About this title: Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN is an epic nightmare of a novel. Set in the 1850s on the Tex-Mex border, it is about a 14-year-old runaway--known only as "the kid"--who comes of age in a brutal culture. Joining up with a gang of Indian-killers, the kid learns to kill Apaches for bounty. Barely escaping with his life from a group bent on revenge, ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: PAN MACMILLAN Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780330312561ISBN:0330312561
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 352 pages. (336 pages) built upon the fortunes of a 14 year old kid, this book covers the violence and depravity that attended america's westward expansion, subverting the conventions of the western novel and the mythology of the wild west. edition new ed (Paperback) read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 5/5/1992
ISBN-13:9780679728757ISBN:0679728759
Description: Very Good. 0679728759 Soft cover copy that has very little wear to the cover of the book. The binding is tight and the pages are clean throughout. Nice copy. Expedited shipping available. Fast shipping. read more
Description: Good. 1992-Paperback----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Description: Paperback in fine condition. Pictorial covers...Only. POST FREE IN UK. * Please note, all our collectable paperbacks are post free in the UK for a limited period. Search our stock with keyword PAPER BACKS. read more
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Pan Macmillan, UK
ISBN-13:9780330312561ISBN:0330312561
Description: New. Please note that deliveries to addresses in the UK and Europe will be in 4-14 business days. Other countries should refer to Alibris standard times. Recounting the adventures of a young man from Tennessee, The Kid, who has drifted to Texas in the 1840s, this is an apocalyptic novel and mythic vision of a blood-red Early West. At first innocent, The Kid joins a party of crazed and violent Indian hunters. ISBN10: 0330312561. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780330312561ISBN:0330312561
Description: New. Built upon the fortunes of a 14 year old kid, this book covers the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. read more
"It is a spitting mean epic about the small party of indian scalpers that played a minor role in the expansion of west. Hopefully. It is a hardcore no hold barred two fists tale, along with knives, stones, lances, teeth, feet, that leave trails of scars, tattoos, mutilated torsos, decapitations on the reader's pysch, by the savages on both sides of the conflict. It has its own poetic beauty of nature devoid of compassion and wicked gleeful nastiness. It is the kind of a book that celebrates the ugly truth that sometimes the end justifies the evil means. It turns war into a sad stupid wild sorrowful game between various tribes trapped in the knick-knack historical clothes that turn into rags as their bodies turn to dust, only to be resurrected by this haunting and beautiful book."
"The only thing that makes me more self-conscious than using the shower in the men's locker room at the gym is when I read a supposed American classic and don't like it. I just didn't like Blood Meridian. And at a little over three hundred pages, it took me a long time to read.
Maybe it was McCarthy's self-regard; the book oozes with pomposity and the author's own cleverness. There are the chapter headings, where - just like in olden days!! - there is a brief description of all the events that are going to occur. There is McCarthy's refusal to punctuate. No quotation marks (because quotation marks are for quotidian word peddlers like Stephen King). No capitalization of proper nouns. Then there is the pseudo-Faulknerian sentences, with tangled syntax and Biblical resonances. You have to be sharp for every word; let your mind stray for a moment and you will be lost.
Blood Meridian is set sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, along the Tex-Mex border. It follows the Kid - in the book, he is referred to as "the kid" because...I don't know, to annoy me - a fourteen-year old who falls in with a group of scalp hunters led by the Judge (or, as he is known in the book, "the judge"). There follows a string of nightmarish incidents, all rendered in gloriously vivid detail (because McCarthy is great at descriptions) all leading up to an ending that is so out-of-this-world that it almost brought a smile to my face as I was flinging the book out a window. I read it a couple times, and suffice it to say, there is a dancing naked man, and I think somebody died.
There is a lot to offer in the book. McCarthy renders some memorable scenes, especially an escape from marauding Indians. He is also a very beautiful writer:
Their way led now through dwarf oak and ilex and over a stony ground where black trees stood footed in the seams on the slopes. They rode through sunlight and high grass and in the late afternoon they came out upon an escarpment that seemed to rim the known world. Below them in the paling light smoldered the plains of San Agustin stretching away to the northeast, the earth floating off in a long curve silent under looms of smoke from the underground coal deposits burning there a thousand years...
The character of the judge is a great concept. However, he becomes more overtly a symbol as the book goes on. Still, he's given some great lines:
The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black. The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said. The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there's many a bloody tale of war inside it. It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
McCarthy does a superb job of imagining and creating a world that never existed. He takes the reality of the American West and heightens it, so that the landscapes are familiar, but viewed through the lens of the macabre."
This is a great piece of historical fiction. It mostly follows the Glanton Gang, who started off as scalphunters but ended up basically killing everyone that happened to cross their path. Easily the most violent novel I've ever read and the fact that it is basically true makes it that much worse."
"I'll be frank right up front: I loved this book. It's a poetic, metaphor-and-symbolism-rich wonder of a novel, and every bit as violent as its reputation states. McCarthy has such a seemingly effortless ability to render forth horrific and beautiful descriptions of everything from sunrises to Indian attacks that it's enough to make one weep with envy.
McCarthy certainly gives the lie to the nostalgic romanticizing of the Old West enshrined in American culture; these cowboys 'n Indians aren't film-stock black hats/white hats (as it were), but each as brutal, kill-happy, and merciless as the other. Entire massacres are committed and described by McCarthy as almost trivial, mundane, routine matters; and the blood drips from literally every page. The grue and gore isn't exploitative in the slightest, however, as many other books containing graphic violence are charged with; the combination of McCarthy's palpably sensuous prose and his obvious knowledge of his subject serve not to titillate, but to simply tell a story.
*ETA: I've heard a good deal said about the gender divide/disparities in McCarthy fans; it's apparently a Great Literary Truth that women do not like McCarthy novels. This being my second five-star McCarthy review, I suppose that stereotype can be laid to rest; and just what are "men's writers" vs. "women's writers" anyhow?"
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