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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
Took me awhile to get into this one. Dense sections make it difficult, but ultimately it's rewarding. Great prose and the different vignettes are interesting (some more than others), not my favorite McCarthy, but still better than a lot of other books.
adventurous
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Best dramatic novel read in 2018, and the last I finished for the year. A perfect end. This will not be for everyone. It is raw, naked, has vulgar and racist language, and would be NC-17 if put to film (dear god, do not ruin this by putting it to film).
There were times when I felt I was reading Matthiessen doing [b:Far Tortuga|611084|Far Tortuga|Peter Matthiessen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1176300996s/611084.jpg|597559] or [b:Killing Mister Watson|248623|Killing Mister Watson|Peter Matthiessen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1357047026s/248623.jpg|2741227]. The voice is very similar. The "protagonist", if you can call him that, is a man of (it is hinted) above-average intelligence who comes from some unknown past slightly or greatly more prosperous than his present. It is set in the mid twentieth century New South, and is so well-placed in time that the mention in the book of a jet flying overhead must seemed as new an incongruous to me as it must have seemed to the characters.
McCarthy hints at the much larger world and much larger doings going on outside of the riverside shacks and city tenements, to the point that it seems alien. The incoming highway system is hinted at, as some strange creature sliding in. Girls come down from Chicago, bringing an alien world with them, one where women order food and drink for themselves, and then pay for themselves.
This novel was engrossing, and entirely live-in-able. But it will not be for everyone. That is not said in a snobbish way. If you appreciated the books I mention above in the review, you will like this one. If you want a classic arc with a resolution, don't pick it up. It is beautiful in the way death can be beautiful.
Check out my highlighted passages for samples of both the language/writing style as well as the plot. Should give you a good idea if it's a picker-upper.
There were times when I felt I was reading Matthiessen doing [b:Far Tortuga|611084|Far Tortuga|Peter Matthiessen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1176300996s/611084.jpg|597559] or [b:Killing Mister Watson|248623|Killing Mister Watson|Peter Matthiessen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1357047026s/248623.jpg|2741227]. The voice is very similar. The "protagonist", if you can call him that, is a man of (it is hinted) above-average intelligence who comes from some unknown past slightly or greatly more prosperous than his present. It is set in the mid twentieth century New South, and is so well-placed in time that the mention in the book of a jet flying overhead must seemed as new an incongruous to me as it must have seemed to the characters.
McCarthy hints at the much larger world and much larger doings going on outside of the riverside shacks and city tenements, to the point that it seems alien. The incoming highway system is hinted at, as some strange creature sliding in. Girls come down from Chicago, bringing an alien world with them, one where women order food and drink for themselves, and then pay for themselves.
This novel was engrossing, and entirely live-in-able. But it will not be for everyone. That is not said in a snobbish way. If you appreciated the books I mention above in the review, you will like this one. If you want a classic arc with a resolution, don't pick it up. It is beautiful in the way death can be beautiful.
Check out my highlighted passages for samples of both the language/writing style as well as the plot. Should give you a good idea if it's a picker-upper.
I have finally reached a point in my reading maturity where I understand deeply the appeal of Cormac McCarthy. It has been obvious to me for a long time that he is an aesthetic titan, a truly preternatural genius of imagery, word choice, setting, and tone, but the depth of his main themes (life and death, suffering, violence) are now clear to me in a way they were not before (and I guess my vocabulary is also just bigger now so that it’s easier to read through the stories without the distraction of constantly referencing a dictionary). In light of reading this novel I am retroactively changing my opinions on some of his other work, namely Blood Meridian—considering that I weighed nearly all its value as aesthetic, and none thematic (I also did not have as much fun reading it as I may have rightly allowed myself).
Suttree is the gloomy story of Cornelius Suttree, a man who renounced his well-off past to live the life of a drunken destitute, primarily making his meager living fishing along the Tennessee River running through Knoxville, Tennessee. I really like that description of this book being a “doomed Huckleberry Finn.”
This book was very fun to read. McCarthy is among the greatest poets of English prose writing, probably #1 among Americans. Seriously, try reading this stuff out loud, it’s beautiful: lyrical, full of potent imagery, alliteration, allusion. He is the veritable king of mot juste. I truly do not understand whence this man’s vocabulary has been built; it is astounding. It can be a little bit distracting at times to look up so many words, but that distraction should best be understood as fun, an opportunity to expand one’s own vocabulary, rather than an ongoing frustration. There is so much depth to this language we do not know.
This is not a full fledged review by my standards because I am a few days past finishing the book and didn’t keep good notes while reading, but oh well, all the more reason to reread it later.
I will end with some of my favorite quotes from the novel. They are split about 50/50 between prose pyrotechnics and thematic brilliance.
- Sot’s skull subsiding, sweet nothingness betide me. (p. 79)
- [About photographs of the dead] Blind moil in the earth’s nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races. (p. 129)
- How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A taste 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. (p. 153)
- But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse. (p. 372)
- Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking avoid of lamp light on the ceiling to post to him:
> Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?
> They’d listen to my death.
> No final word?
> Last words are only words.
> You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.
> I’d say I was not unhappy.
> You have nothing.
> It may be the last shall be first.
> Do you believe that?
> No. What do you believe?
> I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.
> Equally?
> It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.
> 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. (p. 414)
- In the toils of orgasm—she said, she said—she’d be whelmed in a warm green sea through which, dulled by the murk of it, pass a series of small suns like the footlights of a revolving stage, an electric carousel wheeling in a green ether. 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 read? 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 urionous, does he remember? Neural colors like the fleeting tones of dreams. The color of this life is water. (p. 415)
- Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
> I was drunk, cried Suttree. (p. 457)
- Seized in a vision of the archetypal patriarch himself unlocking with enormous keys the gates of Hades. A floodtide of screaming fiends and assassins and thieves and hirsute buggers pours forth into the universe, tipping it slightly on its galactic axes. The stars go rolling down the void like redhot marbles. These simmering sinners with their cloaks smoking carry the Logos itself from the tabernacle and bear it through the streets while the absolute prebarbaric mathematick of the western world howls them down and shrouds their ragged biblical forms in oblivion. (pp. 457-458)
- I know all souls are one and all souls
lonely. (p. 459)
- Some eastern sea that lay heavily in the dawn. There stood on its farther rim a spire of smoke attended and crowned by a plutonic light where the waters have broke open. Erupting hot gouts of lava and great upended slabs of earth and a rain of small stones that hissed for miles in the sea. As we watched there reared out of the smoking brine a city of old bone coughed up from the sea's floor, pale attic bone delicate as shell and half melting, a chalken shambles coralgrown that slewed into shape of temple, column, plinth and cornice, and across the whole a frieze of archer and warrior and marblebreasted maid all listing west and moving slowly their stone limbs. As these figures began to cool and take on life Suttree among the watchers said that this time there are witnesses, for life does not come slowly. It rises in one massive mutation and all is changed utterly and forever. We have witnessed this thing today which prefigures for all time the way in which historic orders proceed. (p. 459)
Suttree is the gloomy story of Cornelius Suttree, a man who renounced his well-off past to live the life of a drunken destitute, primarily making his meager living fishing along the Tennessee River running through Knoxville, Tennessee. I really like that description of this book being a “doomed Huckleberry Finn.”
This book was very fun to read. McCarthy is among the greatest poets of English prose writing, probably #1 among Americans. Seriously, try reading this stuff out loud, it’s beautiful: lyrical, full of potent imagery, alliteration, allusion. He is the veritable king of mot juste. I truly do not understand whence this man’s vocabulary has been built; it is astounding. It can be a little bit distracting at times to look up so many words, but that distraction should best be understood as fun, an opportunity to expand one’s own vocabulary, rather than an ongoing frustration. There is so much depth to this language we do not know.
This is not a full fledged review by my standards because I am a few days past finishing the book and didn’t keep good notes while reading, but oh well, all the more reason to reread it later.
I will end with some of my favorite quotes from the novel. They are split about 50/50 between prose pyrotechnics and thematic brilliance.
- Sot’s skull subsiding, sweet nothingness betide me. (p. 79)
- [About photographs of the dead] Blind moil in the earth’s nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races. (p. 129)
- How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A taste 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. (p. 153)
- But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse. (p. 372)
- Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking avoid of lamp light on the ceiling to post to him:
> Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?
> They’d listen to my death.
> No final word?
> Last words are only words.
> You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.
> I’d say I was not unhappy.
> You have nothing.
> It may be the last shall be first.
> Do you believe that?
> No. What do you believe?
> I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.
> Equally?
> It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.
> 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. (p. 414)
- In the toils of orgasm—she said, she said—she’d be whelmed in a warm green sea through which, dulled by the murk of it, pass a series of small suns like the footlights of a revolving stage, an electric carousel wheeling in a green ether. 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 read? 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 urionous, does he remember? Neural colors like the fleeting tones of dreams. The color of this life is water. (p. 415)
- Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
> I was drunk, cried Suttree. (p. 457)
- Seized in a vision of the archetypal patriarch himself unlocking with enormous keys the gates of Hades. A floodtide of screaming fiends and assassins and thieves and hirsute buggers pours forth into the universe, tipping it slightly on its galactic axes. The stars go rolling down the void like redhot marbles. These simmering sinners with their cloaks smoking carry the Logos itself from the tabernacle and bear it through the streets while the absolute prebarbaric mathematick of the western world howls them down and shrouds their ragged biblical forms in oblivion. (pp. 457-458)
- I know all souls are one and all souls
lonely. (p. 459)
- Some eastern sea that lay heavily in the dawn. There stood on its farther rim a spire of smoke attended and crowned by a plutonic light where the waters have broke open. Erupting hot gouts of lava and great upended slabs of earth and a rain of small stones that hissed for miles in the sea. As we watched there reared out of the smoking brine a city of old bone coughed up from the sea's floor, pale attic bone delicate as shell and half melting, a chalken shambles coralgrown that slewed into shape of temple, column, plinth and cornice, and across the whole a frieze of archer and warrior and marblebreasted maid all listing west and moving slowly their stone limbs. As these figures began to cool and take on life Suttree among the watchers said that this time there are witnesses, for life does not come slowly. It rises in one massive mutation and all is changed utterly and forever. We have witnessed this thing today which prefigures for all time the way in which historic orders proceed. (p. 459)
Many are quick to cite 'Blood Meridian' as McCarthy's magnum opus. While I do understand why this is, I feel that the real novel deserving of that title and achievement, is actually Suttree.
Never have I read a book that so beautifully describes the human condition and it's peculiarities, with near poetic prose and the best use of the English language I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Though bleak at times, it also manages to shine a fair amount of humour into it.
The titular protagonist and his foil, 'Harrogate' are some of the most memorable characters I've ever read in my life, with the latter's antics never failing to make me laugh, or at the very least, make me chuckle.
Overall this novel is a masterpiece, and my life is better for having read it.
Never have I read a book that so beautifully describes the human condition and it's peculiarities, with near poetic prose and the best use of the English language I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Though bleak at times, it also manages to shine a fair amount of humour into it.
The titular protagonist and his foil, 'Harrogate' are some of the most memorable characters I've ever read in my life, with the latter's antics never failing to make me laugh, or at the very least, make me chuckle.
Overall this novel is a masterpiece, and my life is better for having read it.
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Really really good, fantastic prose akin to moby dick, KILLER dialogue, very funny. Loved all the stories of his degenerate friends. Liked the disgusting squalor juxtaposed with the beautiful writing
Kormak Makarti piše o borcima.
Svet koji njegovi likovi (kao refleksija sveta) naseljavaju je mračan i brutalan i surov i, naizgled, beznadežan. U paru sa dosta teškom tematikom (tradicionalna priča, od a do b, ne postoji) koja dotiče nasilje, očaj, otudjenost i mnogo toga drugog, njegovi romani na papiru deluju vrlo depresivno, kao delo nekog ozbiljnog cinika odnosno mizantropa, zagovornika apokalipse razočaranog u ljudski rod. Medjutim, tu su likovi, tačnije ovde lik (naslovni) koji uprkos svojoj želji za samoćom, pa čak i gubitkom sopstvenog identiteta, uspeva da kroz trajanje romana konstantno isijava nekakvom dostojanstvenom čovečnošću, više instinktivnom nego voljnom, ali ništa manje važnom. Ti njegovi temelji, ma koliko krhki bili, uspevaju da opstaju.
Makartijevo 'ja' je ovde dosta snažno, pa se romanu može pripisati i ta neka delimična autobiografska priroda. Najsmešnija od svih njegovih knjiga koje sam pročitao, dirljiva i ponekad uvrnuta, napisana njegovim karakterističnim izrazito liričnom stilom, a opet na neki način hemingvejskim po svojoj ekonomičnosti, ovo je dostojan deo njegovog dela. A on je, i dalje, moj omiljeni pisac.
5
Svet koji njegovi likovi (kao refleksija sveta) naseljavaju je mračan i brutalan i surov i, naizgled, beznadežan. U paru sa dosta teškom tematikom (tradicionalna priča, od a do b, ne postoji) koja dotiče nasilje, očaj, otudjenost i mnogo toga drugog, njegovi romani na papiru deluju vrlo depresivno, kao delo nekog ozbiljnog cinika odnosno mizantropa, zagovornika apokalipse razočaranog u ljudski rod. Medjutim, tu su likovi, tačnije ovde lik (naslovni) koji uprkos svojoj želji za samoćom, pa čak i gubitkom sopstvenog identiteta, uspeva da kroz trajanje romana konstantno isijava nekakvom dostojanstvenom čovečnošću, više instinktivnom nego voljnom, ali ništa manje važnom. Ti njegovi temelji, ma koliko krhki bili, uspevaju da opstaju.
Makartijevo 'ja' je ovde dosta snažno, pa se romanu može pripisati i ta neka delimična autobiografska priroda. Najsmešnija od svih njegovih knjiga koje sam pročitao, dirljiva i ponekad uvrnuta, napisana njegovim karakterističnim izrazito liričnom stilom, a opet na neki način hemingvejskim po svojoj ekonomičnosti, ovo je dostojan deo njegovog dela. A on je, i dalje, moj omiljeni pisac.
5
This is part Mark Twain picaresque and part vulgar Bukowski romp; I loved it and I loved Suttree, even as he descends lower and lower into the booze and violence-sodden netherworld he inhabits. He has a good heart, and he has a kind of integrity.
Definitely the most unique McCarthy book i’ve read so far. Really enjoyed it a lot, took me forever to read because it’s so damn dense. I had to look up a word every 2 pages though similarly to blood meridian McCarthy just be making up words fr. Great characters.