/lit/ - Literature

>>21786163
Pic related is overkill. Even among female writers, we have Christine Schutt, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Garielle Lutz who are all better than Munro at the art of sentence.

>>21491180
He breaks mountains, intellectual or otherwise, with his great steep precipice of a forehead.

>>21462584
McCarthy mirrors stone images again and again, linking stones with truth and with death. For example, when Tobin recounts his first encounter with the judge, the ex-priest describes the judge as being “bald as a stone” (6). On the mirror page, the judge says, “this desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren, its very nature is stone” (330). Similarly, Tobin says, “About the meridian of that day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self” (125). On the mirror page, the “rising sun” finds the kid “crouched under a rocky promontory watching the country to the south” (212). The judge sits on the rock at the peak of day, while on the mirror page the kid lies under a rock at the dawn of day.

In another example, the judge tells the parable of the white man who murders the traveler, saying, “He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the road” (144). On the mirror page, when Glanton has taken a fit, McCarthy writes, “As he turned a shot rang out and the mule fell stone dead under him with a musket ball lodged in its brain” (193). Again, McCarthy cleverly flips the order of the terms: “killed him with a rock” and “stone dead” to present a true “mirror image.”

Furthermore, at the book’s meridian, McCarthy presents us with a key truth of the book. “The severed heads had been raised on poles above the lampstandards where they now contemplated with their caved and pagan eyes the dry hides of their kinsmen and forebears strung across the stone facade of the cathedral and clacking slightly in the wind” (168). The scalps clacking against the stone facade of the cathedral represent the church’s “false truth,” or rather its inability to protect against the hard truth of death.

>>19819989
One of, definitely.

>>19699189
CM is proof that phrenology is real. That head can break boulders, figurative or otherwise.