About this title: Cormac McCarthy's highly unusual novel, set in 1951 Knoxville (where the author grew up), is the story of Cornelius Suttree, a distinct oddball unlike the young, questing heroes of most of McCarthy's other books. Suttree has given up a life of patrician wealth to live alone on a broken-down old houseboat on the Tennessee River, where he hopes to ...
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Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges and creases. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 1986-10-12
ISBN-13:9780394741451ISBN:0394741455
Description: Fair. Very worn covers. Piece missing from upper edge of title page. No markings. Still a good reading copy with tightly bound pages. read more
Description: Satisfaction Guaranteed. Shipped quickly. 1986. Paperback. 1st Vintage Books ed Ed. Used, very good. Very good overall with light to moderate wear. No dust jacket. read more
Description: Good. Light shelving wear with minimal damage to cover and bindings. Pages show minor use. Help save a tree. Buy all your used books from Green Earth Books. Read. Recycle and Reuse! read more
Binding: PAPER BACK
Publisher: VINTAGE
Date Published: 1992
Description: GOOD. 5X8. Book si slightly shelf cocked and has some creasing and staining to front cover, a clean tight copy for reading _PAB_ read more
Description: Fair. 0394741455 Mild cover and shelf wear. Front cover beginning to curl. Pages beginning to tan. No marking in text. Binding solid. No creases in spine or covers. Not remainder or ex-library. Packaged carefully for shipping. Ships within 24 hours. Satisfaction guaranteed! ! read more
Description: New. By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining o... read more
"The title character is a grown-up Huck Finn, out of territory, and returned to southern mid-America--lto live in a ramshackle houseboat on the Tennessee River outside of Knoxville, to be exact. The Huck Finn echoes are reinforced by the unforgettable teenager Gene Harrowgate, one of the best comic inventions in recent American lit history. Indeed, McCarthy has crafted an epic where the participants are decidedly unromanticized no-future derelicts, and while the effect is often funny in a way you might never have imagined this author capable of being, it's just as often poetically and profoundly sad, as much as any novel I've ever read. A half-step away from the scintillating hell-fired prose of BLOOD MERIDIAN--kids, if you want a book that will build your vocabulary or else cause you "skullpangs," as McCarthy would put it, give this a try.
"I was excited to read this book because it takes place in Knoxville, TN, where I have lived for almost a year. I enjoyed getting absorbed in the 1950s version of the city, but found parts of the book to be overly dense and florid. However, the dialogue is great and there are some very funny moments. There isn't much plot - it's mainly a character study - but it reads as sort of an anti-Huckleberry Finn. Whereas the Mississippi River in Twain's book represents movement and life, the Tennessee River in McCarthy's book is an embodiment of stagnation and decay.
Definitely read it if you plan to visit Knoxville!"
"What happened to McCarthy? Where did the author of Suttree disappear to? I understand that writers/artists have a desire to evolve, and in some cases move past the style that made them famous, but McCarthy left behind a true and beautiful thing. I had only read The Road and No Country For Old Men prior to this and while both of those are good, they pail in comparison to Suttree. I mean, wow. This novel is just devasting. And sad. And surprisingly funny but funny to McCarthy...well, that's some pretty dark humor indeed. But still funny. The following paragraph is a good representation of the kind of writing throughout the novel. It's long, but well worth your time:
"Now at noon each day he wakes to the gray light leaking in past the gray rags of lace at the window and the sounds of country music seeping through the waterstained and flowered walls. Walls decked with random flattened roaches in little corollas of oilstain, some framed with the print of a shoesole. In the rooms the few tenants huddle over the radiators, flogging them with mophandles, cooking ladles. They hiss sullenly. The cold licks at the window. In the bathrobe and slippers she has bought for him and carrying his pigskin shavingcase he goes along the corridor like a ghost through ruins, nodding at times to chance farmboys or old recluses with skittish eyes emerging from assignations in the rooms he passes. To the bathroom at the end of the hall that no one used save him, the yellow bowl spidered with cracks, the paintstained tub, the diamond panes in the window looking out on a ledge where pigeons crouched in their feathers lee of the wind. A gravel roof where a rubber ball lay rotting. The city a collage of grim cubes under a sky the color of wet steel in the winter noon."
Pg. 397, Suttree
Also, this:
"Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it."
"Well..I have to say this may be the best book I've read. The book follows Cornelius Suttree as he live his life on the river in Knoxville TN. There is such a wealth of characters in this book, that you will find someone in this book to root for or hate. This book reminds me so much of a Flannery O'Connor story or a Faulkner book. McCarthy manages to capture the beauty of Tennessee and the beauty of the human condition. This book is filled with great humor and great sadness. I recommend this book to anyone and every one."
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