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PRODUCT
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International)
Product Description:
Price:
$12.99
Detailed description:
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
Look for Cormac McCarthy’s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
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Product group:
Categories: Best Books of 2024 So Far
Product name:
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International)
Price:
$12.99
Mykhaylo Shamritsky –
After playing the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, I came across the book Blood Meridian in various subreddits as it has a few references in the game. I was intrigued so I bought the book without a second thought. But be warned. The story is vivid in it’s description of brutality and bloodshed. So, unless you can’t stomach a little bit of blood and gore, I’m afraid this won’t be your cup of tea. Also, the author Cormac McCarthy is known for his polysyndetic usage of “and”, and he also doesn’t use quotations in dialogues. So, while the prose is still beautiful to read it may be difficult for some.
Concerning the book, the Picador Collection paperback is probably the most affordable version available for the Indian subcontinent and on Amazon. The book was delivered to me in perfect condition without so much as a dent.
Jude Evans –
Keine Leichte Koste, dafür aber, welche die, sich lohnt.
Ich habe das Buch auf dem Kindle gelesen, was mir bei vielen englischen Vokabeln geholfen hatte, wer kein Muttersprachler mit ausgezeichneten Wortschatz ist, würde meiner Meinung nach auch davon profitieren, Wörter direkt nachschlagen zu können.
Schwere Themen und keine Erzähler der einen an die Hand nimmt, können für manche abschreckend sein, was aber auf anderer Seite zu einem sehr bewussten Leseerlebnis führt, welches sich den Leser auch nach dem Lesen des Buches mit der Handlung auseinandersetzen lässt.
Ashutosh S. Jogalekar –
The central character in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” says at one point, “Whatever exists in creation without my knowledge exists without my consent”. The book that details his journey surely seems like it could not have existed without his knowledge and consent.
There are a few universals that fill a McCarthy novel: the crudity and Neo-Biblical, fire-and-brimstone bleakness of human sagas with no respite in sight, the almost complete absence of women, the haunting, bone-chilling, lyrical physical descriptions of nature and devastated landscapes, the metaphors literally dripping from every sentence, and – ubiquitously so – the brutal violence and desperation. But “Blood Meridian” stretches each one of these plot devices to the breaking point. Critics have universally praised it as one of the best American novels of the past 25 years and heavyweights like Harold Bloom have said it’s the most significant encapsulation of all of human frailty and triumph since ‘Moby Dick’. Yet it remains one of the most complex, challenging and exhausting works of fiction I have ever read, and this feeling seems to be widespread.
It’s certainly the most extraordinarily violent. The violence here is mind-numbing, routine-as-rain and runs on every page like fresh blood pulsing through a healthy artery. For several days when I was reading and re-reading the book, the story was lodged like a splinter in my brain, not letting go even when I was away from it; as one reviewer of the volume put it, there is no safe space (not in the contemporary sense of the term) from which you can watch what unfolds. But it was the kind of splinter whose pain and beauty you want to feel before you finally dislodge it in a final act of defiance. And even though I read it as carefully as I could, there are parts I will have to read again so that I can fully digest their mystical properties. When I finished I was glad to be done with it and just felt like sleeping, and yet I will re-read it at some point in time; it’s a bone-rattling wine that makes you sick but ages with time and contains mysteries that are still waiting to be plumbed.
The book is challenging and exhausting for several reasons. The plot is set in 1840s Texas, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the language is often a bastardized mix of English and Spanish from that era; if you understand Spanish you will have a leg up. But that’s the least of the obstacles. Anyone who has read McCarthy knows how a single one of his sentences routinely fills an entire paragraph or even entire pages. Not just this, but these sentences can consist of garbled verbs and nouns and sometimes words that are pure inventions: there was more than one occasion when I looked up a word in a dictionary, only to find that just like McCarthy’s fevered creations, it’s a phantasmagorical thing that only exists in the heaven and hell of his characters. There is plenty of free association in the book, but somehow, this free association often congeals into a kind of mesmerizing, rhythmic meter.
The basic story centers on a boy of 14 years who joins a gang of bounty hunters who are hungry for Indian scalps. They ride on through the American southwest, regularly encountering various tribes of Indians and massacring them, scalping them, and parading these bloodied trophies around. In the process they also kill, maim and mow down hundreds of innocent men, women and children who have done them no harm. After each of these “missions” they ride back into town, collect their bounty and revel in a night of drunken excess and destruction before setting off on their next bloodthirsty trip through bleak and cruel lands. Like many other McCarthy stories, this begins in mid-stride, seemingly without a beginning and a background, wrenched from the orderly march of destiny. Who is the kid? Where does he come from? What is the historical context in which he lives in his life? None of this really matters. His actions simply are.
Although the story centers on the kid, the main character is a man called the Judge who has to be one of the most fascinating characters in all of fiction. He is a terrifying, large, sweaty, bald, crude hulk of a violent creature, capable of crushing heads simply by squeezing them. Blood and guts permeate his entire being, his naked body often providing the backdrop to some of the most gratuitous scenes in the narrative. And yet like Whitman he contains multitudinous contradictions. He engages in extended, complex disquisitions on every topic from evolution to astronomy, from philosophy to religion, from morality to agency and the Bible. He dances little jigs when in the mood. This murderous psychopath is, almost violently disgustingly, a kind of gentle Darwin, constantly sketching scenes, fossils, flowers and other natural objects in a little notebook around the fire and holding forth on the timeless beauties of the rocks and stars to young recruits. His extended monologues comprise some of the most interesting, deep-seated and shocking parts of the book, and ones that will almost certainly take more than one reading to fully digest.
Here’s one excerpt, one of the more comprehensible ones:
“The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
For the Judge and the other men, violence is not something to be done, something to be inflicted on friends or foes; it’s simply their natural state of being. Just when you think the killing in these pages is conveniently making you numb, there is a fresh instance of it that delivers a blow in a wholly novel manner. There is no swashbuckling cowboy and Indian story here, although there’s certainly plenty of the lawlessness and the casual, break-bottle-on-head kind of violence which was prevalent on the frontier in those times. But that’s just the beginning. When someone is not being scalped, they are being pierced by arrows; when they are not being pierced by arrows their brains are being smattered on the walls. If it’s not bodies of babies strung out on a clothesline, it’s pet dogs being bound to their owners and cast alive into a fire. And all this happens relentlessly, often without rhyme and reason, at the drop of a hat. Violence and war here simply exist, infused into every emotion and cell and fiber of the world.
But the violence in the narrative is not just physical; it extends to the violent descriptions of pretty much everything. Man in this book is reduced to his primal state, wallowing in his own blood and filth. Random characters who seem to serve no further purpose are depicted as naked, bound in chains, with a leash around their neck if alive; split open, their entrails spilling out and being eaten by wild animals if dead. The animals in the story are desperate and wretched; wolves constantly trail the party and subsist on human and animal bones, lizards crawl out of the rocks and drink the men’s spittle and horses routinely buckle under in a heap of broken bones and spurting blood when they are shot. And not just the living organisms but the rocks and trees and weather and stones and lightning and arroyos and rivers and sand and houses and stirrups and food and whiskey and guns and nooses and feathers; all of these seem to cry out with crudity and conflict. And sometimes they evoke great beauty.
At least half of the narrative is devoted to descriptions of the gang just riding through landscapes of wind and rain and fire and sunsets and sand and storms and snow and heat whose descriptions drip with high metaphor, often mesmerizing; sometimes these streams of consciousness go on for pages. Here’s a typical – although atypically short – example:
“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”
And a stunning, poetic one-sentence description of a war party of Indians on the horizon, defying any I have seen before:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
One scene that deals with the horrible massacre of Indians like these is another single sentence one that goes on for several pages. You can of course tear away your eyes, but the only recourse for doing that would be to stop reading and step away. Once you are committed to the narrative however, it has contaminated your soul, so it would seem pointless to not trudge on.
Taking a ride with the Judge and his fellow scalpers feels like taking a ride through Sodom and Gomorrah with Lot, except that these men are the malevolent God of the Old Testament who are committed to raining fire and misery on the world. McCarthy’s predilection for Neo-Biblical, apocalyptic tellings is well-known; “The Road” featured some of these doleful ingredients at their most effective. And yet the central core of “The Road” was the tender relationship between father and son. There is no such redeeming relationship in “Blood Meridian” except the occasional fleeting bonds between men engaged in casual murder. In fact there is no redemption in the book at all, and that’s what makes it so wholly unique.
What is the rationale behind this kind of murderous, nihilistic writing, a vision for the end of time that never ends and keeps sucking the marrow from our bones, albeit in its own lyrical manner? Cormac McCarthy is a very private person who has granted maybe three or four interviews over the past twenty-five years. But a clue comes from his interview with – of all people, Oprah – which takes place at the Institute for Complexity Studies in Santa Fe, a scientific organization at the forefront of interdisciplinary research. In it McCarthy confesses that he has always liked hanging around scientists much better than around artists and writers. In fact he seems to have almost shunned contemporary writers. His scientific eye is evident in the often excruciatingly graphic details of physical landscapes and human anatomy that he provides.
And it is this love for describing things as they are in all their gory detail that I believe provides a window into McCarthy’s writing. McCarthy’s men seem to engage in a kind of inexorable, stark Darwinian extravaganza; just like the cruel laws of nature which are made bright through tooth and claw, the wanton killing and maiming here seems to be part of a Darwinian cycle of rebirth through murder. Just like mutations and nucleosynthesis and entropy and life and death, the violence in these pages just is.
There is still a key difference, however: unlike Darwinian evolution which somehow also manages to produce butterflies and tulips and kindness and altruism, there seems no redemption at the end of “Blood Meridian”. And that’s perhaps the best way to read it, as a story that can only be described, not explained.
Jude Evans –
Wendigoon from youtube recommended it. I really enjoyed it, the descriptions of the places they go are sureal and give the mundane or bleak setting a feel of significantly greater importants, and that im really there. McCarthy could make my boring apartment seem like mystical hallowed ground.
The themes are pretty morbid, I actually had NO idea it was about scalpers in pre-civil war America, which is not even tangentaly related to any of my current intrests, but I still found it valuable.
Already orderd “The Road” from Amazon, should be another good read.
Paperback binding was in poor condition.
A note for McCarthy: 🗣PLEASE USE GRAMMER 🙏
5 stars
Shubham Roy –
I recently had the pleasure of diving into Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” from the Picador Collection, and I must say, it was an exhilarating experience from start to finish. McCarthy’s writing style is both poetic and brutal, weaving a tale that is as captivating as it is disturbing.
Set in the American West during the mid-1800s, “Blood Meridian” follows the journey of a young runaway known only as “the Kid” as he joins a ruthless gang of scalp hunters led by the enigmatic and terrifying Judge Holden. McCarthy’s vivid descriptions of the harsh landscapes, the relentless violence, and the moral ambiguity of the characters create a haunting atmosphere that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
What sets “Blood Meridian” apart is McCarthy’s mastery of language. His prose is dense and lyrical, with every sentence crafted to perfection. The dialogue is sparse but impactful, revealing the true nature of the characters and the darkness that resides within them. McCarthy’s ability to capture the essence of the human condition, the rawness of survival, and the depths of human depravity is unparalleled.
The character of Judge Holden is one of the most memorable and chilling figures in literature. With his towering presence, intellectual prowess, and complete lack of morality, he embodies the embodiment of evil. McCarthy delves deep into the darkest corners of the human psyche, exploring themes of violence, greed, and the nature of humanity itself.
“Blood Meridian” is not a book for the faint of heart. It is a brutal and unflinching portrayal of the dark side of humanity, filled with graphic violence and disturbing imagery. However, for those willing to venture into its depths, it offers a profound examination of the human condition and the inherent darkness that lies within us all.
In conclusion, Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is a masterpiece of American literature. It is a challenging and thought-provoking read that will leave you in awe of McCarthy’s writing prowess. If you have a taste for dark and gritty fiction that explores the depths of the human soul, this book is a must-read. Just be prepared to confront the darkness within yourself as you journey through the unforgiving landscapes of the American West.
demerson19 –
Rarely, okay, never have I read a book which is so simultaneously abhorrent and appealing. Blood Meridian is a book that treats violence as a commonplace occurrence, and offers little respite in its continual assault on all (or anything, please anything) that is good in the world. The prose is stark, direct, and often undefinable (perhaps somewhere, but I often found words for which no definition can be found). The novel immerses you in a world of evil and violence far more terrifying than any post-apocalyptic book can create. And this, indeed, is how I came to this “masterwork” by Cormac McCarthy (bio). I’ve read a few of his novels, and consider “The Road” (blogged about here) one of my all time favorite novels.
This novel centers around “the kid” in the 1850s as he travels from his home state of Tennessee and joins up with the Glanton Gang, a real-life group of killers (there are probably more appropriate terms, but I’m calling them what they are) led by John Joel Glanton. Hired by the Mexican government to fight off attacking Native Americans, they killed any Native American they could since they were paid by the scalp. Women, children, unarmed men — it makes no difference. Even non-Native Americans were not exempt for their depravity as all of humanity appears to be at their disposal. What makes McCarthy’s descriptions so unnerving is the calmness and detachment used in describing the killings. You can almost read through some of them before the horror of what is happening dawns on you. I’m reminded of Tim O’Brien’s writing about the My Lai massacre during the American war in Vietnam. In the Lake of the Woods is a novel about a politician later found to have been involved in the massacre. But the most disturbing part of the book is not the fiction, but a chapter of excerpts from the actual court-martial records. What you see is this same dispassionate account of brutal abuse and killing. As if the event itself is not horrific enough, the presenting of it as a normal occurrence makes it even worse.
McCarthy’s prose is powerful. It can edge on the dramatic, and at times tips into the over-dramatic category, but its power is clear.
“Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked grounds. They rode on.”
The phrase, “they rode on,” is the perfect balance to that long, intricate preceding sentence. Language like his can be hard to follow in our quick read society, but a slow and thoughtful read pays off. Plus, he reminds you of the beauty of words (and perhaps I just tipped into the over-dramatic category).
While “the kid” is the anti-hero of this anti-western, it is the Judge who stands out as the most memorable character. A large, hairless, white man, he is often naked and always calm. He appears to be waiting for others as they come to him, and his intellect puts him ahead of both enemies and his fellow travelers. He makes observations in his notebook in order to understand and thus control the world, and is given to long, fascinating discourses on a variety of topics. He is both God-like and devil-like, omniscient and monstrous, and terrifying in his outreach.
Toward the end of the book “the kid” faces off with judge, the culmination of a relationship in which they dance around one another throughout the book.
“The judge smiled. He spoke softly into the dim mud cubicle. You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgments of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledge a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.”
It is as if “the kid” recognizes his role in evil, and by the recognition (for there is no repentance) he has broken the fabric of their community. He recognizes the judge as the one behind the evil, but he cannot separate himself. As the judge says, “What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but sharing of enemies.”
Clearly, this is a disturbing novel. The fact that McCarthy bases this on historical occurrences does not allow us to write this off as some post-apocalyptic fantasy. Instead, we have to face the judge and his comments about our own culpability in human affairs.
“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow”.
edgar fernando torre rendon –
Todo excelente