My 5 favorite novels are this novel 5x. I think āmasterpieceā has become rather glib. This could be the way we reset the standard. Best fiction written in my lifetime. @templecone pointed me to some music by Ben Nichols of Lucero: āThe Last Pale Light in the Westā which was inspired by this novel. Liked the music so much I had to read the book again (4th time) Harrowing tale of Apache-scalp hunters in 1840-50ās. Human depravity, ingenuity, savagery, stupidity endurance and strength. All painted thru the most vivid characters, the crispest dialogue and deeply moving depictions. Like, Huck Finn vivid and crisp and moving but more of it. Set in the Mexican-American borderlands, itās something like an anti western. No heroes, one villain, maybe, who doesnāt ride off into the sunset but dances into the next day. McCarthyās prose is scriptural and breathtaking, verging on holy English. This is writing from the sharpest mind and pen. It would seem he knows all the words. The story is pitiless and unflinching. Mercy for none. But salvation for all. Not reading Blood Meridian is a huge mistake. āBooks lie, he said. God dont lie No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.ā āThe judge smiled. Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the worldā āThe truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness, it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue or precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. ā āA manās a odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it withā (at Lancaster, Pennsylvania) https://www.instagram.com/p/CRon3-vNFbrXJmhm3G2VofKlrsbApCwAjWvAzE0/?utm_medium=tumblr
