[nivekastoreth]

First things first, I think it’s important to recognize that this book may not be for everyone.

I was recommended and read Blood Meridian a while ago without having any prior knowledge of it, and I now rank it as one of the best book I’ve read that I’ll almost never recommend to anyone blindly.

If you decide to read it, and I actually hope you do, please be aware that it is —- as the article describes —- heartlessly and brutally violent.

That being said, I think the author justifies their use of it, as does the linked article. In my memory it stands more as a work of poetry than a novel, in as much as it provoked emotions more than tell a specific “story”.

[AlotOfReading]

Blood Meridian is absolutely not for everyone, but it's one of the best narrative books on the period that I've ever come across. I periodically recommend it on Askhistorians because it communicates the sheer chaos of the period that (many) people on the ground experienced far better than any academic work I can cite.

[ethbr0]

It's an interesting point that historical chaos can never be truly communicated or appreciated, except through creative art.

The very fact that it's history, and we're looking back with knowledge of how things turned out and a fuller picture of the different parties and their intentions, leaves elusive that contemporaneous confusion that often describes "why" for participants much better.

[darkerside]

It's rare that I wish I had multiple upvotes to give, but this is one of those times. I'm just commenting to raise the visibility of a comment that reads so simply that I feel it could be easily overlooked, and yet says something so profound.

[ethbr0]

We've all just lived through such a moment in ~March 2020, so it probably rings truer than it would otherwise.

[darkerside]

A colleague once grew vociferously angry when I disagreed with his claim that we were lucky to be alive now, and not at say the beginning of the 20th century, living through pandemics and multiple world wars. You stated my point more eloquently than I was able to at the time.

[salty_biscuits]

I love the book, but it is like the apogee of McCarthy idiosyncrasy. Obsessive about guns and death and has a complete absence of women. But it is beautiful for what it is.

[cheese_van]

>it communicates the sheer chaos of the period

For me, it's the sheer chaos of being alive. There's no sympathy in McCarthy's universe, no room for sentimentality. It's bleak as hell. If there's loving, human contact, it's fleeting, and erodes, usually quickly, like the unforgiving landscape of all his books. There's slight redemptive quality just enduring life, enduring existence if you have the strength. He's one of the best American existentialists. "I'm still alive", is both banal and heroic in McCarthy's world.

[cossatot]

I am one of those who had to put it down; after losing interest in TV and movies for a decade and becoming resensitized to violence (finally growing up and developing some empathy during adulthood also contributed), I just couldn't take it. Nor can I typically take extremely violent movies unless I watched them a lot in high school.

I'm quite interested in the history of the era and might give it another go; I think I've got it on a bookshelf somewhere.

[gj667cc]

I mentioned this in a reply above, but I'd recommend The Crossing for a similar level of poetic descriptive beauty with a lesser (but still significant) degree of violence.

[mythrwy]

Yep it's a great book and McCarthy is a fantastic author but it is a bit disturbing.

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

[jvanderbot]

Absolutely. It's poetic and bleak and colorful and sometimes just a bit nonsensical, but always vivid.

For me, it's like a literary version of all those renaissance pictures of the events of the book of Revelation or paintings of the apocalypse. The characters and events sometimes just feel like allegories or gods somehow.

[gj667cc]

I have similar feelings, when I recommend it I include a big disclaimer about the violence. Some of those scenes lingered in my mind for months afterwards, and I don't think I'll ever fully lose the impact of the novel's ending.

I also really enjoy his novel The Crossing, and feel that it has similarly beautiful, poetic descriptions while being a much more introspective and character-focused novel. Still plenty of violence, but nothing close to the brutality of Blood Meridian.

[guidoism]

It was on sale on Audible and I got it and listened to it knowing nothing about it other than it looked interesting.

Wow! What a great book!

I had to take breaks because of the violence and it took several weeks to finish because I wasn’t always in the mood. But I’m definitely going to read it again.

[abathur]

I'm not sure this is exactly what you mean, but McCarthy's descriptive language in particular is very poetic.

I had a writing workshop with Pam Houston back in 2009. She is a very incisive reader, so I was a little surprised when she reacted to Blood Meridian coming up in discussion with something to the effect of how bleak and devoid of beauty it was (I'm synthesizing a little from ~feeling; my memory isn't this good). Part of our ongoing assignment each week was to share a passage we liked, so I brought it the next week and read this one (it is about 2 pages into chapter 11--but there's a lot of this throughout):

> Their way led now through dwarf oak and ilex and over a stony ground where black trees stood footed in the seams on the slopes. They rode through sunlight and high grass and in the late afternoon they came out upon an escarpment that seemed to rim the known world. Below them in the paling light smoldered the plains of San Agustin stretching away to the northeast, the earth floating off in a long curve silent under looms of smoke from the underground coal deposits burning there a thousand years. The horses picked their way along the rim with care and the riders cast varied glances out upon that ancient and naked land.

> In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

> They rode down from this country through a deep gorge, clattering over the stones, rifts of cool blue shade. In the dry sand of the arroyo floor old bones and broken shapes of painted pottery and graven on the rocks above them pictographs of horse and cougar and turtle and the mounted Spaniards helmeted and bucklered and contemptuous of stone and silence and time itself. Lodged in faults and crevices a hundred feet above them were nests of straw and jetsam from old high waters and the riders could hear the mutter of thunder in some nameless distance and they kept watch on the narrow shape of sky overhead for any darkness of impending rain, threading the canyon's close pressed flanks, the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and smooth as arcane eggs.

> That night they camped in the ruins of an older culture deep in the stone mountains, a small valley with a clear run of water and good grass. Dwellings of mud and stone were walled up beneath an overhanging cliff and the valley was traced with the work of old acequias. The loose sand in the valley floor was strewn everywhere with pieces of pottery and blackened bits of wood and it was crossed and recrossed with the tracks of deer and other animals.

She listened with something like awe in her eyes. I wasn't smart enough to pry, then, but I interpreted it as a bit of delight at re-discovering the care McCarthy is paying every little detail here even though he must know, on some level, that we'll all be blinded by baby-trees.

[gj667cc]

I read it for the first time a few years ago, and due to purely coincidental timing I finished it over the course of a weeklong trip to Big Bend National Park in West Texas. McCarthy lived not far away in El Paso when he wrote it, and the scenery in Big Bend is the embodiment of the way he describes the desert in the book. Haunting and inimical, yet simultaneously beautiful and magical. Being in that setting and hiking and backpacking through the heat really underscored to me how such a stark environment could have driven humans crossing it to unspeakable violence.

I don't specifically remember any of the passages you quoted, which I think means that I'm due for a reread. A few descriptive scenes stick out in my memory, particularly the burning tree and the cattle graveyard.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> She listened with something like awe in her eyes.

The issue is that you'll read a few pages like that then a paragraph using the same language to describe a tree hung with dead babies. The effect is of course quite unlike much else.