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Aug 05, 2010

Eddie rated it:

Life as infinitely detailed turbid flow. Life’s flow so drenched with death there’s hardly need of another name for it; death as life’s incorporated twin. It’s all a river and it flows. Suttree is saturated with this outlook, this philosophy, though it remains unspoken, instead being simply shown, in a style itself all detail and turbid flow. In fact, the style itself is so integral to the book’s texture and meaning, and the structure of it all so structureless (being modeled on riverflow as it More...

40 comments like (30 people liked it)

Apr 06, 2008

Lane rated it:

'Suttree' goes directly into my own, personal daydream of the idealized 20th century canon. The heavily stylized prose hearkens back to the works of Joyce, Steinbeck, Algren, Faulkner, and Celine. Indeed, I have yet to encounter another book that so perfectly synthesizes these five unique voices of 20th century literature

'Suttree', at heart, is a sort of urban pastoral, replete with the myriad voices of a depressed, post-war Knoxville. Cornelius Suttree's wanderings echo precisely th More...

6 comments like (15 people liked it)

Jun 17, 2011

Jeremy added it

This is quite the slow burn. Most of Mccarthy's other works are very plot-driven, and you see that really reinforced in his western novels where you have this incredibly hypnotic language coalescing with (often horrific) events to create this sort of magisterial whirlwind of doom which just pulls you in with it's richness. That sort of building up takes a back burner here in favor of something which just sort of flows out in all directions, trying to encompass totally the world of the downtrodde More...

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 09, 2010

Brent rated it:

It almost seems insulting to call this a work of art, because that is so cliche and nothing about this book is cliche. But it IS a work of art. McCarthy is a genius, and it's a shame that he is not more highly regarded than he is. Not an easy book to read. I am a fast reader, but this one took me almost a month. Very dense at times, but take your time and appreciate the pictures McCarthy paints with his words. Just incredible. Suttree is a unique character and extremely likeable, in my opinion. More...

18 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

chase rated it:

"One among the younger was sent for a chicken from his mother's yard and they plucked it and roasted it on a wire and passed about a warm RC Cola and told lies."

"Her hot spiced tongue flat in his mouth and her hands all over him like the very witch of fuck."

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Mar 02, 2010

Abailart rated it:

A goodreader's recommendation has come at the right moment.

Arrived a bit late from amazon, and I have only just finished James Kelman. But I have read the first sentence, and here goes....

It is marvellous. Somewhat as McCarthy, I'll refract and draw a few straight lines but first one way of seeing it whole. It's ethical, of course, and not moral, and the distinction between the two is immense in this book. An oddyssey of one man who is all souls in an underworld (literall More...

7 comments like (14 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2009

John rated it:

I decided to read this book because I saw a comment by Roger Ebert about the language McCarthy uses and it's brilliance. It's his masterpiece.

Well I can definitely say the Ebert was right about the language. Unless you're a lit major, a crossword junkie, or scrabble master be sure to have your dictionary at hand. Be ready to check on average two words per page. At 470 pages that's a lot of checking! After awhile I just gave up on accuracy and let the mood take me along.

I More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 19, 2008

Adam rated it:

Suttree is an unusual book by McCarthy, for it lacks the genre conventions he sometimes employs and subverts. Here there is no plot, and it is focused on the picaresque adventures of the eponymous hero and his gang of misfits and compatriots. Comic misadventures and schemes a lá Twain occur, passages of beat gutter poetry, stark imagery and characters out of medieval allegory or the Old Testament (Witches, fools, and madmen); makes for a strange but beautifully written book. The prose creates it More...

0 comments like (12 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Andrew rated it:

It was with this book that I really fell in love with McCarthy. Not so much a story as a massive, impressionistic account, that is rendered in the most beautiful English you could imagine, of one person's self-consuming heart. Funny, heartbreaking, and in the end, strangely triumphant.
If for no other reason, read it to meet the most endearing character who fucks watermelons this side of Gallagher Two.

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 04, 2010

Djrmel rated it:

There is a line near the end of this book that will stick with me the rest of my life. It not only describes the entire journey of this masterpiece, but it's a bit a sound bit of advice on how to get through life.

"He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him."

Such is the story of Cornelius "Buddy" Suttree More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 28, 2009

Nick rated it:

Thank you, Mr. McCarthy. You've out done yourself once again. You've constructed a book about a social outcast that precedes and has much more resonance than what the best of Bret Easton Ellis, Palahniuk (and other like contemporary authors) can offer. Your urban squalor transcends time. Suttree, our hero, is the hero of the everyman and any given time. Forsaking a life of privilage, our hero continually finds himself on the receiving end of heartbreak, of terrible luck. He is surrounded t More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 24, 2008

Powells.com rated it:

I read Suttree twenty years ago and was floored by the writing and the story. It is a poignant tale of a man choosing to live his life as he wants, turning his back on his family and their considerable wealth. Jerome Charyn wrote a review of the book in the New York Times, Feb. 18, 1979. I figured I couldn't do any better than he did: "Suttree himself is a lost creature who can find no real hook into this world. He can touch another human being for a moment, drink beer with a friend, fish, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 30, 2008

Capitu rated it:

Well, I just finished reading Suttree and I feel exhausted. Maybe I should not use the word “finished” at all, as I feel that I should go back to it once again, slower this time. Actually I have to confess that I have hushed through the last third of this book, because the universe Cormac McCarthy creates has a suffocating atmosphere. The experience that comes to my mind is the memory of trying to learn to deep-sea dive and finding my otherwise mild claustrophobia flaring up underwater, until More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 05, 2008

Judy rated it:

You can choose your friends...

The college educated and handsome Suttree has issues and torments of his own but is generally a kind hearted ascetic who, largely turning his back on his well-to-do family, acts as straight man to assorted looney eccentrics in Knoxville, Tennessee in the 1950s.

McCarthy wields sentences like visual tools (or projectors) as if pounding words, like hot metal, into exotic scrollwork or adding fine brushstrokes to an elaborate oil painting. There More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 26, 2008

Josh rated it:

Wow, what an intense book. Kind of a "ulysses" by way of Faulkner. This one dwarfed my intelligence a little bit, as I found it to be a not easy read. That's not to say that I didn't admire it or enjoy it. It's like a really super thick chocolate milkshake; really really tough to suck down, but so worth the effort.

This one I think falls in the category of being able to admire it rather than enjoy it. Cormac McCarthy is such a master of the English language, and all of More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jun 07, 2008

Janette rated it:

Suttree was the best book I've read in a long time. McCarthy has the most amazing gift for bringing subject matter to life -- in this case, it was the squalor and dark and dank and nastiness and struggle of the setting of this book, in the 50's in Knoxville, Tennessee, on the wrong side of town.
There were parts that were so hilarious that I could still laugh thinking about them (don't want to give it away).
The format of this book is so moch more rich than the bare-bones (but also More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Nov 03, 2011

trav added it

I hope this doesn't get me kicked out of the Deep South group...

but this was the second time I picked up this book and the second time I put it down having made it no more than 100 pages into it.

I have always wanted to read this book and the "Deep South Review Challenge" gave me a renewed incentive. And after reading LouisBranning's eloquent review I REALLY wanted to read it.

But I just couldn't dig my heels in.

The long descriptives are well written, no doubt. Some are even poetic enou More...

0 comments like

Feb 07, 2012

Robert rated it:

I read this book over a few days while on vacation last year. It blew my mind, in more ways than one. The writing is classic McCarthy, but to me it's misplaced in the world it's describing. While rich, melodic prose fits in Blood Meridan, it does not work for me here in this 1950s setting in Knoxville. In fact, it feels to me like it's counter-productive. I found myself reading the book and admiring the style over the substance. And that's not a place I like to be as a reader.

Don't ge More...

0 comments like

Nov 06, 2011

Erica rated it:

Never before thought that I'd read McCarthy, much less a story about the lost, ex-convict, homeless men (and, like, three women named) of Knoxville, TN. Divya gave it to me for my flight back from Peru and I was fascinated. And moved. I laughed, I cried. Suttree, the title character, is the sort of guy who drives me crazy in real life (he's white, born into privilege, and is too damned easy and well-liked). His suffering moves the novel, not a plot as such, and touches of humor make it readable. More...

2 comments like

Aug 13, 2011

Joe rated it:

Some admire this as a masterpiece, but to the general reader I offer a caution: The grand verbal descriptives McCarthy is known for can sometimes reach an intensity that is all but opaque to the casual reader, and that is certainly the case here. For most readers with an eye toward trying out Cormak McCarthy I would recommend either The Road or No Country for Old Men, where the language remains within arm's reach of mainstream fiction novels. This one is more for those of a literary bent.
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Jul 28, 2011

Rob added it

Tremendous book, said to be Cormac's magnum opus, tracking the life of Suttree, an outcast scion of a wealthy Tennessee family, living his life on a dilapidated houseboat along the Tennessee River, subsisting on catching catfish and sneaking free Thanksgiving meals from a Walgreens. Said to be in many ways autobiographical, and if so, lends deep insight into McCarthy's life, outlook, and formative experiences. Overlaid the profound poverty and abject hedonism of the ill-educated and downtrodden- More...

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Jun 16, 2011

Steve rated it:

"Suttree" is a difficult but rewarding odyssey from a truly great author. We find the title character living on a houseboat in the Tennessee River at Knoxville in 1951. He has fallen from his family's grace and periodically falls into a bottle. His community is an assortment of lowlifes who exist at the far margins of Knoxville society, but he manages (at least when sober) to bring nobility to those interactions.

Like everything I've read by McCarthy, this has otherwordly, rel More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 13, 2011

Bill added it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Jul 12, 2010

Melina rated it:

I admit, it was hard to read. It's not structured like you are accustomed to read. Sometimes it's hard to decipher what is dialogue, what's the main character's thoughts, what's someone else's thoughts, what's just vivid flashes of possibly pertinent, possibly entirely irrelevant details. Long about the third chapter I fell into a groove and got invested in not the characters so much as just the grit and soot of the entire work.

As a synesthete, there were lots of long, wholly-articu More...

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Mar 12, 2010

Matthew rated it:

This book overstayed its welcome. Sad, because I loved it so much early on. A young man in a houseboat on the Tennessee river. It is stuffed with bum lore, wild drinking tales, river legends, poor characters with every wild trait possible. It's like a map of the scuzzy bars and lots and bridges of Knoxville in the fifties. Very funny. Suprisingly funny.

The book is obviously personal for McCarthy, most likely biographical, and he indulges. He loves his goofy metaphors:

More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 14, 2009

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE rated it:

Ok, I'm adding my voice to the chorus of praise for McCarthy. He IS a great writer &, given that this bk was copywritten in 1979, it's astounding that I've never read anything by him until now. In fact, I'd never heard of him, as far as I can remember, until I joined GoodReads & kept running across mention of his "The Road".

I admit, at 1st I had a very vague notion of him as yet-another 'Suthern depravity, suh' novelist - someone who'd treat me to tales of inbreds commi More...

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Aug 21, 2009

Dane added it

This past week, I finished my three summers-long journey through the McCarthy oeuvre with his plays/screenplays and this hulking beast. After trudging, compelled as though bound and roughly led with a rope, through Bolaño's mouth-gapingly tremendous 2666, I worried about how McCarthy would look through my newly-racked senses. In a few tentative words, as I'm still in the post-read process of resorting my atoms, I guess the loudest notions I'm left with are:

A) I love McCarthy in th

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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 25, 2010

Phil rated it:

After reading All the Pretty Horses I picked up the second volume of the trilogy but felt immediately weighed down by the "voice" of All the Pretty Horses. An editor I know suggested that the second of a trilogy is always the hardest to write, and once a writer find his voice and an audience that clamors more for it, he is reluctant to make any changes.

Suttree was originally published in 1979, relatively early in McCarthy's career. But it is hardly the work of a "newco More...

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Jun 28, 2011

Luc rated it:

there are moments of sheer, unexpected beauty distributed generously throughout Suttree, in their intensity comparable probably only to the experience of discovering synaesthesia. Given the amount of bespoke linguistic gems to be found here, I couldn't help but think of Heinrich von Kleist's remark on Caspar David Friedrich's 'Monk by the sea'

He said that "when viewing it, it is as if one's eyelids had been cut away", which also describes the overall impression More...

1 comment like

Nov 27, 2008

Ryan rated it:

I decided to continue my McCarthy binge with Suttree. This is a much denser and slower read than The Road. McCarthy has populated it with as many beguiling and vivid expressions as he has characters, and I wanted to take my time with them all. Usually, I'm quite an impatient reader, always eager to read the next book on my list, but I wanted to savour McCarthy's inventiveness. I wanted to remain in the world of the Tennessee River, the detritus and lean-tos, catfish and outcasts. Admittedl More...

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