Tag Archives: Cormac McCarthy

You know what scares me?  I don’t see the darkness in McCarthy any more. It was warm in the room, he could feel the sweat in his armpits, but the man was swathed heavily in blankets.  Thickness of them under … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Glad I’m catching up on the old, since the new is coming at us fast and furiously.  Continue reading →

Just a thought this morning, and one that comes up in my mind quite a bit:  How much does the author know about what he presents in a story, what is planned, and what can still surprise him?  What is … Continue reading → Continue reading →

…that is, if we come to understand Benjy, of Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, and the way stream of consciousness reveals the revealer, then we can come to understand the method enough to understand McCarthy’s characters, or anyone else’s.  … Continue reading → Continue reading →

One thing McCarthy does not do, is race the reader through his stories.  Nor does he tell us about his characters. We follow at a steady pace, and decide by what they do, who they are.  We’re following three different … Continue reading → Continue reading →

One of the elements of what Longinus (or whoever) claims makes up the sublime he calls "noble diction" — "which in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of language. Here is where Cormac McCarthy excels.  … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading → Continue reading →

McCarthy is a master at keeping the reader on a level with his characters in time.  If someone’s trudging down a road, we know how he’s walking, how long it’ll take him to get into town.  And this, a fight … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I suspect, after reading several of McCarthy’s books now, that his readers are weeded out or strengthened into firm believers by his opening chapters. In this novel, we follow one man walking towards a place he wants to be going.  … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I can’t find it easily enough to excerpt here, but something I found in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian awed me when I first read it since it was the first time I’d come across it.  It was a repetition of words … Continue reading → Continue reading →

For some time now the road had been deserted, white and scorching yet, though the sun was already reddening the western sky.  He walked along slowly in the dust, stopping from time to time and bobbling on one foot like … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Need a Cormac fix.  But since I’ve so many books in the pile, I’m pulling one out of there (have a total of five left in there!): The Orchard Keeper. Am still enjoying Stories for Late at Night, and will … Continue reading → Continue reading →

No, not that McCarthy, but my man, Cormac of the guts and the blood and the rats. Crof of Writing Fiction just had to know this would stir me up some:  The New York Times has a piece asking: What … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Just finished McCarthy’s Child of God and honestly don’t know what to say.  I truly wish some day to continue my formal study of literature so that I can offer a more insightful review than Whew!  I seem to base … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Lester’s first murder of a woman is born of the egg of rejection with the sperm he’s left inside a woman he found dead in a car (boy, that’s a whole psychological story right there that I won’t go into … Continue reading → Continue reading →