Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 07, 2013 Sera rated it did not like it

Shelves: own, literary-fiction, hated-it, 1001-books

Horrific anti-manifest destiny story about a group of cold-hearted killers. The violence is so over the top in this book that it even extends to animals and children. Throw in some rape, ladies and gentlemen, and you have yourself a depiction of the wild west circa 1850.

I have a rule of thumb that I will finish a book in order to be able to give my opinion about it. This was one of the few times in my life that I wish that I did not have such a rule, because after reading this book, I literally ...more

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May 28, 2010 Jason rated it it was amazing

My esteemed offendee Natalie has been recommending this book to me for some time, and it turns out that a buddy of mine at work here in Beijing just happens to own a copy and brought it over with him from England. When he found out I would be going on vacation, and that my destination was the Taklamakan Desert by way of old-fashioned train, he told me I MUST read it.

So on the train to Xinjiang, China, I did read it. Finished it upon returning home to Beijing. The environment of reading it could ...more

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Dec 08, 2013 Sam rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, 1-contemp-literary, read-2013

After raving about how much I loved Philipp Meyer's recent book, The Son , and how it so effectively upended some of the myths associated with settling the West, I figured I was practically duty-bound to follow that up by going back to *the* gold standard in this enterprise of subverting the traditional Western novel: McCarthy's 1985 masterpiece, Blood Meridian. I'm glad I did, though it wasn't easy--the language is dense, the violence unflinching, the characters pretty much ciphers, the paci After raving about how much I loved Philipp Meyer's recent book, The Son , and how it so effectively upended some of the myths associated with settling the West, I figured I was practically duty-bound to follow that up by going back to *the* gold standard in this enterprise of subverting the traditional Western novel: McCarthy's 1985 masterpiece, Blood Meridian. I'm glad I did, though it wasn't easy--the language is dense, the violence unflinching, the characters pretty much ciphers, the pacing of the action brutally slow. This was no rollicking-good-time of a book that I could dip into and out of at will, or pay marginal attention to while on the train, without totally losing the rhythm and flow of the story. And many times even when I was giving it all the attention it demanded, it simply bored the hell out of me.

But then other times I was too busy being in awe of the way McCarthy bends the language to his will to be bored, like when he paints a majestic picture of nature:

"They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia...and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn."(197)

or like when he's showing us the disturbing scene of another cold-blooded massacre, another vicious scalping:

"...spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts...and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off the limbs, heads...And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered out of sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming." (57)

...more

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