Cormackian readers and scholars to help us explore different works and various essential aspects of McCarthy’s writing.(Note these episodes try to offer accessible literary criticism and may contain spoilers from different McCarthy works.)

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

I just finished The Road last week. It was worth reading. By sheer coincidence, the e-book version is currently on sale (at least I sure hope it's coincidental): https://www.amazon.com/Road-Vintage-International-Cormac-McCarthy-ebook/dp/B000OI0G1Q/ https://www.amazon.com/Road-Vintage-International-Cormac-McC...

pastor_bob 3y ago

I always heard the "Big 4" (white guys) were John Updike, McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. I think somebody like, the disgraced, Harold Bloom at one point said they were the last 'great', living American Authors. To my surprise, Don DeLillo is still alive.

cgh 3y ago
Bloom isn't a fan of Pynchon? Not sure how you could exclude him from such a list.
peruvian 3y ago
Bloom considered McCarthy the best living American author and Blood Meridian one of the best American novels, right up there with Moby Dick in terms of importance.
Rant423 3y ago
Bloom actually lists Roth, Pynchon, McCarthy, and DeLillo

ryanfreeborn 3y ago

Some of my favorite quotes, from my favorite McCarthy book, Blood Meridian: War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. -- Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. -- In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god. -- They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.

ali_m 3y ago
And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Tao3300 3y ago

pizzafeelsright 3y ago

This knowledge exists without my consent.

DubiousPusher 3y ago

For me, McCarthy is among a few authors ( Sherman Alexie, Edward Abbey, Octavia Butler, etc) who truly broke the Northeastern cultural stranglehold on American literature. His voice is brutally and uncompromisingly continental.

thereticent 3y ago

Rest in peace. I had a harebrained fantasy of taking a sabbatical to do a visiting fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute while he was there. I figured he would like talking brain-behavioral science and I would like hearing anything he had to say, plus would have gotten to talk with mathematicians and other technical experts with a visionary tinge. I never did it (too early in my career to try), but it was fun to imagine. My spouse got me his final novel(s), which he had the prescience to announce as such, and I almost started reading them a few days ago. Now I know it will be a memorial read, also content that he assumed it mostly would be.

arandomsapien 3y ago

I came across his work far too late and am catching up, having only read The Road Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men so far. I've never read an author who can paint such a vivid picture in my mind with so few words. I wasn't much of a fiction reader prior to picking up his work, and it's certainly reignited a love of reading for me. His books don't resonate with a good number of friends, and I can understand why. But for me it's a strange mix of dark and comforting, with words that make my neurons dance like they're listening to jazz.

tmountain 3y ago
The Road is really good and a quick read. I read it in one sitting, and really loved it. Check out Sutree for something completely different but really well rendered. McCarthy is one of my favorite authors. He gave us so many gifts.
drc500free 3y ago
The border trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) is understated compared to many of his other books, but gets to something about young men becoming who they are that I haven't found elsewhere.

cypherpunks01 3y ago

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.” —Cormac McCarthy, The Road

andyjohnson0 3y ago

Not unexpected, and he had a long life well used, but this is still such a loss to the world. Personally, the Border Trilogy and The Road are among my most favourite novels. RIP

__abc 3y ago

Fudge, I loved that guy and his work. I still remember how fun it was to binge The Road in a single day. I don't think I left my couch from the early morning on through to the late evening. Such a compelling and gripping writer.

tehnub 3y ago

I only started reading his books within the last year, but McCarthy quickly became one of my favorite authors. Suttree in particular I think is quite wonderful. I also immensely enjoyed the Passenger and have been thinking about it for months. Allow me to quote some of the late critic Roger Ebert's remarks about him, which had an influence on me to pick up a McCarthy book: At first when I could not speak, I could not read easily, because sedation had undermined my attention span. I was depressed. I could turn on the TV, but why? My wife brought a wonderful DVD player to my hospital room, but I could not make myself watch movies. My life was stale and profitless. I would spend hours in a murky stupor. Knowing I had always been reading a book, my concerned wife began reading to me: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. Curiously, my love of reading finally returned after I picked up Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a book I had already read not long before my first surgery. Now I read it two more times. I was not "reading the same book." I was reentering the same experience, the same occult and visionary prose, the life of Suttree so urgently evoked. As rarely before, a book became tactile to me. When Suttree on his houseboat pulled a cord and brought up a bottle of orange soda pop from the cool river, I savored it. I could no longer taste. I tasted it more sharply than any soda I've ever really had. When Suttree stopped at the bus station for a grilled cheese, I ate it, and the pickle, and drank the black coffee. I began to live through this desperate man's sad life. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-mind https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/i-think-im-musing-my-... McCarthy, the heir of Faulkner, who mines the Southwest and Mexico for the way they can break your heart before they kill you. McCarthy is best known for his Border Trilogy, about men, horses, pain and loyalty; All the Pretty Horses was directed by Billy Bob Thornton. McCarthy's best book is said to be Blood Meridian, which Harold Bloom said he hated so much for its violence he threw it across the room twice, and then read it, declared it a masterpiece, and wrote the introduction for the Modern Library edition. My own favorite is Suttree, with its closely-woven mosaic of unusual and unknown words and its heartbreaking story. It's about a man fallen from grace who lives in a houseboat, catches catfish for a living, has hallucinatory alcoholic adventures and episodes of sentiment, pity and loyalty. https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/coen-country https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/coen-country As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his "Blood Meridian", and as in his "Suttree," especially in the scene where [...], the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men-2007 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men-20...

krylon 3y ago

I read The Road while doing a lengthy daily commute via train, leading through a kind of lush rural area in western Germany. I vividly remember the stark contrast between the bleak world described in the novel and the vibrant, colorful abundance of life outside the window when I came up for air. It was a very unreal experience, switching back and forth between these two realities. Blood Meridian was another monstrosity that lured me into a very dark inner space. I think it expresses the USA's relationship to violence better than anything else I have read, fiction or non-fiction. But there is a lot more going on at the same time, and I don't think I ever fully explored that. It didn't help that for a relatively short novel, it's so exhausting to read, both intellectually and emotionally.

SemioticStandrd 3y ago
Absolutely. His books are like slabs of lead (in the best way). Sitting down to read Cormac is a decision
vector_rotcev 3y ago
I read The Road under similar circumstances (though the commute was more like ~30+ minutes on a stifling and oppressively densely packed underground train) - I felt numerous times that my vision, or my perception, or my perception of my vision, went from greyscale to vibrantly full colour when I looked away from my kindle to get ready to alight the train, and even in the grimy setting with the exhausted dejection of the commuters stuck where they didn't want to be, everything and everyone looked so optimistic and joyful and it all felt so, so happy to be in, compared to where I had been moments before.

oli5679 3y ago

Cormac McCarthy - The Road "Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

gabaix 3y ago
The epilogue of The Road shows its purpose. Make us appreciative of today’s nature beauty.

tehnub 3y ago

One of my favorite quotes from Suttree: He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.

sharadov 3y ago

RIP McCarthy The Road was a hard book to read - sparing with words but yet very effective at describing the dystopian landscape and the grueling journey that father and son are on. I could not stop thinking about it for weeks after having read it - had a profound effect on me.

cbfrench 3y ago

Being a native East Tennessean, I’ve always had a slight preference for Cormac’s Appalachian novels, perhaps in part because the people (at least some of them…) and locations seemed familiar to me. What a loss. I was pleased to see that the local NBC affiliate had made the announcement of his passing[0] the top story, but I was especially gratified that it describes him as “the author of Suttree, The Road, Child of God and several other novels.” It’s probably the only obit that will lead the list of novels with Suttree and relegate Blood Meridian to “several other novels,” haha. [0] https://www.wbir.com/article/news/local/cormac-mccarthy-dies-at-89-years-old/51-f5009113-5f6b-4507-993a-4d89667725b6 https://www.wbir.com/article/news/local/cormac-mccarthy-dies...

turrican 3y ago
I wasn’t aware he wrote books based in Appalachia! Do you have a recommendation?
- colinflane 3y ago
  Suttree is maybe my favorite of all his novels. If, as others here have suggested, you regard Blood Meridian an epic. Suttree is a picaresque, like reading Pickwick Papers on salvia.
- cbfrench 3y ago
  His first four novels—The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree—are all set in East TN. I’d highly recommend Suttree. It’s superb. Child of God is also quite good, especially for a novel about a necrophiliac serial killer. ;)
whiddershins 3y ago
Suttree is a masterpiece.
- kamranjon 3y ago
  It is the best book I have ever read and I didn't think I would feel that way so firmly about a book so late in life. I read it last year and it is unequivocally a masterpiece for me.

the_af 3y ago

Everyone is praising McCarthy and in particular mentioning how The Road impacted them, so allow me to go against the grain here. First, I do like downbeat, apocalyptic fiction. I sometimes enjoy reading fiction that evokes anguish or that portrays failures. Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite English language writers. But... I didn't like "The Road" at all. I think I get the point, but to me it was essentially "apocalypse porn". It was about pointlessly and joylessly describing a dying, hopeless world, but in a way that wasn't interesting to read. I didn't even like how it was written, after a while I started counting how many times McCarthy saw fit to write "the last of [food]". "They ate the last of the biscuits". "They ate the last of the beans". Etc, etc. I'm sorry but I cannot find better words for this, The Road felt like "hopelessness porn". I expect people won't agree with me. So be it.

retinaros 3y ago
I read all of his books and tbh the road is a minor work of him. a small book that is easy to enter into and tell a story to a lot of people. blood meridian, sutree, the border trilogy are not that. they are work of art where words are crafted in ways that go beyond the pages. it is really the work of a master like very few writers ever did in history. a small excerpt of blood meridian. with so many little words, .. « And by and by they came to a place where the road was darkened in a deep wood and in this place the old man killed the traveler. He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the road. Then he went home.. The harness maker lived until his son was grown and never did anyone harm again. As he lay dying he called the son to him and told him what he had done. And the son said that he forgave him if it was his to do so and the old man said that it was his to do so and then he died. But the boy was not sorry for he was jealous of the dead man and before he went away he visited that place and cast away the rocks and dug up the bones and scattered them in the forest and then he went away. He went away to the west and he himself became a killer of men. »
zwieback 3y ago
I couldn't get into The Road either and I know others that feel the same. I've always wanted to try a different McCarthy but haven't yet, maybe this will give me the final impetus.

scranglis 3y ago

In light of the LLM break throughs in the last couple of years, I've been returning his speculative essay about the source of symbolic thought every few months: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

mahathu 3y ago

I will never remember this Yelp Review a fan of his wrote: Three stars. See that false burrito. See it swaddled in tinfoil on the desk in the bowels of that great tower, a bundle of meat and sauce in a place long ago ceded to silicone and copper. The stooped man eating that peasant food as if in consuming it he can escape to a farmfield in a verdant valley and look down and see blood running from his blisters and say, yes this is work. This is work. Instead his hands are clawlike and ruined by the keyboard and the mouse for he is a thing of bone and sinew in a sprawling contraption electric and of man’s creation but not of man at all. And were he to saw his breast open with that plastic knife and soak the carpet black with his hot blood and were he to look ceilingward like some stigmatic enraptured and with the bellows of his lungs let forth a soaring wail in that subbasement his screams would be swallowed by the acoustic panels and repulsed by the good steel door as if he had made no sound and spilled no blood at all. https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/15243208646/chipotle-mexican-grill https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/15243208646/chipot...

deleted 3y ago
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pugworthy 3y ago
Hah I see I am not the only fan!

spaceman_2020 3y ago

RIP. One of the modern literary giants. The Road remains one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read, and Blood Meridian, the most disturbingly beautiful.

bitcurious 3y ago

The Road is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read. Highly recommend. Warning though - it broke a game my friends play “how would you survive X apocalypse?” My answer for many switched to “wouldn’t want to.”

sh34r 3y ago
Threads (1984) has the same effect. On the bright side, it's a great antidote for anyone who's falling too deep into the prepper rabbit hole. YAGNI.
prawn 3y ago
To recover, watch The Last Man on Earth.

austinprete 3y ago

Since I haven't seen mention of it yet, let me recommend one of his (seemingly) lesser known works: The Sunset Limited. It's a play of 2 characters and 1 setting, and has an (IMO very good) HBO adaption starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. Like most of his work, it's an existential contemplation of sorts and perhaps raises more questions than it answers. But I find myself going back to it a lot, maybe as a divining rod for my own meaning to life and death. RIP, Cormac.

toomanyrichies 3y ago

As others have mentioned here, John Hillcoat (director of the film adaptation of "The Road") is taking a crack at filming the "unfilmable" "Blood Meridian". I'm stoked to see how he handles BM, especially who he casts as Judge Holden. I feel like Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been perfect for the role, but I'm confident Hillcoat will find someone equal to the task. My favorite Judge quote from BM: “This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance, in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned, and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale, there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event, the history of all is not the history of each, nor indeed the sum of those histories, and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence, for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know, he might well absent himself, and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan, if plan there be.” RIP.

zxexz 3y ago
A friend of mine has been saying for years now, and I fully agree, that Puddles Pity Party[0] would be perfect casting for Judge Holden. Not just his height and that he’s bald. Watch the way he moves, listen to his voice. I can’t imagine anyone else playing the role now. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=VBmCJEehYtU https://youtube.com/watch?v=VBmCJEehYtU (Linking his version of Royals, as it’s my favorite, but there are are plenty of other wonderful covers and originals)
- kjs3 3y ago
  Was not expecting a Puddles callout...am very pleased.

wellthisisgreat 3y ago

Oh god no. What a sad sad day.

next_xibalba 3y ago

I think this paragraph, from The Road, is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever read: “Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

downut 3y ago

Two short phrases seared into my brain almost 4 decades ago: "Et en Arcadia ego" and "Ruder forms survive". Different books.

whiddershins 3y ago
Suttree

Wonnk13 3y ago

RIP. Blood Meridian deserves a Nobel imho. “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

usehackernews 3y ago

Cormac got me back into reading as an adult. I read The Road and I was astounded. Still have yet to read another book I’ve liked as much, but at least he got me reading to find it!

fallinditch 3y ago

Blood Meridian is a rendering of the actual history of that period. McCarthy based the main characters on real people. The kid is Samuel Chamberlain who wrote about his time with the Glanton Gang in his memoir My Confessions: Recollections of a Rogue. Here's a fascinating article that discusses Blood Meridian as an important work of American history. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/crossing-the-blood-meridian-cormac-mccarthy-and-american-history/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/crossing-the-blood-merid...

richardatlarge 3y ago

I think McCarthy believed that telling a story and conventional grammar had no necessary relationship. Whether you like few or none of his novels, recognize that he was brave enough to forfeit fame and fortune to tell the story he wanted to tell, and the way he wanted to tell it. Fiction publishing today would squash CM like a bug. That’s the bad news

x86hacker1010 3y ago

So I finished reading The Road last night and sufficiently spooked by news of his death.

BMc2020 3y ago

Ctrl F Wendigoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu6STuj4njw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu6STuj4njw Wendigoons 5 hour review of Blood Meridian. 3.7M views in 4 weeks.

thetopher 3y ago

Here are two lectures about Blood Meridian from a Yale literature course. https://youtu.be/FgyZ4ia25gg https://youtu.be/FgyZ4ia25gg https://youtu.be/7ZFmf4T5L3o https://youtu.be/7ZFmf4T5L3o

kamranjon 3y ago
Thank you for this - after reading Blood Meridian I have been looking for something exactly like this to help me process it.

da39a3ee 3y ago

Suttree

sandkoan 3y ago

Something which may not be known to many, McCarthy was also quite interested in math, philosophy, cognition. A piece of his non-fiction work which made a lasting impression on me was "The Kekule Problem" [0], exploring the power of the unconscious, combative with consciousness, as an unveiler of Truth. 0: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

zls 3y ago
If you’ve read his final two books it’s incredible clear how fascinated he is by math, physics, and their interaction at philosophy. Stella Maris is basically just a long exploration of the philosophical implications of math, in dialogue form.

whiddershins 3y ago

Although the preface to Suttree is my favorite, the preface to The Passenger is beyond the best: * It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones. One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she’d dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered. That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures. The hunter knelt and stogged his rifle upright in the snow beside him and took off his gloves and let them fall and folded his hands one upon the other. He thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing. He bowed his head. Tower of Ivory, he said. House of Gold. He knelt there for a long time. When he opened his eyes he saw a small shape half buried in the snow and he leaned and dusted away the snow and picked up a gold chain that held a steel key, a whitegold ring. He slipped them into the pocket of his huntingcoat. He’d heard the wind in the night. The wind’s work. A trashcan clattering over the bricks behind his house. The snow blowing out there in the forest in the dark. He looked up into those cold enameled eyes glinting blue in the weak winter light. She had tied her dress with a red sash so that she’d be found. Some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation. On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.*

tehnub 3y ago
It hits even harder when you finish Stella Maris and consider the significance of that red sash — that she put it on despite her despairing solipsism. It breaks your heart.

bmitc 3y ago

Damn. I immediately got chill bumps reading this. I'm not one to fawn over so-called celebrity deaths, but here, we have lost a philosopher and a thinker who also told great stories. It feels like ideas and perspectives will be lost forever, referring to the ones he never wrote down or spoke about. I have always been in love with McCarthy's deep philosophy in his writing. I like the following two examples, not for any particular relevance of their content but just for the deepness that they get at. One is one of the final scenes in the No Country for Old Men film adaptation by the Coen brothers, and the dialogue is in the book as well. Sheriff Bell visits his cousin Ellis about feeling overmatched by the violence he's seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdOPJKocMWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdOPJKocMWg > "What you got ain't nothing new. This country's hard on people. You can't stop what's comin'. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity." The other is one of the final scenes in The Counselor, which is, as far as I know, McCarthy's only screenplay, at least that was actually filmed and released. The Counselor is on the phone begging for some way to get his wife back from the cartel, the Jefe of which explains the impossibility of the request regarding situation he has created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIn7y4ejIFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIn7y4ejIFM > "It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There's only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago. I don't mean to offend you, but reflective men often find themselves at a place removed from the realities of life. In any case, we should all prepare a place where we can accommodate all the tragedies that sooner or later will come to our lives. But this is an economy few people care to practice. ... You continue to deny the reality of the world you're in. You are at that crossing. At the understanding that life is not going to take you back. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist." This is pure brutality in the form of prose and dialogue.

sixstringtheory 3y ago
I also liked the line from the first: "All the time you spend tryin' ta get back what's been took from ya, more's goin' out the door." Haven't seen The Counselor before, but that's a tough scene to watch. Definitely on the queue now!

losvedir 3y ago

Is he worth reading if you don't have a vivid visual imagination? From the glowing praise here I feel like I should finally check him out, but all these comments sharing people's favorite quotes are just falling flat with me. I don't picture things in my head real well, and usually skim over description. I'm generally more captivated by interesting ideas than interesting ways of expressing the ideas.

mmierz 3y ago
For what it’s worth I have nearly complete aphantasia and I enjoy mccarthy’s descriptions very much. But if the quotes do nothing for you, his stories probably will not either.

an-allen 3y ago

My favourite CMC quote. The evil of automation. “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.”

scop 3y ago

A phenomenal artist. Thank you Cormac for bringing honest beauty to my life. Some of my past HN comments re McCarthy: - When I read both Melville and McCarthy, I'll often find myself mid-run-on-sentence and think to myself, "welp, he's gone too far this time" only to find, by golly, they pull it off in the end. What would otherwise be complete pretension and chaos is, when wrought by true literature artists, simply breathtaking. There are times when I'm reading McCarthy and I literally, out loud, utter "Lord have mercy" for the beauty/fullness/meaning that man can lay upon us. — This quote from Blood Meridian is one of my favorite in all of literature and I think capture McCarthy's magic. He has such great talent to describe simultaneously with vivid details yet inexact clarity/meaning. > It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.

pugworthy 3y ago

One of my favorite bits of writing is “Yelping with Cormac”, a series of short humorous pieces written by E.D.W. Lynch. An excerpt from “The Apple Store”… “… There was folks outside just standin there. Line stretchin round the block. Maybe a hundred people. I saw a man who’d brought his own chair. He had a shirt on with the same logo as the one on the store. I figured he worked there so I asked him what the line was all about. What were all these people waitin for. He told me it was for a apple phone or some such. I said dont these folks have telephones already? He told me they all had apple phones but it was the older one. I asked him what would happen to the old apple phones. He told me about a fella named Craig had a list and everbody sold their old telephones on it. A telephone sellin list.” https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/best https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/best

lordfrito 3y ago
OMG thanks for the link, funniest thing I've read in a while.

anjanb 3y ago

Is this McCarthy the one on whom the McCarthy Blvd in Milpitas, CA is named after ?

gbjw 3y ago

Adding to the list of favourite passages. This is from The Road, when the father holds his son: “No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”

nologic01 3y ago

"he fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until he fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved him forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was"

tehnub 3y ago
This quote is about a donkey or something falling off a cliff IIRC. Lol.

tehnub 3y ago

Here's a nice essay from Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian (FYI: Full of spoilers): https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir-to-melville-and-faulkner/ https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir...

david_shaw 3y ago

I posted a few months ago[1] about Suttree, and was surprised at how many people connected with the book (which I agree is great). I haven't read The Road or Blood Meridian, but when you consider the different styles and structures of McCarthy's prose, it's easy to agree that he was a remarkable writer. RIP. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561915

krelian 3y ago

I have never connected with any artist as much as I have with Cormac McCarthy. His writing brings forth feelings and ideas that seem to have always existed inside me but were waiting for his words to take shape. Throughout his work runs a line of thought that is never explicitly explained or can be easily summarized but some of his sentences and paragraphs nod at it. Here's one of my favorites: "He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."

thx 3y ago

No Country is one of the best books i’ve ever read

dclowd9901 3y ago

Aw damn. I figure he’d say “Alright”

sampa 3y ago

I liked this too-simple of a quote, that hits hard, when you have read the book. "When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf."

wageslave99 3y ago

I read The Road like 10-15 years ago. It was the first or one of the first books I fully read in English (I'm not a native English speaker). The simplicity of the grammar and lexicon helped me to follow the story, and although the crude environment that happens in the book is daunting and somber, I loved the book. From that time, when I see some news piece about Cormac McCarthy I cannot thank him enough for doing a masterpiece accesible to ESL speakers. RIP.

ftxbro 3y ago

> "In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field." if you write a novel with something like that then you know what will go in your obituary if you get famous