Everything I try to read after reading him seems dry and awkward

>>24456839 (OP)
>Everything I try to read after reading him seems dry and awkward
Turn your head and spit.

>>24456839 (OP)
Only Orchard Keeper and Suttree are worth bothering with pre-Meme Meridian. The late stuff should not have that quality thereafter.

>>24458403
>filtered by Outer Dark
It's a novel worthy of Franz Kafka, pleb

>>24456839 (OP)
How is it even possible for one man to BTFO every other author in the English-speakin sphere within 200-year range so hard? It's like nobody else has a brain or a mouth in comparison

>>24458627
>Come from wealthy, highly educated, powerful and connected family, also have friends from wealthy families
>Access to tons of literature from birth
>Don't have to worry about truly starving because your future is secured, calls on wealthy friends and siblings when he needs information, jobs, or a place to stay
>Slums it, pretending to be poor, in actuality he's constantly traveling and researching for his books, constantly reading and writing
>drags several wives and two kids along for the poverty larp
>wins a bunch of money
>blows it all traveling through Europe because he's a rich kid that doesn't need to worry about money, never going to actually starve or die of poverty
>wives and kids hate him because he's refuses to stop larping as poor
>they abandon him
>Rebrands himself as wizard cowboy that shoots Mexicans and Indians. In actuality he's never ridden a horse or shot a gun outside of boot camp.
>Writes stories about being wizard cowboy that shoots Mexicans and Indians
>Profits

>>24456839 (OP)
you mum's cunt is dry and awkward, faggot

>>24458355
And then ride on.

>>24458627
He's not that good anon

>>24458756
How true is this? He claims he didn't read until he was an adult.

I liked meme meridian. I liked the uber manly don't give a fuck aspect of it. what should I read next?

>>24458934
He's an unrivaled genius

>>24458952
He claimed a lot of things. He claimed to carry a special lightbulb for typing in motels.
Nothing wrong with all that of course. Reinventing yourself is the great american tradition. Bob Dylan made up all kinds of outlandish tales to make himself sound more interesting than 'lower middle class Jewish kid from the midwest', as did most of the golden age of Hollywood

>ywn again be 15 and reading McCarthy for the first time

>>24458998
He simulates depth with easy allusions and heavy-handed theme treatments.

Conrad is better

>>24458756
in which salty poorfag spreads salt on the grave of Cormac "if u punctuate u shit" mcarthy.
daily reminder commas are cityspeak.
say what you need in a sentence and no more.
think even plurals and tense and copula are crutch for "good" writing.
my wife dead 1955 and agrees.
but anon gay and my wife and agrees

>>24459027
Yet nobody else can hold a candle to him. what does that say about the state of literature

>>24456839 (OP)
Pynchon is unironically better

>>24458627
Melville mogs

>>24459027
It will be extremely easy for me to show how little clue you have but I am feeling generous today

>>24459094
Lol

>>24458627
kek
you need to read just a bit more

>>24456839 (OP)
>Glanton spat. They rode on as the giggity niggers like a bloody cursed legion of myopic manatees stretched thinly across the Marianic ocean shore trotted along the apocalyptic mesa and the scorch of the rim of a thousand red suns of an expansive universe that conspired against them shot its light across their bald faces and then it turned yellow then red again and then sun rose out of nothing like a great malevolent phallus and the Judge halted and he raised his arms like a pilgrim of a silent pact turned vengeful and he took his hat and he smiled with his tiny black eyes like some changeling and he was strangely childlike like the forgotten apostle of a buried God. The Kid spat.

>>24459437
kino

>>24459467
holy reddit

>>24458461
Makes sense, Franz Kafka isn't worth shit

>>24458627
everything mccarthy wrote besides suttree was mediocre at best and outright bad at worst
suttree is moby-dick-tier in terms of great literature

>>24459001
Very based view, anon. Reminds me of "never let the truth get in the way of a good story"

>>24459537
You're a retard

>>24456839 (OP)
try the road if you haven't, it's more digestible for someone trying to get a feel for his writing imo

>>24459409
Oh thank God

>>24459548
>it's more digestible for someone trying to get a feel for his writing imo
That's a nice way to say someone reads like shit.

>>24460786
It's a nice way to say you're probably too stupid and illiterate

The Suttree chapter where he has a relationship with a whore is beautiful. Their banter was so funny (far from the only time in this novel) and his descriptions have been getting better as I near the end of the book.
I thought she would hustle him at the end because it would be predictable after that shit he pulled with the 'musseling' chapter, but McCarthy made it more interesting.

McCarthy constantly shows a ton of range as a novelist. He does favour longer run-on sentences, then out of nowhere basic straight-shooting minimalist ones, and back to insane heavy-headed descriptions with obscure words unspooling out of nothing as if you were turning over little stones and a chinese dragon flew out from under one. The images he evokes are incredibly vivid even when he's using words I don't know, like he's painting a picture on my subconscious with them.
His dialogue is stellar. His knowledge of character is piercing. Points of view that shift seamlessly between omniscience and consciousness in the same paragraph without ever being confusing.
He has a fondness for spectacle and never bores. This story has a guy fucking watermelons, Suttree getting hit over the head with a floor buffer in a barfight, eating turtle with an Indian, giant nigger prison fights, sex-capades, helping a faggot dump a dead body in the river, someone poisoning an entire local bat population with a harebrained scheme trying to claim a nickel bounty per bat and later trying to tunnel under the town bank using homemade dynamite. Suttree just basically got raped by a black witch woman crone for sex magick purposes. And it's all literary.

>>24460881

>harrogate responsible for almost half of this nonsense

Thank God for his lawyer. Smart son of a bitch.

>>24456839 (OP)
>No interiority at all (except for vague biblical statements by the narrator)
>Only explanations of events unfolding and vivid imagery
>Still writes masterpieces
Does this prove symbolism is the key?

>>24458978
>don't give a fuck
Suttree

>>24460942
Mccarthy critiques symbolism though. You're not looking at his larger project

>>24460989
>Mccarthy critiques symbolism though
WTF how? His work is filled with recurring symbols.

>>24460995
Read "the late modernism of Cormac Mccarthy" by Max holloway. The reason his work remains so open to interpretation is because the symbols don't signify anything actual in the world. It's one of his main themes.

>>24461017
>>24460995
*David Holloway i meant

>>24461017
Does he say he loads the symbols himself instead of relying on pre-established ones?

All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker and in the night they could hear the drum of rain miles away on the prairie. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns. Mad jack-hares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot.

>>24461035
He says he uses symbols only to apply a pressure of meaning on the narrative. Resolution is not Mccarthy's aim. In Mccarthy's fiction, the World exists free of the human paradigm. The narrator and his figurative language is a way for the reader to make some sense of the world, but it is not necessary that what is suggested is how it is. This is the third destiny that the Judge talks about during his coin trick. He is talking to the audience as well.

>>24461039
>This is the third destiny that the Judge talks about during his coin trick.
Damn okay I'll give it a read it then.

>>24456839 (OP)
>HE FUCKED A REPRODUCTIVELY MATURE WOMAN AAAAAA I'M LOSING MY MIND

>>24461020
You think you got him over Dustin next month? Could be a career ending fight.

Try not being a pseud with bad taste

>>24458403
>filtered by the passenger
thank god i have good taste , what would i do without it, read Hemingway ?

>>24459085
>hold a candle to him.
Grip the shaft and learn to deal with hot wax.

>>24462892
Is that what you learnt from sucking dicks all the time?

Late that afternoon the high sheriff of Sevier County with two deputies and two other men crossed the field from Willy Gibson’s old rifle shop where they’d left the car and crossed the creek and went up the old log road. They carried lanterns and coils of rope and a number of muslin shrouds on which was stenciled Property of the State of Tennessee. The high sheriff of Sevier County himself descended into the sink and surveyed the mausoleum there. The bodies were covered with adipocere, a pale gray cheesy mold common to corpses in damp places, and scallops of light fungus grew along them as they do on logs rotting in the forest. The chamber was filled with a sour smell, a faint reek of ammonia. The sheriff and the deputy made a noose from a rope and they slipped it around the upper body of the first corpse and drew it tight. They pulled her from the slab and dragged her across the stone floor of the vault and down a corridor to where daylight fell against the wall of the sink. In this leaning bole of light, standing there among the shifting motes, they called for a rope. When it descended they made it fast to the rope about the corpse and called aloft again. The rope drew taut and the first of the dead sat up on the cave floor, the hands that hauled the rope above sorting the shadows like puppeteers. Gray soapy clots of matter fell from the cadaver’s chin. She ascended dangling. She sloughed in the weem of the noose. A gray rheum dripped.

In the evening a jeep descended the log road towing a trailer in the bed of which lay seven bodies bound in muslin like enormous hams. As they went down the valley in the new fell dark basking nighthawks rose from the dust in the road before them with wild wings and eyes red as jewels in the headlights.

anyone here read The Crossing? How is it?

>>24463963
>anyone here read The Crossing? How is it?
So much better than All the Pretty Horses. All the Pretty Horses was a heterosexual's lie. The Crossing is a homosexual's lie.

Obviously it is a set up for the Cities of the Plain.

>>24460942
Just finished Suttree. In that novel at least, the entire text is Suttree's interiority, even when the narrator is omniscient. It's he who sees the world in those 'vague biblical statements'.
I didn't quite get at first why he's living the way he does, but now it's obvious that McCarthy tells you almost everything very early on. He's extremely troubled by the thought of his twin's death and the life unlived. He thinks it could've just as easily been him who died, maybe it was and he's the twin, what would be the difference?
Suttree believes in transcendentalism. He says outright that "one man is every man." In a sense he's looking for himself in other people, and he's anguished because the lives of the common people of his hometown and childhood neighbourhood are ruinous and degenerate. So he's for meaning in them to explain the death of his twin, and he's finding more degeneration and death.

At the end, after he's turned to shamanistic rituals to try and understand something, and then almost dies from typhoid fever and has an extended near death experience rife with dream-logic symbolism, he decides to leave Knoxville and leave his past behind.
While he's hitchhiking and waiting for the first car to stop he sees construction workers being brought water by a blond boy who brings some to Suttree because he happens to be standing nearby. He notices this boy's blond hair and blue eyes and describes him as a mirror of himself (his twin). Then a car has stopped without him noticing.
As it starts moving he looks back and sees a hound dog sniffing at the place where he was just standing. The last paragraph is omniscient but it's still Suttree's mind because it's a continuation of his internal monologue. It says there's a hunter everywhere in the world with a pack of hounds that are ravenous for human souls, and he thinks "let them fly" because he's resolved his existentialist dilemma.

>>24464832
Suttree is certainly a very interesting text if you choose to dig deep into it. I've also read an interpretation where Suttree begins believing in gnostic transcendentalism but is convinced against it towards the end. I think a lot of it is up to the audience.

>>24460942
No, there's plenty of action in his books.

Anyway, the 'Mac is good but OP should do some more reading because there are plenty of other just as, or more excellent writers in the English language out there.

>>24464878
>I've also read an interpretation where Suttree begins believing in gnostic transcendentalism but is convinced against it towards the end
That would gel because when he begins to recover from typhoid he tells the priest that he learned "There is one and only one Suttree."