Books Thread | Recommendations, in Progress, Etc

[BlooVooDoo]

That was easier than I expected.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/cormac-mccarthy-secret-muse-exclusive

 

[Ddseddse]

Bout to start flinging hand grenades, not because it's a hill I want to die on, but because I'm bored and looking to stir the pot a bit...

I'm not convinced that McCarthy's prose is all that. I kinda feel like it's the American Idolization of prose. Just like the trills and runs in in an American Idol contestants song, McCarthy's prose is technically impressive in it's own right, but also overwrought to the point that the medium obscures and diminishes the message.

Hard to explain, but I feel like in the very best writing, the prose organically arises out of what is being depicted. Reading McCarthy I feel like the prose is layered on top of the scene rather than organically originating out of the scene.

 

[doctor_octopus]

I concur with the latter. This is one sentence from that paragraph:

The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth's heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the mountainside and bright and quick in the dry path of the storm channels and shaping out the sockets in the rock and hurrying from ledge to ledge down the slope shimmering and deft as eels.

YES. I still bring up "small trembling satellites" at every opportunity.

 

[doctor_octopus]

Bout to start flinging hand grenades, not because it's a hill I want to die on, but because I'm bored and looking to stir the pot a bit...

I'm not convinced that McCarthy's prose is all that. I kinda feel like it's the American Idolization of prose. Just like the trills and runs in in an American Idol contestants song, McCarthy's prose is technically impressive in it's own right, but also overwrought to the point that the medium obscures and diminishes the message.

Hard to explain, but I feel like in the very best writing, the prose organically arises out of what is being depicted. Reading McCarthy I feel like the prose is layered on top of the scene rather than organically originating out of the scene.

I think that's a totally fair critique, but I think sometimes the message is simply the prose itself. It's less pure storytelling, and more of a work of art in itself. It's definitely not for everyone, and it hits and misses. I know some people who think it's so overdone as to be a form of parody.

 

[Ddseddse]

But then again maybe I'm this guy...

(I know I'm that guy when it comes to American Idol, that's for damned sure)

 

[Ddseddse]

I think that's a totally fair critique, but I think sometimes the message is simply the prose itself. It's less pure storytelling, and more of a work of art in itself. It's definitely not for everyone, and it hits and misses. I know some people who think it's so overdone as to be a form of parody.

No, you're doing it all wrong! You weren't suppose to concede the point as potentially reasonable dammit!

 

[breepf]

I think that's a totally fair critique, but I think sometimes the message is simply the prose itself. It's less pure storytelling, and more of a work of art in itself. It's definitely not for everyone, and it hits and misses. I know some people who think it's so overdone as to be a form of parody.

This.

I usually think about McCarthy’s novels as attempts to surmount the following challenge: can he write so beautifully as to overcome the depravity and suffering of the world he is depicting?

To that end, my example at hand would be the simile in The Road that compares a lit match to a molten rose. And what it illuminates is a tractor trailer full of dead bodies.

 

[hedge]

I know some people who think it's so overdone as to be a form of parody.

This "interview" with CM ran in the Paris Review some years ago...

INTERVIEWER

What time of day do you write?

MCCARTHY

I rise at six and work through the morning, every morning, seven days a week. I find the sun has a forlorn truth before noon. The words come unbidden. By early afternoon I have to quit.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find that the intensity of the material makes it difficult to continue beyond a certain point?

MCCARTHY

No, it’s not that. I entertain most nights. In the afternoon you wear the mud mask of your being. And then the guests arrive and you are a new thing. It is the unspoken promise of nightfall. It takes time. Time that hunts you, time that is calamity.

INTERVIEWER

These are dinner parties.

MCCARTHY

Barbecues, mainly. And this is part of it. Calling the dogs in, all limbs and sinew, the vermicular homebound patterns they weave in the scorch of the grass. The glint of the grill in the sun’s fire ellipse, its entirety as it bends toward hyphenate unyielding horizon. I like to soak the mesquite chips for at least half an hour. Then there’s the marinade for the brisket, or the dry rub, the laying on of hands. A replication of primeval violence. In your fingertips the harm of generations, the wish to make right, the failure to cleanse and absturge. Raw matter. Chile ancho, dried chipotles, paprika and salt, pulverized plant and rock, the sad spice and crumble of the earth’s red crust. I put the beef in a plastic bag for two hours before my guests come.

INTERVIEWER

Your guests—these are other writers?

MCCARTHY

The meat is all talk. It murmurs and sibilates. We stand and watch the conflagration of charcoal. The flame maze, the char, the sauce and slaw. In the glowing embers of the mesquite, the old dead wood, you see the incipient sting of godlessness. The smokehouse and the smoke and the burn in your eyes with which to fever it.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say these gatherings have a profound effect on your writing?

MCCARTHY

They are my writing.

INTERVIEWER

What advice would you give, then, to aspiring writers, especially those—and there are many, by now—who don’t wear your influence lightly?

MCCARTHY

Towelettes. Moist towelettes.

 

[Ddseddse]

This.

I usually think about McCarthy’s novels as attempts to surmount the following challenge: can he write so beautifully as to overcome the depravity and suffering of the world he is depicting?

To that end, my example at hand would be the simile in The Road that compares a lit match to a molten rose. And what it illuminates is a tractor trailer full of dead bodies.

Maybe this is a generational thing. I think I'm old enough that I can see the world as it is, but not wallow in the the rotteness but instead seek the sublime in the imperfect. I'm a Steinbeck guy as far as prose goes. Here the prose is every bit as ornate as McCarthy's, but it's also an organic linguistic expression of the precise thing depicted, and not a kind fun house mirror depiction that I get from McCarthy (and, honestly, I think this likely just comes down to a stylistic preference vs. better/worse):

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.

 

[breepf]

Maybe this is a generational thing. I think I'm old enough that I can see the world as it is, but not wallow in the the rotteness but instead seek the sublime in the imperfect. I'm a Steinbeck guy as far as prose goes. Here the prose is every bit as ornate as McCarthy's, but it's also an organic linguistic expression of the precise thing depicted, and not a kind fun house mirror depiction that I get from McCarthy (and, honestly, I think this likely just comes down to a stylistic preference vs. better/worse):

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.

Well, what I wrote was my best attempt to summarize the challenge that, I think, McCarthy has assigned to himself. To read a McCarthy novel is then, by my reckoning, to assent that this is generic contract to which I've agreed as a reader: he's going to depict a world that is, in large part, complete shit, but in such terms as to suggest that storytelling and art redeem it all.

Admittedly, I haven't read Steinbeck in years, but my guess is that his "organic" prose is unobtrusive (by your reckoning) and a vehicle for storytelling because his implicit contract with the reader derives from the precepts of social realism. The job, in short, is to (lyrically) describe a world out there and not, like McCarthy, to draw attention to the gulf separating the aesthetic from the real.

 

[nycfan]

I recall you finished it up as you were recovering from an illness, maybe Covid. It struck me that that was the perfect mood to be in whilst reading BM, a little gloomy, beaten down and faint of heart. All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly, as Kent said at the end of King Lear. One of the first few times I read it I was in the throes of my own self-imposed malady. I think that's when I really fell in love with the book...

Yep a COVID read indeed! Great recall! And my mood was definitely on point.

 

[grubar]

If this is a thread about book recommendations .... I recently finished Geraldine Brooks' HORSE. Brooks is one of my favorite novelists. And HORSE was recently included among the books (temporarily) banned by the MAGA morons at the Dept of Defense to be excluded by the Naval Academy library. This was for some silliness about supposed DEI content.
It is a good book.

If this is now really a thread about McCarthy ... I personally like his prose.

 

[nycfan]

If this is a thread about book recommendations .... I recently finished Geraldine Brooks' HORSE. Brooks is one of my favorite novelists. And HORSE was recently including among the books (temporarily) banned by the MAGA morons at the Dept of Defense to be excluded by the Naval Academy library. This was for some silliness about supposed DEI content.
It is a good book.

If this is now really a thread about McCarthy ... I personally like his prose.

It’s for all books but if it works out the discussions will ebb and flow



Put it in my queue at Audible so I won’t forget — thanks

 

[nycfan]

Anyone read Playground by Richard Powers? I’ve started it twice and so far cannot get into it. Starting to feel like that copy of Infinite Jest that I swear ONE DAY I will get hooked enough to keep going.