Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
Book Review: A terrible beauty
Summary: 5 Stars
There is no bleaker or more bitter book. There is no better or more beautiful one, either. This, Cormac McCarthy's finest novel, depicts violence so depraved as to be almost unbearable, and doesn't ameliorate its impact by confining the evil within one or two sociopathic characters. His violence is institutionalized and endemic. His vision indicts the entire project of Western expansionism, and goes farther to become a threnody for the debased human condition.
The writing in this book, though, is so careful and pure that the act of reading it is itself redemptive. As the story grows ever more horrific and threatens to engulf the reader in despair, the cumulative power of detail and diction elevates the spirit and mind. More than almost any other book, "Blood Meridian" shows art's ability to ennoble us while it illustrates our worst aspects.
The experience is exhilarating.
Book Review: An allegorical tale comparable to "Moby Dick"...
Summary: 5 Stars
A thought provoking yet entertaining read; definitely one of the best books I've ever read. McCarrthy's imagery is always vivid and often disturbing, and he has produced an epic, oddly twisted and almost mystical journey of death, redemption, and discovery for his character and the reader. I can't recommend this book enough.Book Review: Inferno of the American West
Summary: 5 Stars
Cormac McCarthy is our most talented fiction writer and this is his best work. From his initial effort, The Orchard Keeper, which justifiably won the Faulkner Award, through his Border Trilogy (also justifiable honored with the National Book Award), McCarthy has practiced his craft with literary genius and a painful, searing perspective of the American soul. We have a violent past, the product of a violent streak in our character, and McCarthy explodes that violence on the landscape of the Mexican-U.S. border of the 1850's. The reader delves into the lower reaches of human desolation, hoping to eventually see the light reaching back towards the surface but always turning into a chamber that leads further down into renewed horror and degeneracy, each level a new incarnation of this Western Inferno. The fact that McCarthy can evoke beauty and nuance even amidst this unrestrained human carnage is supreme testament to his skills as an artist. This read is a challenge to the willing - as any approach to great art must be. However, it is well worth the effort with its reward of fantastic panoramas of man's descent into a chaotic state, evil outside the metering bounds of civilization, horrifying in its stark portrayal of the dark side of our national character.Book Review: The problem is, it's repetitive
Summary: 3 Stars
BLOOD MERIDIAN was published in 1985 and I can see why it achieved lasting acclaim. Cormac McCarthy is a master of sentence and paragraph construction. The beauty of his words and the construction of his sentences provides a basic pleasurable sensation. Which is good for this book, because after a while the narrative begins to drag. They walk through desert. They massacre. They walk through desert. They massacre. They walk through awful landscapes and massacre again. And so on. It seems to lose coherence when it spins off from the heart of "the kid"--which may be a point being made but is damned annoying nevertheless. If you are coming to this novel retrospectively from his Border Trilogy, you might be disappointed in the absence of a "hero" on the scale of John Grady or Billy. At least there is in BLOOD MERIDIAN the character of the judge to (hopefully) capture your attention, though hero definitely does not apply.Book Review: A masterpiece on every level
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel is filled with the most exquisite sentences I've ever read: laser-accurate diction, uncompromising truthfulness, evocative far beyond Faulkner, perfect structure. The content, the theme, the movement, the freshness on every level are staggering. Brutal beyond anything else I've read, but worth more than anything else I've read, too.