A truly intriguing and beautifully depicted but ultimately unsatisfying debut from McCarthy which arrived draped in keen, vibrant colours, with lush, fragrant descriptions of the gorgeous Tennessee landscape, earthy watercolour portraits of its taciturn characters, and the leisured pace of an Appalachian highway that tunnels through the overhanging, rainbow-spiked autumnal woods, emerging every now and then, sun-dappled and redolent of honey and cider, into the fresh breezes of open space—and ye More...

Blame it on Faulkner. You can't write a novel nowadays about the South—good country people, grotesque deviants, backwoods hollers, and wide, copper-colored rivers—without being labeled Faulkner-esque, your work derivative of Faulkner, your themes and language descended from a rich Faulknerian lineage. It's some wonder more southern writers aren't trying to flee from under daddy F's looming shadow, the evoked comparison being just as much of a complaint half the time as it is a compliment. Yet I More...

The Orchard Keeper: Cormac McCarthy's first novel of his Southern quartet



First Edition, Random House, New York, New York, 1965

Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own--Billie Holliday, God Bless the Child, 1941

You have to read this book. I rarely say it. I feel so strongly about it, I'll say it again. Read this book. Read it straight through. Then read it more More...

I recently summarized two Uncle Tupelo songs as condensed Cormac McCarthy novels. This novel is more like an expanded Silver Jews track ("Smith and Jones Forever," I'm looking in your direction).

There are a lot of descriptions of body odor in this book. Most everyone so far seems like the kind of old coot you encounter when you get to Fleet Farm a little too early on Saturday morning. Or maybe this is more like "American Graffiti" moved from Milwaukee to West Virginia. I'm just shy of 100 pages More...

As a lot of people have noticed, this partakes very heavily of the southern literary tradition. It IS a Faulknerian book, but you sort of have to cede those comparisons by default because, as his first published work, it isn't yet fully representative of the rich, dark style he really makes his own a few novels later. But even an OK Mccarthy novel is often descriptively gorgeous enough to make you not care too much. And you can definitely see flashes here of what he would go on to develop in Blo More...

There's no question McCarthy is a brilliant prose writer. There are times when I stop in reading to marvel at his stunning verbal combinations. However the subject matter of this book just didn't appeal to me and I found the density of description overwhelming to the plot and actual characters. I knew exactly what everything looked like, smelled like, moved like, sounded like, etc, but for a good chunk of it i wouldn't have been able to tell you what was actually going on and how it related to a More...

Wheee! I finally finished this book! Which means that I've only started. Now I have a ton of questions... obviously I'll need to do several re-reads. I'm sorry now that I waited so long to read it... I really, truly wasn't interested in reading it at all at first. It really is a fast read, and I might have had time to do an immediate second reading before feeling threatened by my (teetering) to-be-read pile--or at least a closer read (though I don't know that I was ready for a closer read the fi More...

Mr. McCarthy, sir, you are taking over my life. Even the music I'm listening to...I can't get enough of that slide guitar twang. I've fallen for those outlaw country bands (even the new guys like Tim Barry or Ben Nichols). And once again, sir, you did not let me down with your first novel the Orchard Keeper.

Sure, it was a little confusing with the shifting narration, denoted with italics, that sometimes takes place in the middle of a conversation. I sometimes wasn't quite sure whom nor when thes More...

Sorprendente romanzo di esordio, nel quale trovano già espressione le principali tematiche che costituiranno il nucleo portante delle opere più mature di questo magnifico scrittore.
È un libro aspro, percorso da una violenza strisciante, insidiosa e inarrestabile, una storia di equivoci e di segreti, di maturazione e di lealtà, di solitudine e di disincanto.
I protagonisti non sono eroi, ma individui che lottano per l’esistenza, un’esistenza che non regala nulla, ma piuttosto toglie, crudelmente More...

McCarthy's poetic style is in full bloom in his first novel and there is great beauty in that, but he strives so hard to make every single small and insignificant detail full of poetic and metaphorical import that it becomes overwhelming and exhausting for the reader. The main problem with his approach is that his novels are often short on plot and character and long on theme, and long passages are often like stream-of-consciousness style writing that leave an already disconnected--because we do More...

A difficult introduction to McCarthy to be sure, but this book shows the origins of the narrative construction he would later perfect, with gaps in time and space filled in as the sections move along. One must be on one's toes to keep characters and plotlines straight, and as the book approaches its end the long indulgent sections begin to break down into plot "tie-ups" but overall a beautiful picture of the Tennessee mountain life and of the morally corrupted.

The attention to the place is what More...

The Orchard Keeper was Cormac McCarthy’s first novel. I have enjoyed several of his books, and this happens to be the last one of his that I read. First of all this one isn’t so bloody. That said, there is still a bit of darkness to his tale like all of his other books. What I love are his prose and spot on descriptions of the most fantastic aspects of life. Sometimes I felt like I was right there in the forest, or under the roof listening to the rain, or watching water of the stream. I am a suc More...

I did more reading in a Webster's than I did in this actual book.

If this book had been written differently, or even by a different author, it would have been monumentally better.

Prepare yourself with a dictionary and a thesaurus hoping that either one of them will have a word that you'll be looking for.
You're going to need to machete your way through the dense foliage of grandiose verbosity being pawned off as poetic language.

Using big words that nobody ever uses or knows the meaning of, e.g, More...

“…tu vuoi diventare una specie di eroe. Be’, maledizione, lascia che te lo dica, gli eroi non esistono più.”
In questo romanzo d’esordio (uscito nel 1965) dello scrittore americano, autore in seguito di western al tempo stesso brutali e poetici come Meridiano di sangue, si assiste a un vero e proprio crepuscolo degli eroi, tra le montagne di un Tennessee degli anni ’40 miserabile e marginale, sospeso tra wilderness e depressione. Eroe al crepuscolo è il vecchio Arthur Ownby, superstite dell’epop More...

While reading this book I had to constantly remind myself that everyone has to start somewhere. I admire McCarthy in many ways, having read three of his publications and bits and pieces of most everything else. But if I were to give the reader a disclaimer it is: Everyone must start somewhere.

The novel centers around three independent characters all living in the same rural Tennessee hill community. It's filled with elegaic descriptions of nature, concrete actions of the characters and a delibe More...

This is a difficult book to rate because it's very inconsistent. The plot follows three different people - A boy, a man and and old feller - but these characters are shown from a distance. McCarthy shows their actions, but never lets the reader into their minds, so we never really know them. He relies more on the setting than on the plot and the characters, and to his credit there are some marvelous descriptions of nature and surroundings written in deliberately constructed, sparse prose (in thi More...

Incredibly well written, though meandering and tiresome. There are passages of great beauty here and melancholy and a variety of wonderful descriptions and it's definitely interesting to see McCarthy for the first time working out many of the themes he'd continue to explore more thoroughly in later works. Unfortunately, it all feels more like a showcase for technique than anything else.

Maybe in a year I'll give it another read and perhaps it'll have a greater impact on me.

I went through a period a while back where I read all of McCarthy's books in one giant rush. It was a sorrowful time for me, and the agonies that McCarthy has studded throughout all his works just seemed as givens; they were the types of heartbreak that I felt were to be expected in life and hardly registered.

Today I'm a far better state, happy and content, and these sufferings he portrays are almost too much to bear. The further I got into the story and the more I remembered about this particul More...

McCarthy's first novel and about as good a debut as one can write, other than Catch-22 (and Heller had a good deal of help in developing his characters and scenarios). I was impressed to see vintage Cormac detail in his debut and really became engrossed by some of the dialogue (especially by Uncle Ather). The passage on the intelligence of cats, the description of the turkey vulture being "flown" in the breeze on a string like a living kite, and the final paragraph (about how no one who was in t More...

The Orchard Keeper was Cormac McCarthy's first book, originally published back in 1965. It was interesting reading this one closely after reading his most recent book, The Road.

(I read a very early copy of the book, with the original blurbs on the jacket. Random House was very sure of the book's popularity and importance, enough so to suggest McCarthy was a writer who would inevitably be recognized as a master at some point. They clearly had no idea it would take about 30 years for him to start More...

I was a little worried going into this book because it is very common for a writer’s first novel to not be a good representation of that person’s entire body of work. This is often true with even the writers who go on to be canonized legends, as more often than not it takes them about two or three books to really get their literary sea legs.

While The Orchard Keeper isn’t quite at the level of Blood Meridian or Suttree, I’m still convinced that Cormac McCarthy sprang from the womb clutching a po More...

I think me and Cormac McCarthy just aren't meant to be. After never finishing "No Country for Old Men" when I was only 10 pages from the end because I just couldn't take it anymore, I didn't read another of his books until this year when I decided to give his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, a chance. While I would not argue with anyone that he is a brilliant writer, and there are certain lines of this book that would stand along as poetry (I wish the whole book had only been about the mountain More...

It's hard not to be awed by what Cormac McCarthy does. His writing is so rich and deeply descriptive, there's no choice but to admire it. And the fact that this is his first novel just makes me want to quit as a writer.

In this book, he paints vast landscapes of a forgotten deep South, so lush and evocative. The characters, though, function more as fixtures of the landscape, as if he's describing a postcard and the humans in the picture are just as important as the trees and the sky and dusty ro More...

I enjoyed Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, so decided to start with his first novel and work my way forward. Aarg. This was the only book I had easy access to on the plane to Indiana or I wouldn’t have gotten halfway through it.

I am a pretty astute reader, I think, but I couldn’t keep track of the characters and couldn’t find anyone or thing that I liked enough to keep going. Too bad.

McCarthy's first novel, in ways already established with regards to technique and content that will become staples of his work, but also lacking something. It reads like prototype McCarthy, wherein his sense of landscape as character, mythic simile, and preponderance of time and mortality are often present but not as effective as elsewhere. Notably missing from this novel are overt Christian metaphors, opting instead for pagan mythologies for descriptive purposes, and sheer backwoods superstitio More...

Mi dispiace ma non mi è proprio piaciuto. L'ho trovato sconclusionato, senza un filo logico e soprattutto non sono riuscita a capirne il significato. C'è un tizio che fa il contrabbandiere e uccide un uomo (per legittima difesa) e nasconde il corpo, un vecchio che trova il corpo e non lo denuncia se non dopo anni e solo perchè viene arrestato per vandalismo (e anche in questo caso non si capisce il motivo del suo gesto). Le autorità una volta scoperto il cadavere non si preoccupano minimamente d More...

McCarthy's fisrt novel, the third of his I have read. All the signs are there! Writing without borders, dimensional shifts, thick, dreamlike. The Old Testament prophetic tone, the lyrical imagery as if somehow nature is expressing itself, and somehow too the sense that in each filmic detail, each auditory beat, you've been there to know it. Of people who were not very much in a sort of boggy, muddy, place that wasn't too much - like rubbish, always there, always, but never lasting - noticed, rem More...

My first foray into McCarthy's work is also his first novel. This book, set in rural Tennessee between the World Wars, is quite an achievement. Notable first of all is McCarthy's style. Stunningly descriptive passages fill the entirety of the novel. Nature is as much a character as any of the humans, and McCarthy depicts the seasons and the weather and the non-human life with vivid, awe-inspiring ferocity. Many compare McCarthy to Faulkner, and I believe the comparison is apt. However, he goes b More...

This was McCarthy’s first novel and already the signs of his talent were present. But, be warned, it isn’t an easy novel to read and enjoy, despite its poetic beauty.

The novel is not so much about its three main characters as it is about time and place and the threat of change. Uncle Arthur Ownby, the old man; Marion Sylder, the bootlegger, and John Wesley Rattner, the boy, interact but—as McCarthy infers—their destiny is “myth, legend, dust” while the land, the place, endures.

Maybe I like the n More...

Il tempo non lineare

Kairos o chronos?

L'esordio di McCarthy sulla scena letteraria non ha la qualità epica che contraddistingue gli altri suoi lavori. La natura è sempre la protagonista incontrastata ma le caratterizzazioni dei personaggi non hanno la pienezza degli altri suoi romanzi. Il tempo della narrazione è un tempo che cambia continuamente ritmo, che segue il tempo soggettivo delle emozioni. È il kairos che domina la scena.
L'epica narrata in questo romanzo è quella del mondo dei contrabba More...