Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthyMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
"When God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years..."
Never have I taken this long to finish a book... historically significant to me as it is the last one I bought from Book Depository before it closed.
Never have I felt this conflicted. There is a great deal of awe for what were undoubtedly some of the most beautiful sentences ever constructed in English, but also, an overwhelming sense of revulsion for all the senseless violence, the gory details of cruelties too evil to put down in a mere review.
There are those that say this book is one of the greatest ever written. To them I say, keep your canon and your PhD in literature.
This book neither ennobles nor entertains. The reason it took me this long to get through it was because I could only bear it in small doses.
I wouldn't want to be friends with anyone who finishes this in one sitting, without even a nightmare that visits them that night. Anyone who reads this undisturbed has "a flawed place in the fabric of your heart."
Reading Blood Meridan is immersing one's self in terror. Beautifully seductive, yes, but it leaves this reader wanting to purge one's brain of the images placed within. Would that there was a DELETE button for this nihilistic novel.
The worst part of it is, the events in it are true. This is historical fiction that really happened, based on Samuel Chamberlain's experiences as a teenager riding with the Glanton Gang during the Mexican-American War. But all of the horrors are told without a historian's sense of weaving meaning from tragedy.
I do not think I shall be picking up any Cormac McCarthy book ever, after this.
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