I’m about halfway through the book and I just don’t get all the praise. So far I find the plot meandering and more akin to torture-porn than an actual narrative, every scene just seems to be there to show how miserable everyone is with no other point. The way the book is written I also found to be an annoyance, in parts due to the translation to portuguese which just doesn’t bother translating certain words making the whole thing all the more jarring; but even still, I found the text to be so oddly timed and verbose that makes it a tad laborious to read. Most characters as well don’t seem well defined and at times just blend into one another.
All that being said, why is this book so well regarded? And if you read it, did you like it?
by P3p514
14 Comments
In the [words](https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir-to-melville-and-faulkner/)of Harold Bloom:
>So appalling are the continuous massacres and mutilations of *Blood Meridian* that one could be reading a United Nations report on the horrors of Syria in 2019.
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>Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because *Blood Meridian* is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s. When I teach the book, many of my students resist it initially (as I did, and as some of my friends continue to do). Television saturates us with actual as well as imagined violence, and I turn away, either in shock or in disgust.
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>But I cannot turn away from *Blood Meridian*, now that I know how to read it, and why it has to be read. None of its carnage is gratuitous or redundant; it belonged to the Mexico-Texas borderlands in 1849 and 50, which is where and when most of the novel is set. I suppose one could call *Blood Meridian* a “historical novel,” since it chronicles the actual expedition of the Glanton gang, a murderous paramilitary force sent out by both Mexican and Texan authorities to murder and scalp as many Indians as possible. Yet it does not have the aura of historical fiction, since what it depicts seethes on, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else, in this third millennium. Judge Holden, the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honor in our years to come.
You aren’t going to like this but you’re reading it wrong
It’s the style. It’s so beautifully written and every single passage is so dense with meaning and poetry
Given that the prose in English is fantastic, it’s likely that the translation isn’t as good, just because translation is an art and it’s hard to compete with McCarthy.
As for the violence… it is about humans. It might not be your cup of tea, though.
I loved it.
I was raised super rural. I read it as largely a mediation on the cultural relationship America has with violence, as well as a reckoning with a lot of the western/religious mythology many rural people take for granted.
It’s definitely a love-it-or-hate-it kind of book because of the unusual approach to the prose.
This isn’t a book that thrives on plot or character arcs. The prose is dense and unyielding and that’s one of the core artist merits of the work. It’s more about atmosphere and theme. Certainly not a book for everyone, I don’t enjoy it myself either for reference. Also probably not one that always translates well if I had to guess.
It’s fuckin’ awesome, that’s why people regard it so well.
I’m still really bummed that the copy i bought is full of typos (no punctuation) but i figure it’s so rare to find a professional book with printing errors it might be a collectors item or something. Was a rough read though!
Have you read *Moby Dick?* I find *Blood Meridian* to be a kind of sequel to that book. Exploring the parallels there really gave me a deeper appreciation for the book.
ETA: I will say though that I find the book to be shockingly popular given how dense and violent it is. I can’t imagine the average reader wants to sit down and read something so decidedly un-fun. I love it but it is a challenging read to say the least.
I put it down half way through. With all due respect to Harold Bloom, I’d rather read Faulkner.
You’re reading the book in Portuguese? I can’t vouch for how it reads if so but I just finished reading the English version last week so I’ll try my hand at describing it.
I can see how some can see how the plot meanders and goes no where – near the middle of the book the Glanton gang are literally just going around from place to place leaving a trail of blood. I get a sense that CM didn’t intend for it to have a progressive plot so much as to just describe a coexistence of the gang with nature – a nature that places no judgement, has no morality, no consequences, no real meaning. I do want to thread a line of nihilism though as I don’t think he goes that far (it’d be boring if so) and I think that’s the role that the Judge plays while they’re on their trip. The Judge draws attention to many complex processes (biology, philosophy) during their journey, aligning everything towards one aim which is that life is.. war, a power struggle, the strong and willing dominating the week.
I disagree with your analysis of it being torture porn for, as gruesome as much of the plot is at times, CM *never* dwells on it. Baby’s heads are smashed against concrete, people’s brains are boiled over fire, heads are split in two by axes.. but it’s all matter of fact, as normal as the sun setting and a desert gust blowing. In that respect, I think he does a great job of capturing the *indifference* of life to the values we hold of good, evil, justice, morality – nature doesn’t care for those things and the Kid is maybe meant to be someone that straddles that line between the artificial values we hold on life and the reality that nature offers.
On top of that, CM does truly write the book with incredible lyricism and descriptiveness for nature and people. He paints beautiful images on nearly every page, Tolkien/Steinbeck-like (those are my two analogous authors anyway), that allows the read to really imagine everything with lucidity, almost to the point of ridiculousness given the archaic language he uses. This may be hit or miss for a lot of people – I was able to get through the book in one go, others stopped and came back to it – to each their own.
I think it might help (if you choose to continue reading it) to not view the plot as something that will progress akin to normal novels. Take each page as a moment in time to be savored and follow along with it, page for page. Allow the imagery to come to you and reflect on the actions of men against the backdrop of a barren, forsaken land like the southwest
*No spoilers if you are halfway through*
Pretty much because of the judge’s speeches/ his character, Cormac McCarthy’s style/the flavor he puts into it, and the fact that it is a very researched book and a lot of what happens in it is based on things that actually happened in that place and time. It’s also one of those genre books(western) that says something about the genre in a meta way. For instance how fucked up the things in westerns were/ American and Native American brutality that isn’t glorified and instead was horrific and disgusting. Also lots of smart/ famous people and authors (David foster Wallace) say it’s McCarthy’s best novel. not his most accessible (personally the easiest to read is No Country but it’s movie so I think most just watch it). It’s a “gritty, raw and unflinching tale”so it gets attention and defense from the scholar to the edgelord. It is said to have a lot of literary merit therefore people will always defend it and insist it must be read if you read any McCarthy.
I personally really loved reading it a lot even though at times I didn’t know where it was gonna go, but my love for it has more to do with the way things were described and the writing. A particular example is in a fight early in the book “they circled each other crabwise” paints such a vivid movie in my mind with so few words as I used to watch fiddler crabs fight in the mud as a kid and because it made me laugh. I knew I was gonna read the whole thing after that sentence. And obviously the introduction to the judge was hilarious and awesome. Although to me it was one of his harder novels to actually just read, but it felt worth it to push through while I was reading/ sometimes I would put it down for a day or two. If you want to try any of his 2000’s releases I recommend reading something else by him if you’re really not feeling the prose and coming back to it later if you want.
Do you normally read dark stuff like this or are you just finding it especially dark?
sometimes you need to look past the surface
*Blood Meridian* is obviously a particularly stomach churning novel but I think it operates so well *because* of the sheer amount of devastation it heaps relentlessly on its reader. It’s *meant* to wear you down and numb you until you come to the end of the novel, you’ve finished it, and suddenly you’re nauseous because you’re now you’re out of that world and in your own and the discrepancy between the two is a violence in and of itself.
As an aside, I read *Blood Meridian* for the first time, it was as a grad student and I’d become particularly desensitized to violence and death in literature. I was reading it and kept thinking to myself, almost bored,>! “yeah, another dead person, another dead person, mhm, yup, another dead person” and there was ONE sentence about the Kid, in passing, watching a mentally disabled man playing with a cat and I wept like a child because the gentleness of those few words were so jarring.!<