Top tags: fiction, western, national book award, contemporary fiction, cormac mccarthy (all tags)
“McCarthy breaks my heart. What draws me to the Border Trilogy, and all McCarthy works, is the sense of place that is present in the language. I can feel the dry, dusty, yellow sun of the west. His words move like a slow snake of loss across your heart.”
“It's been a long time since I willfully and happily set down a book; I hate not finishing books and do what I can to finish them out of sheer willpower, yet this book managed to make me not only put it down, but I put it back on my shelf since I knew I wouldn't be picking it up again for a long time. The prose is an attempted mixture of the understatement of Hemingway (though he lacks the subtlety and implication of Hemingway) and the serpentine sentence structure of Faulkner (though he lacks the cadence and poetry of prose that Faulkner mastered). With such sentences as "He talked of horses and of how man and horse are the same and that you don't know a horse until you have ridden it in war and war is the only place to and discover a and the horse kicked its legs and he said, 'whoa' and sat down and smoked and got up and said, 'that's a good cigarette' and he walked and went to bed and snored and woke up and went to bed at night and smoked and everthing was blood red like the sun that is always blood red. And and and." Mind you, I made that sentence up, but I'm not very far from how McCarthy writes. But I made an accident and greatly misrepresented McCarthy, I put quotation marks. I have done him a great wront--no! He's done reading a wrong for not including standard punctation for no apparent reason. I have feeling he thnks he's literary for avoiding punctuation. The plot's pretty dry, too, except for when he tries to be philosophical about our spiritualy bellacose connection to the horse. The only thing he's good at is describing nature and objects in an original fashion, except for when he's talking about the sun THAT'S ALWAYS BLOOD RED. It's like he has a bag of ready-made descriptions he uses when he can't add anything else to the word "and". So if you have any love for prose, even bad prose, and any love for story, even bad stories, avoid this book. Please, please avoid this book.”
“This was a great western - gritty and scary. I loved the fact we were following boys on an adventure, one that can't really happen any more.”