/lit/ - Literature

He's a poor-man's Hemingway that uses a lack of punctuation as a gimmick to sell his books.

>>1699483
>hemingway isn't poor man's mccarthy

OP
I'm trying to read All The Pretty Horses, and good God it's like reading some middle schooler's awful attempt at being descriptive. I remember trying that when I was in middle school.

>>1699492
Hemingway led an interesting life filled with unique people and experiences. McCarthy is a twat who does interviews with Oprah to make cash.

>>1699496
I got the same impression. He's not a good writer.

He captures the violence of North American culture pretty much perfectly, negates the glorified role of the cowboy while creating a new western tradition, blurs lines between Absurdism and Realism, delineates childish violence as all violence, blah blah blah.

I like his storytelling.

i like his minimalist approach. hemingway was a minimalist himself but mccarthy is...i want to say grittier but some of hemingway's short stories are pretty brutal too. then again, in some of his books like suttree mccarthy reminds me more of faulkner whom hemingway had a nasty back and forth with.

>>1699496
bitch. you couldn't write like mccarthy if you wanted to.

i say if you don't like it move on. no book will please everyone. and if you're curious why others like it, it could be for the same reasons you dislike it. the prose, characterization etc etc

He writes with a poetic clarity - every word fits with every other word like a puzzle, and he never wastes a single one. His grasp of character is masterly, and his ability to draw the reader into unthinkable situations is beyond compare.

He's one of America's truly great writers, and I don't think there's a prose stylist better than him working today. Child of God is a book that will stay with me to the end of my days.

>>1699502
actually that was the only filmed interview he ever did. and he only did it because his wife got excited when she heard oprah asked him for it.

that's cool that you're saying whatever shit pops in your head. it lets me know not to take you seriously.

>>1699523
Yes, Faulkner has much more of an influence on McCarthy's writing style. Thank your for being informed.

>>1699523
>bitch. you couldn't write like mccarthy if you wanted to.

inb4 one word back and forths taken from the road.

the road was awesome too fuck all yall haters.

>>1699523
His minimalism when it comes to syntax mirrors Hemingway while his (lack of) punctuation creates a Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness. Utter brilliance considering most people consider Faulkner and Hemingway to have two completely opposite styles.

>>1699523
I'm not being condescending intentionally, I'm just curious as to why he get's so much attention. Good reasons have been given in his favor so far, but I'm still having a hard time getting over his seemingly insistent use of run-on sentences. Wikipedia says he's quoted as saying he likes to use short sentences lol.

McCarthy is like that snobby kid in your high school English class who doesn't talk much because he thinks he's better than everyone. Then you have to peer-edit his writing which is just a bunch of descriptive sentences about the landscape connected with "and" so you tell him to split those sentences up or use commas or periods or something and he says, "This is my style. I read a lot of Hemingway and draw inspiration from Faulkner. The way I write is gritty and raw."

Fuck you, Kevin.

>>1699558
well, keep at it if you're interested. that one was the most popular out of the border trilogy. i thought the last book in the set was the best. i won't say anything for fear of ruining anything.

i feel kind of bad that you're not reading blood meridian or suttree as your first mccarthy. or maybe even the road. people hate on the road but only because they have crummy opinions.

joking about that last one. i'm not that dense. but i loved it. i hated the movie.

Isn't The Road about zombies? Why would a guy who writes zombiefic ever be considered a serious author here on /lit/?

Ive read 'For whom te bell tolls' and 'the old man and the sea' they are great. 'the road ' and 'no country' are shit in comparison.

Also, doestoevsky is the best

>>1699473
Don't read the border trilogy, read Child of God, Outer Dark, and then Blood Meridian.

>>1699585
i'll agree that dostoevsky is the story teller everyone should envy.

however, no country is one of the two or three mccarthy novels i've yet to read so i can't comment there. but the road was great. you just have to be someone with good opinions to appreciate it. that's all, bruh.

McCarthy's imagery is incredible powerful and feeds into the feel and pace of the story. Now you guys are talking about his influences-- Faulkner and Hemingway... but no one has mention Melville which is where literary critiques always go.

>>1699591
>>1699585

God, I tire of the Dostoevsky worship on this board. He's a canonical writer, slightly above average. Lermontov was a better Russian author, and a far better storyteller. Russian literature in translation is a fucking joke, and you're all a bunch of pseuds, licking the spunk from the dick of professional literary critics.

>>1699473
>mfw noone realizes the literary merit of McCarthy because he went on Oprah because he doesn't give a fuck

You could honestly dedicate this whole board to the discussion of Blood Meridian and Suttree and I would be quite fine with it. They both have that much content behind them.

>>1699600
>you just have to be someone with good opinions to appreciate it. that's all, bruh.

i haven't read lermontov before but i'll add him to my list. you could've done without your comment. you're acting like anyone who likes it is criminal of your comment. you're gay.

>>1699609
see
>>1699535

>>1699600
You should be embarrassed. McCarthy is a gimmick, a flash in the pan author that appeals to suburban boys and their testosterone-crazed ideals of what being a Man would be like.

McCarthy is the WWE of literature.

>>1699620
Whoops, this should be aimed at >>1699609

>>1699620
gtfo. why do so many anons pretend to know more about why i like mccarthy than myself?

i stated my opinion earlier. and most opinions posted have nothing to do with manliness.

>>1699620
Don't talk shit about WWE by comparing it to McCarthy.

First tip to watching wrestling, everyone knows it's not real. Now enjoy the ridiculous fighting and story.

>>1699620
0/10, see me after class

Q: Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad “writers of books for boys”?

Nabokov: That’s exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story,”The Killers.” And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as– but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried.

>>1699654
>famous fish story
Only Nabokov is a big enough snob to characterize Old Man and the Sea as "a famous fish story"

I think most anons who bash him on lit are scifi geeks who got sold on The Road as a piece of dystopian action like they're used to getting. They got butthurt because it wasn't what they were expecting.

I doubt anyone slagging on him has read his better stuff. Child of God? Suttree? Only someone who knew absolutely nothing about writing would fail to see the brilliance of Blood Meridian.

>>1699654

He doesn't like books for boys, or boys at all for that matter, because they represent competition for all the little girls he wants to dip his willy in. Nabokov is a faggot, stop emulating him.

Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian
http://www.avclub.com/articles/harold-bloom-on-blood-meridian,29214/

>I think I had read some earlier McCarthy, and had mixed feelings about it—it seemed to me to be Faulknerian in a way that was not really integrated in a way that made it McCarthy’s own. It may have been Suttree, in fact, a book that I haven’t read since. It was a strong book, but you had the feeling at times that it was written by William Faulkner and not by Cormac McCarthy. He tends to carry his influences on the surface, quite honestly.

>>1699667
On finally finishing Blood Meridian, after two failed attempts because it was too violent and he didn't like it:
>And then the third time, it went off like a shot. I went straight through it and was exhilarated. I said, “My God! This reminds me of Thomas Pynchon at his best, or Nathanael West.” It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In fact, I taught it for several years in a class I gave here at Yale—interestingly enough, in a sequence starting with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, moving on to Miss Lonelyhearts, then The Crying of Lot 49, and the fourth in the sequence was Blood Meridian.

So there. Harold Bloom says it's the greatest book since As I Lay Dying, and as good as anything Pynchon ever wrote. Is that high enough praise for you literature snobs?

>>1699684
He thinks the rest of McCarthy isn't very good, though

> I wish that the rest of McCarthy, both before and after, was that good. I think the Border Trilogy has its moments, especially the first volume [All The Pretty Horses], but the second [The Crossing] and third [Cities Of The Plain]—especially the third—were disappointments. I was not one of the admirers of No Country For Old Men, which I found strained and the brutality coming through it all so… Nothing really mitigated it. The negative protagonist has none of the legitimacy or grandeur that Judge Holden has. And The Road I’ll have to visit again, because it really wore me down, that book, until the last 40 or 50 pages, where the father-son bond, I felt, was conveyed with real beauty and majesty.

>>1699667
Pynchon is the best living American writer?

AVC: You placed Blood Meridian not only firmly in the Western canon, but in your own “canon of the American Sublime.” Have there been any books since that time that you’d consider to be part of that canon?
HB: Well, we have four living writers in America who have, in one way or another, touched what I would call the sublime. They are McCarthy, of course, with Blood Meridian; Philip Roth, particularly with two extraordinary novels, the very savage Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, which I mentioned before; Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is a little long for what it does but nevertheless is the culmination of what Don can do; and, of course, the mysterious figure of Mr. Pynchon. I don’t know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century, it probably would not be something by Roth or McCarthy; it would probably be Mason & Dixon, if it were a full-scale book, or if it were a short novel it would probably be The Crying Of Lot 49. Pynchon has the same relation to fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is beyond compare.

>>1699667
why does he always look so sour?? how come nobody in the history of taking pictures of harold bloom has ever told him to try an expression other than "smelling a lemony fart?" does he just have a really unfortunate facial palsy that permanently contorts his face into the way you'd look upon being told that a friend of a friend has been cheating on his wife with his dog?

lack of punctuation emphasizes deadness of characters and world

>>1699726
Not sure what you mean. Looks like a happy guy to me.

>>1699728
Skilled authors can emphasize deadness of characters and world without gimmicks.

>>1699735
his posture is a perfect match for his face

he's the secular patron saint of slumping 'n' moping

>>1699742
Most people can't even make that face

So remind me again why Harold Bloom's opinion is definitive?

Oh, that's right, it's because /lit/ knows fuck all about literary criticism.

I'm a huge McCarthy fan, but c'mon /lit/. Move past talking about the same dozen or so people.

>>1699583
No. No zombies in the road... wtf.

Also, McCarthy is great. Blood Meridian is a masterpiece. The boarder trilogy is good but not his best work. His best is Blood Meridian and Child of God.

holy fuck these Bloom pictures are win

>>1699777
His opinion is not definitive, but he has read a lot of books, summarizes and analyzes well, and knows much more about literature, style, writing, theme, plot, and anything else literary than all of /lit/ put together.

He's not perfect, his word isn't law, but his opinion on a book should encourage some people to consider reading the same books as Bloom. You might disagree with him but you probably won't have wasted your time.

>>1699774
he looks like the schlubby, cheese danish-loving uncle of god on the sistine chapel ceiling

>>1699777

>Oh, that's right, it's because /lit/ knows fuck all about literary criticism.

>mfw I'm majoring in Literary and Critical Theory

>>1699868

Hope you have connections in academia...

>>1699810

Fair enough, but you still can't deny this is like the billionth topic mentioning McCarthy or Bloom.

People here need to branch out.

>>1699684
>>1699667

Fuck him.

>>1699667

I saw that picture and my nostrils were filled with the scent of sour feces. Don't know why.

Most of the reasons why McCarthy rules have been stated in this thread. I just want to add to this that the Border Trilogy is fucking amazing, brutal, emotional, scarring and monumental. Although I admit the third book is weak. No Country for Old Men is one of the best "thrillers" ever concocted and will go down in history as fucking amazing.

>>1699990
>reasons why McCarthy rules
are you in 8th grade