Books He Writes Mighty Fine
posted by on October 9 at 15:23 PM
So I’ve been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy lately, in preparation for the upcoming please-god-be-as-awesome-as-it-sounds Coen Bros. adaptation of No Country for Old Men. Anyway, I’ve been kinda running hot-and-cold on his body of work, particularly the instances where you can feel him straining for a grand cosmic metaphor when a simple description of a coyote would do. But then, well, you hit a sentence like the following from Blood Meridian, and everything sort of … realigns:
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 uniforms 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 wedding veil 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 horses’ 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.
Anybody else need a cigarette? Discuss.
Hopefully the movie will be better than the book.
It's nice that he got an SF book into Oprahs Book club.
I wasn't crazy about that book either, but I love the Coen brothers and Javier Bardem is a wonder. I think this is only his 2nd Hollywood film (with "Before Night Falls" being his first.) Am I right?
Anyhoo, I like the older Cormac McCarthy books much more, when he was still trying to be Wm. Faulkner and before he decided to write for the movies. "Outer Dark" is a terrifying story of love and incest. Like Faulkner vs. Stephen King. "Suttree" is plain gorgeous. Well drawn Southern misfits and high weirdness. You know what he’s got in that sack?
@3
"I wasn't crazy about that book either, but I love the Coen brothers and Javier Bardem is a wonder."
100% agree, although I didn't finish the book. Sigh. I tried.
"I think this is only his 2nd Hollywood film (with "Before Night Falls" being his first.) Am I right?"
Well I wouldn't consider Before Night Falls a 'Hollywood film', and no. He was in Collateral, playing the dude Cruise sent Foxx to talk too in order to retrieve the lost info on who to kill for the night. He was also in Goya's Ghosts, which was fucking boring as hell.
So technically this is his second 'Hollywood' film. By that I mean it's his second film that will land in at least 3,000 screens.
Gurldoggie,
I'm pretty sure its his 4th Hollywood film, actually, if you count his cameo in Collateral (wherein he knocks the everloving hell out a monologue about Santa Claus). Anyway, agreed with you on McCarthy's earlier stuff. I'm already hankering for an Outer Dark reread.
"Anybody else need a cigarette?"
Smoking is bad, Meatwad.
the book read like a screen play. I bet you it's going to be a blast.
McCarthy's The Road is the most harrowing thing I have read in years. Wonderful and wrenching, it left me in tears. I have not read Blood Meridian, but this quote makes me want to although it also reads a bit like Larry McMurtry at his most self-indulgent, NTTAWWT I suppose. That the Coen Brothers are directing a movie makes me even happier.
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