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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 I don't get it Nov 19, 2009
I'm sorry, but I don't understand all the high praise that people give this novel. For me, it's little more than a Spaghetti Western written in arty prose, some of the prose impressive (McCarthy is very good on landscape and corpses) but most of it just arty. There are no characters, no recognizable human beings who turn into cold-blooded killers (which could give the material the moral weight many attribute to it). No, it's only presences, silhouettes with names (the Kid, the Judge, the Captain), the shadows of character types we already know from movies, without any actors to flesh them out. I'm not a big fan of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, but boy did I miss him here. Now and then the book gets beyond the formula pleasures of a Sergio Leone movie to achieve the nightmare surrealism of EL TOPO, but I don't find that a good work of art either. Reading this book is akin to watching a great Western like THE WILD BUNCH while roaring drunk: you can pick up the gist of the story through your elation, but you lose all details and emotion and human reality. You can't even be sure what happens at the end.
0 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 God is War Nov 17, 2009
There are already so many reviews of this fine novel that I can only add this, in 3.5 speak:
Judge Holden- CE Aissamar Bard 10 / Divine Crusader of Erythnul 10 / Horizon Walker 6
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Hypnotic, Legendary, Impossible Nov 08, 2009
One of the objectively most skilled artists alive at the top of his game penning one of the most polished and relentlessly creative pieces ever made. He wrote this on one of the first batches of McArthur Grants.
My time spent reading this was some of the most enjoyable time I've ever spent doing anything. The only crime regarding this book is that Toni Morrison's "Beloved" ever sits in spot number one above this in greatest books of all time lists. Objectively, this is on a whole other level. Also literature this good is rarely this easy to read and clear in its plot happenings. The stunning ending is widely debated still in modern journals.
7.4/5 stars. I'm serious. The odds you will passionately love this book *far* outrank the odds you will think it only moderately good. I literally cannot even begin to fathom anyone ever giving this four stars.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
"Judge not, that ye be not Judged..." Nov 04, 2009
This novel of the Old West is "about" neither Sin, nor Redemption, nor Judgement, nor Righteousness, nor Salvation. It IS most assuredly about Damnation, however. And a more spectacular paen to pain, magnificently wrought ode to woe, and artistic apotheosis of suffering is hard to envision this side of David Lindsay's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS or Malcolm Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO, two of its 'spiritual' relatives. Yet, in tone and language it often more closely resembles the haunted universe of Flannery O'Connor...
And it may be said to share their sense of religiosity steeped in blood. And, more to the point, it revels in the perverse--i.e., recalcitrant--heart of humankind. What is at the core of its religio-philosophical perspective? That mankind's suffering is deserved. It is not so much the depiction of a Catholic universe, as it is a darkened Calvinist world in which most are ineluctably damned with but a few Elect to be spared...Yet under what conditions or for what reasons we can neither begin to apprehend nor have any right to expect to understand.
The basic facts underpinning the book are truthful. There was a Judge Holden; there was a "Captain" John Joel Glanton who lead a band of marauding scalphunters through the borderlands of Texas, Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico, in the late 1840s--and who were themselves slaughtered by outraged Indians, deservedly so, at Yuma Crossing in April, 1850; there were incessant and horrific depredations throughout the borderlands by Comanche & Apache raiding parties during this period. Frustrated and terrified local state governments in northern Mexico turned to paying scalphunters to remedy the "barbarian" menace.
From these essential historical facts McCarthy has fashioned an original work of genius--powerful, disturbing, and mysterious. His language alone marks this novel as among the most remarkable of its generation. No one writing in America today--after nearly a quarter of a century-- has yet approached BLOOD MERIDIAN's originality & strength. It isn't flawless, or no more than a slab of rock or chunk of limestone or desert cactus is, but is about as close to it as one has any right to expect.
Not for the squeamish, and still less for the those who believe in humanity's spiritual or social "evolution", it nonetheless succeeds in the highest artistic sense (Schopenhauer's, let's say) and remains well worthy of our utmost admiration and attention.
How the west was slaughtered Oct 14, 2009
Be warned that Blood Meridian is a relentlessly blood thirsty and violent work that at times is not so much read as endured.This is not a criticism just an indication of the world that is being painted in blood and pain through various encounters between a group of mercenarys and anyone or anything that they happen to come across. Apparently based on real people and events that occured in the 1850s on the border between The United States and Mexico, the story follows a boy leaving home and becoming a member of this group who earn their keep by killing and scalping indians,not necessarily in that order,as well as anyone else who will pass for an indian.This is no sanitised view of the wild west and reveals man at his most primal and animalistic.Whilst the events are gruesome and detailed they are written with an almost detached and matter of fact style that lends itself to you believing they could actually have happened.Even some of the more surreal moments that I would normaly have thought ridiculous somehow have a feeling of authenticity about them. At times the book seems to descend into a kind of insanity in its convoluted descriptions of places and ideas which is in stark contrast with the simplicy it uses to decribe most of the characters who utter very little dialogue and almost no indication of what is going on inside their head.If you are looking to glimpse the monster that possibly resides in us all then this stark and haunting work stands out as a compelling and brutal journey that will leave its mark on the reader.
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