Suttree (1992) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Cornelius Suttree: The inconsequential man has rarely been achieved with such brilliance. McCarthy is without peer in contemporary American literature.
• Reese: Add a description of this character.
• Mr Callahan
• Leonard
• Clayton
• Blind Richard
• Slusser
• Harvey
• Buddy
• Rufus
• Mcanally
• Bobbyjohn
• Oceanfrog
• Clifford
• Jimmy Smith
• Willard
• Jones
• Wilson
• Mr Hatmaker
• Mcculley
• Billy Ray
• Youngblood
• Cecil
• Mama
• Wanda
• Martha
• Howard Clevinger
• Jabbo
• Hoghead
• Holmes
• James
• Good God
• Jake
• Miller
• Ulysses
• Sharpe
• Jesse
• Byrd
• Jeffrey
• Johnson
• Vernon
• Fernon

Quotes edit see section history

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• “"They rowed far downstream. Leonard saying Hell, Sut, any place is good and Suttree rowing on. They looked like old jacklight poachers, their faces yellow masks in the night. The corpse lay slumped in the floor of the skiff. The lamp standing on the stern seat with its thin spout of insects caught in its light the wet sweep of the oars, the beads of water running on the underblades like liquid glass and the dimples of the oarstrokes coiled out through the city lights where they lay fixed among the deeper shapes of stars and galaxies fast in the silent river."”

• “"He left it burning there and went as far as the edge of the light, his small shadow swallowed up finally in the greater dark beyond. He turned and came back. He squatted and watched the flame totter. The dank stone room grew smaller, drew in about him. He crouched in the smallest cup of light with his hands joined at the back of the flame as if he would gather it to him. Hot oil ran on the stones. The wick toppled and dropped with a thin hiss and dark closed over him so absolute that he became without boundary to himself, as large as all the universe and small as anything that was."”

• “Suttree in the woods was surprised to find small flowers still. He fell into silent studies over the delicate loomwork in the moss. Annular forms of lichens fiery green that sprawled across the stones like tiny jade volcanoes. The scalloped fungus that ledged old rotted logs, flangeous mammary growths with a visceral consistency and pale indianpipes in pulpy clusters among the debris of humus and rich decay and mushrooms with serrate and membraneous soffits whereunder toads are reckoned to siesta. Or elves, he said. In breeks of kingscord, shirts paned up of silk tailings, no color like the rest. A curious light lay in the forest. He was squatting in the rich and murky earth, the blanket about his shoulders. He wondered could you eat the mushrooms, would you die, do you care. He broke one in his hands, frangible, mauvebrown and kidneycolored. He'd forgotten he was hungry." p.284”

• “"All day this halfmad outcast staggered through the snow and what a baleful heart he harbored and how dear to him. In midafternoon he came upon a freshet and he turned downstream, his breath pluming. He could smell the water. Going down through the snow where ice tines hung from boughs above their replicas in graygreen pools like jaws from fierce jurassic carnivores. Until late in the day he came out of the snow and crossed through a broad bottomland where the ground gave wet and spongy underneath. In his darker heart a nether self hulked above cruets of ratsbane, a crumbling old grimoire to hand, androleptic vengeances afoot for the wrongs of the world. Suttree muttering along half mindless, an aberrant journeyman to the trade of wonder." p.290”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.

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• 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.

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• But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so.

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• Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.

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• What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.

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• We are come to a world within the world. In these alien reaches, these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams. Illshapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland.

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• Believing this ghastly circus reconvened elsewhere for alltime. He in the limbo of the Christless righteous, I in a terrestrial hell.

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• Envy’s color is the color of her pleasuring, and what is the color of grief? Is it black as they say? And anger always red? The color of that sad shade of ennui called blue is blue but blue unlike the sky or sea, a bitter blue, rue-tinged, discolored at the edges. The color of a blind man’s noon is white, and is his nighttime too? And does he feel it with his skin like a fish? Does he have blues, are they bridal and serene, or yellows, sunlike or urinous, does he remember? Neural colors like the fleeting tones of dreams. The color of this life is water.

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• He was stayed in a peace that drained his mind, for even a false adumbration of the world of the spirit is better than none at all.

  Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers

• Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Knoxville, Tennessee

First Sentence edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Mulengro, and followed by Mythago Wood.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Cormac McCarthy (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 818'.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Add a note to help parents select a book for a child.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( M ) › McCarthy, Cormac
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › United States
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/: author's website