Whenever I read McCarthy I come across a few pages that beg to be read aloud. Usually, a description of a place, and McCarthy colors it well:
He went up the far side of the square under the shadow of the market house past brown country faces peering from among their carts and trucks, perched on crates, old women with faces like dried fruit set deep in their hooded bonnets, shaggy, striated and hooktoothed as coconut carvings, shabby backlanders trafficking in the wares of the earth, higgling their goods from a long row of ancient vehicles backed obliquely aainst the curb and freighted with fruits and vegetables, eggs and berries, honey in jars and boxes of nuts, bundles of roots and herbs from sassafras to boneset, a bordello of potted plants and flowers. (p. 82)
What’s that you say? These are people and things, not places? I disagree. This is the square, alive with color, sounds, and smells. And I read this in a drone that I can’t help falling into, as if, amid all this busyness, there is still a sense of despair.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Wonderful description, but the sense of despair as you mention is not evident to me without a verbal passage. Otherwise, just an exercise of thesaurus-like talent.
The passage is there…did you want me to read it and hook up audio?
I agree with you: this is one sentence and if I allow myself to hear a voice in my head reading it to me, the rhythm of the words is the staccato noise and bustle of the square. If you listen to the words, you will not only know what the square looks like, you’ll know know what it is like to be there.
Amazing talent to make sounds come alive. In looking it over, I’m wondering if it’s not the inclusion of hard consonants: the k’s in hooktoothed, truck, trafficking, coconut; the g’s in higgling, shaggy, eggs; x’s and q’s–the boxes, obliquely. And, the softness of bordello that adds spice and color only by word association. Neat, neat stuff.