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Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. The previous Cormac thread has long been gone, but we are only a week away now from our 2022 gift of 400 + 200 pages of new McCarthy material. The Passenger, coming October 26: quote:The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. quote:The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. Here's some more Cormac stuff you might find interesting: A bunch of newspaper articles featuring quotes from McCarthy early in his career, that he gave to his friends before he stopped giving interviews. The Kekulé Problem, where McCarthy ruminates on the origin of language. Cormac McCarthy Returns to the Kekulé Problem, a follow-up from seven months later where McCarthy comments on reader feedback from the original article. Three early short stories: Wake for Susan (1959) A Drowning Incident (1960) The Dark Waters (1965) If you have a chance, go buy The Passenger and Stella Maris at your local independent bookstore.
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Oct 18, 2022 18:33
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Been a long wait since The Road, looking forward to these.
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Oct 18, 2022 20:02
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The NYT also posted an excerpt of The Passenger the other day.
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Oct 18, 2022 20:53
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Holy cow I gave up googling the release date a couple years ago, convinced he was going to croak before this ever saw the light of day.
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Oct 19, 2022 03:02
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PsychedelicWarlord posted:The NYT also posted an excerpt of The Passenger the other day. Cormac McCarthy posted:Various of them looking for work. John gestured with his glass. Brat very nearly secured a position, he said. But of course at the last moment it all came uncottered. Cormac McCarthy posted:It was pretty much fun, said Brat. When the bailiff raised his hand to swear her in she reached up and slapped him a big high-five. I dont think they’d seen that before. Cormac McCarthy posted:I had a dream about you, Squire.
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Oct 19, 2022 03:51
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Oct 22, 2022 04:23
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I had the good fortune to have early access to review galleys of each of the two new novels. I've already read The Passenger, although I'm saving Stella Maris, as I've spent the past couple months-ish since first finishing The Passenger revisiting all of McCarthy's other work, to better appreciate and contextualize the new ones. I will say that my gut instinct on first finishing The Passenger was that fans of Suttree (my favorite, and possibly my favorite novel period) will be especially fond of it. There are many similarities, both superficial and more significant/thematically resonant, that lead me to say so, but I'll spare further thoughts for when I've had more opportunity to go back through and take proper notes on all the stuff now that it's fresh in my mind. I would highly recommend taking this chance to tackle McCarthy's body of work if you can find the time and energy, it's not often one of the great artists comes back with a rich new work.
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Oct 25, 2022 02:56
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Criminal Minded posted:Passenger, although I'm saving Stella Maris, as I've spent the past couple months-ish since first finishing The Passenger revisiting all of McCarthy's other work, to better appreciate and contextualize the new ones. I tried to do this over the last couple months but I honestly couldn’t hang. I couldn’t handle another knife fight description and I think I’m one and done with the road. A friend told me that if I thought the border trilogy was intense then I’d really like outer dark. I had to tap out. I’ve since cleansed my palette and im fired up for the passenger.
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Oct 25, 2022 04:31
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I made the mistake of preordering the boxed set, so I have to wait until December for both.
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Oct 25, 2022 16:38
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I forsook the box so that I wouldn't have to wait the six weeks. Drove down to the local indie bookstore during my lunch break to pick up my pre-order: Now to try and figure out if I'm going to ration the pages or just go hog wild, knowing that we might be waiting another 16 years for the next one.
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Oct 25, 2022 18:19
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Not sure if I can’t wait sixteen years to hear an old man tell me a joke I read on fwd:fwd:fwd: guess I’m loving nuts
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Oct 25, 2022 18:43
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kind of feel like i;ve come full circle with McCarthy. My first encounter with him was The Road back in 2011; i had seen the ad for the movie and then picked up the book on a whim in the student bookstore at my university. the next day was halloween and i was sick as hell. ended up staying up all night reading it while i sweated out a fever. spent the next few years devouring everything he had written. Now with this book around halloween time again, it feels poignant. Can't wait
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Oct 26, 2022 00:55
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Cormac posted:I'll tell you what else. I think that my desire to remain totally loving ignorant about poo poo that will only get me in trouble is both deep and abiding. I'm going to say that it is just drat near a religion. 
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Oct 26, 2022 13:35
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Criminal Minded posted:I will say that my gut instinct on first finishing The Passenger was that fans of Suttree (my favorite, and possibly my favorite novel period) will be especially fond of it. Love Suttree so this is promising news. My copy was delivered yesterday, so just waiting for the right time to dive in.
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Oct 26, 2022 17:09
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How do you feel about the world being almost 90 Mr McCarthy?quote:what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry. As for myself again if I cant be decorum’s sworn enemy while savoring its fruits I simply see no place for me at all. And how do you feel about the post Trump America? quote:Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning. Mr McCarthy, do you think the two parties can compromise in order to avoid catastrophe or are we headed to a second civil war? quote:It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced.
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Oct 28, 2022 05:05
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Goddamn this book is good so far.
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Oct 29, 2022 00:14
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New 75 minute interview with Cormac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrUy1Vn2KdI Novels are barely discussed. It's mostly math, metaphysics, physics, consciousness, science, philosophy and the many famous students of them. Fascinating. He is pretty drat sharp for someone pushing 90. He could definitely publish more books.
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Oct 30, 2022 00:17
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I have that interview bookmarked to watch soon, still working on The Passenger. I did realize that I never remembered to look for The Gardener's Son but it is available on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/the-gardeners-son_202202 Screenplay by Cormac McCarthy, starring Ned Beatty, Kevin Conroy, Brad Dourif, Penelope Allen, and Jerry Hardin, from the PBS anthology series Visions in 1977. One thing I wanted to note mid-Passenger is last night I read a scene where Bobby Western is talking to a PI and McCarthy included the line "Like most people he liked being consulted." It stuck out to me as being unusually descriptive for Cormac, especially about the personality of a character. Does anyone else feel this way?
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Nov 4, 2022 03:03
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I get the feeling the author is looking deeply at his own mortality surrounded by physicists on a land haunted by the atom bomb.
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Nov 4, 2022 04:51
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I'm a bit over halfway through, and while I enjoy following Western along and these random conversations he has with people, the chapters with his sister and her hallucination crew I find really tedious.
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Nov 4, 2022 16:32
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Agreed. Having only read Blood Meridian and The Road and seen No Country For Old Men I'm amazed McCarthy writes in forms other than Southern doom poetry and drawl. This brings Pynchon to mind with the flashy names and character vignettes.
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Nov 5, 2022 06:11
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Finished it up. Loved that opening part that they excerpted in the NYT, and the last chapter was great. But so much of the middle didn't grab me, and I also did not like any of the parts with The Kid. To the point that I'm worried there's a chance I won't like Stella Maris at all. Though I think in the description it was said that SM is, like, transcriptions of her talking to the doctors, so maybe we won't have to put up with the speaking voice of The Kid? I don't know, my opinion is that The Passenger is pretty medium and at best I can say that it leaves a lot of room for it to grow on me. For all the hype about how scientific it was going to be, it really felt like that was a non-essential 10 pages or so out of 383.
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Nov 6, 2022 17:33
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There are moments of brilliance in The Passenger but anything containing the Kid does not number among them
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Nov 6, 2022 21:31
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After what the Judge did to him that only makes sense
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Nov 6, 2022 23:50
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We’re going to find out that Cormac has been holed up at the sante fe institute because he can’t afford rent after all his assets were seized for back child support. Also his irl sister was a dime. 
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Nov 7, 2022 05:51
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I'm a little over halfway through. A bit disappointed so far, partly because the prose is so stripped down. Also, Western is probably the weirdest protagonist in a McCarthy book so far, and I find it really hard to get a grip on who this guy is. Every other character of his paints a fairly clear portrait in my mind, but Western sort of eludes my imagination. I am glad I finally got around to reading Suttree this year so that I can see some of the parallels though. I mean, that's not the only reason I'm glad I read Suttree.
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Nov 7, 2022 14:32
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I finally decided to read Blood Meridian. Is it okay to discuss in this thread or should I go elsewhere? I'm baffled by his decision to put spoilers at the beginning of every chapter.
Help a goon out! Lots of books - horror, nonfiction, classics and more for sale. escape artist fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Nov 7, 2022 |
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Nov 7, 2022 18:14
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escape artist posted:I finally decided to read Blood Meridian. Is it okay to discuss in this thread or should I go elsewhere? I'm baffled by his decision to put spoilers at the beginning of every chapter.
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Nov 7, 2022 19:56
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escape artist posted:I finally decided to read Blood Meridian. Is it okay to discuss in this thread or should I go elsewhere? I'm baffled by his decision to put spoilers at the beginning of every chapter. It was a standard trope of novels in the era he's depicting. He's not really a "spoiler" kinda author, too. I mean there's a couple shocking moments in a few of his books but for the most part eh. edit: Finished the book last night. I'd be lying to myself if I said it wasn't a disappointment after all those years of waiting. It doesn't sound like Stella Maris is going to "unlock" The Passenger either. Oh well, it wasn't a total failure. And I'm glad the announcement of the The Passenger's release prompted me to finally go back and read the rest of McCarthy's work- that was well worth it. You can definitely see little bits and pieces of his prior works (Suttree, as had been pointed out, but also Outer Dark, NCFOM, The Road, even naming one of the characters The Kid...). There's definitely some interesting parallels between McCartht's father, who was an attorney for the Tennesee Valley Authority, and Suttree, and Western and Alicia's father in this book. Jewmanji fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Nov 8, 2022 |
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Nov 7, 2022 20:25
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Well after finishing I'm disappointed to say that this was my least favorite of his novels that I've read - still haven't got around to his first three. I doubt I'll even bother with Stella Maris unless I find it at the library at some point.
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Nov 9, 2022 00:29
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People will disagree on whether Outer Dark or Child of God is better (it’s the former) but both would be worth your while imo. The Orchard Keeper was a little difficult to parse for me, but it was a short enough book that I read it to be completionist. Feels crass to rank his books but: Suttree Blood Meridien All The Pretty Horses The Crossing The Road Cities of the Plain Outer Dark Child of God No Country for Old Men The Passenger The Orchard Keeper Jewmanji fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 00:39
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The book’s great. What were people disappointed about? Yeah. The chapters with the kid were tedious, but tedious in an intentional dream logic sort of way. Plus I’m a sucker for crude puns and malapropisms. And am I crazy, or is it pretty much explicitly the case that The Kid is Bobby and Alicia’s child?
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Nov 9, 2022 02:11
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Are you basing that on the fact that they both have visions of The Kid? It’s an interesting thought but I don’t know if that fact alone is very persuasive. For me, the main failing was that Bobby just didn’t feel like a fully coherent character to me. The disparate parts of his history didn’t gel in my mind. Math whiz? Son of a major inventor? Incestuous? Race car driver? Deep sea diver? It was all just a bit much for me, even if you posit that the book isn’t strictly literal. Also, I think for all of the rumors of Cormac’s interest in math and science, I was surprised at how tacked on that aspect seemed at times. That highly technical discussion near the middle is the most obvious example, but the fact that Bobby didn’t practice physics himself during the events of the book made that whole aspect feel somewhat remote. And his reaction to his dad’s legacy was kinda undercooked. It reminds me of Suttree’s rejection of his birthright, but in that case feels much more believable than finding a fortune and spending it on race cars I would like to hear more about why you liked it though, it’s a fun book to think about, plenty to chew on (and for the record I liked all of the Alicia bits). Also it’s gonna drive me crazy how everyone irl will pronounce it “Ah-lee-sha” when the book makes clear it’s pronounced “ah-lish-uh” Jewmanji fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 03:33
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Jewmanji posted:Are you basing that on the fact that they both have visions of The Kid? It’s an interesting thought but I don’t know if that fact alone is very persuasive. That scene is when everything fell into place but it's there throughout. He's a manifestation of what kept the two from consummating their love: that innate fear/revulsion towards physical deformity, which founds the taboo around incest. So basically he's the product of their love. He literally exists because of it. And in that sense the Kid is their kid. Reread his scenes as an abandoned son traveling across dimensions to torment/connect with his parents. Still puzzled over the scene with the little wooden man. Who is Crandall? quote:For me, the main failing was that Bobby just didn’t feel like a fully coherent character to me. The disparate parts of his history didn’t gel in my mind. Math whiz? Son of a major inventor? Incestuous? Race car driver? Deep sea diver? It was all just a bit much for me, even if you posit that the book isn’t strictly literal. I don't know, I just enjoyed reading it. Western's incoherence felt relatable to me. The whole thing was incoherent in a "lots of ideas McCarthy had over the decades knit together as a sort of farewell to the world" and I'm just grateful it exists. I did know an Alicia who pronounced her name that way. Don't know what's up with that. I haven't read Suttree yet. I tried years ago and bounced off for whatever reason. That, Outer Dark, and No Country are the only McCarthy novels I have yet to read.
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Nov 9, 2022 04:21
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That’s an interesting take on it, thanks. I think I was investing too much in the thalidomide reference and thought maybe he was a manifestation of children born with deformities because of parental exposure to radiation. Though I guess that’s not incompatible with your take. I highly recommend you read Outer Dark which is sort of a template for Bobby and Alicia’s relationship, and the itinerant nature of Bobby and his fellowship with all of these characters in the bars and restaurants of NOLA is a explicit reference to Suttree. I bounced off Suttree 2 times over the last ten years and then made it through this year and found it to be astonishing.
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Nov 9, 2022 05:11
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Carly Gay Dead Son posted:The book’s great. What were people disappointed about? Yeah. The chapters with the kid were tedious, but tedious in an intentional dream logic sort of way. Plus I’m a sucker for crude puns and malapropisms. And am I crazy, or is it pretty much explicitly the case that The Kid is Bobby and Alicia’s child? That was my first guess too. I’m holding out judgement until I finish Stella Maris. My least favorite thing is I don’t really understand the purpose of each of the supporting characters in New Orleans with whom much of the dialog occurs. They don’t seem distinct enough to make sense. Ill wait though Also, I know the kid is supposed to be a thalidomide baby but I kept picturing him as: 
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Nov 9, 2022 05:18
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Carly Gay Dead Son posted:I don't know, I just enjoyed reading it. Western's incoherence felt relatable to me. The whole thing was incoherent in a "lots of ideas McCarthy had over the decades knit together as a sort of farewell to the world" and I'm just grateful it exists.
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Nov 9, 2022 14:31
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Boco_T posted:I really loved Cormac spends 5 pages letting you know how convinced he is about a JFK assassination conspiracy. Haha! Yes! The whole time I was just like what the hell Cormac. Then again it's 100% something a psychic PI would spend 5 pages talking about. I don't think enough people are pointing out just how wacky this book is. It felt like I was reading Pynchon at times. Anyone catch the part where Long John plays poker with William Burroughs? Jewmanji posted:That’s an interesting take on it, thanks. I think I was investing too much in the thalidomide reference and thought maybe he was a manifestation of children born with deformities because of parental exposure to radiation. Though I guess that’s not incompatible with your take. That too, absolutely. I also think it's worth pondering, is Alicia some kind of mutant?
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Nov 9, 2022 15:34
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Boco_T posted:Absolutely, this thread is for all Cormac McCarthy, and Blood Meridian gets the most discussion out of all of them a lot of the time. As it should. It is the best western ever written and easily one of the best books in English of the 20th century, up there with Salman Rushdie and DFW. It is a sophisticated and nuanced exploration of the dark side of human nature set within the extremes of liminality, in time and geography and space, and in that sense is shoulder to shoulder with Moby Dick, another American fiction colossus. As historical fiction it is dense and realistic and deeply accurate. I gush, but I love this book to death.
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Nov 14, 2022 05:07
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Finished this last night and I stumbled in here to see if maybe there was a discussion because it’s still sitting with me. Was wondering if anyone else had the same kind of general knee jerk take away and yep…Proust Malone posted:I get the feeling the author is looking deeply at his own mortality surrounded by physicists on a land haunted by the atom bomb. I enjoyed it well enough, and was initially put off by the Alicia chapters but appreciated them by the end. I thought Bobby’s background of math whiz/race car driver/diver contrasted in an interesting way with his general personality through the narrative, which was primarily to meander through the narrative and react when outside forces pushed him, in contrast to the kind of proactive nature you usually expect from a protagonist with those backgrounds The oil platform really seemed to highlight this, alone on an empty platform in a storm suspecting you’re not actually alone and your close friend recently died under unusual circumstances during a similar job but what does he do beyond just wander the halls and pick up a knife All in all he just seemed to me like somebody adrift with no sense of purpose trying to create an identity as a man of action but not really taking action. There’s also a lot about carrying so much guilt over his sister and father but I haven’t really fully digested that stuff so I’ll stop before I say something dumb Anyway it’s still sitting with me and I’m neither a great mind in literary criticism nor a particularly insightful poster so interesting to see what others think and hopefully there will be more to come
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Nov 19, 2022 00:14
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