Genre Fiction
![Cormac McCarthy - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APT0OW.jpg)
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
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.
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.
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.
Editorial Reviews
"A classic American novel of regeneration through violence. McCarthy can only be compared to our greatest writers, with Melville and Faulkner, and this is his masterpiece."
-Michael Herr
"McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly-envied."
-Ralph Ellison
"McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay."
-Robert Penn Warren
-Michael Herr
"McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly-envied."
-Ralph Ellison
"McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay."
-Robert Penn Warren
Readers Top Reviews
Bernardo todeschi
Cormac depicts a crude and powerful vision of human condition based on a known history - a group of scalp hunters led by Glanton which stormed the Mexican- American desert around 1850. Landscapes are vivid and are made real to the reader - one can feel thirsty, cold or burnt while reading - as well as diversity of human conditions - loneliness rudeness and ruthless which makes the reader take a breath to keep going. Certainly one "must read" novel!
DelaBernardo tode
Cormac McCarthy es uno de los escritores por los que tengo una mayor inclinación y específicamente "Blood Meridian" -en su versión traducida al castellano- una de mis obras favoritas del autor. Hacía tiempo que quería leer esta novela en su idioma original y me decidí por esta edición económica fácilmente manejable. Es una novela que tiene cierta dificultad para un lector de habla hispana si no está familiarizado ni con el estilo propio del autor ni con un nivel avanzado de inglés. En mi caso conocía bien la obra pues la he leído en varias ocasiones traducida al castellano y ese hecho me ha facilitado adentrarme en ella pero también diré que me ha costado menos de lo que pensaba terminármela. En resumen, recomiendo leer esta edición en su idioma original únicamente a los conocedores de McCarthy ya que enfrentarse a esta obra sin conocer el estilo del autor nacido en Rhode Island puede resultar una tarea ardua y ciertamente complicada.
R. G. NavaDelaBer
Una de las mejores novelas de McCarthy. Brutal y no de fácil lectura, pero, sin duda, una obra maestra.
ANPANPR. G. NavaD
Niente a che vedere con le edizioni economiche picador. Questa è un'edizione di classe, con una formattazione impeccabile, ben impaginata e rilegata. Sulla qualità del libro non mi esprimo, dato che si tratta di uno dei più grandi capolavori della letteratura americana. Vale davvero la pena di spendere qualche soldo in più e prendere questa versione, perché è destinata a durare nel tempo ed esser tramandata alle generazioni che verranno. Anche la carta è piacevole al tatto, con una porosità calda e raffinata. Diciamoci la verità: alcuni libri meritano una rilegatura all'altezza, come in questo caso. In america è possibile trovare delle edizioni molto più prestigiose, ma questo è quanto di meglio sia possibile reperire in Italia. Sono entusiasta, ed il servizio amazon è stato impeccabile. Fatti questo regalo. Valuterò solo l'edizione e non il contenuto del testo, che è INGIUDICABILE tanta è la sua grandezza. Rilegatura: 8/10 Carta: 9/10 Impaginazione: 9/10 (c'è lo spazio per scrivere appunti) Dimensioni del testo: 9/10 (non affatica la lettura) Copertina rigida: 8/10 Sovra-copertina: 5/10 (brutta, ma il suo scopo è solo protettivo).
LazyReaderANPANPR
With all books, there is a difference between author and narrator. Sometimes the difference is slight, sometimes great. Omniscient narrators tend to reflect the author's stance about the story more than, say, first-person narrators, which often strike poses very unlike the authors', excepting the case of confessional "fiction" (which is not actually fictional). At first I thought Blood Meridian's narrator spoke without irony, without distance being injected between his voice and the author's feelings about the story. As I read on, I felt more and more an ironic distance between McCarthy and the narrator. I felt as if McCarthy were telling me to resist this narrative for its excesses, its hyperbole and its superstition and fatalism. Omniscient narrators are not usually unreliable. This one certainly speaks with an authority we are invited initially to believe. The narrator knows the landscape and how it regards the people trudging through it, like pawns in a game ruled by its unalterable ends. We can say that the landscape is the most revealed character in the novel, as Harold Bloom has noted. The narrator seems to speak with unquestioned insight about the world, which he animates. We glimpse the landscape's recalcitrant and indifferent interiority in the poses it strikes, that is, in its eerie lightening, meteor showers, ominous clouds, threatening mountains, and its hellish surfaces that stretch for miles. It is god-like and uncaring, harsh and without mercy. But the Judge also speaks with authority, and we do not believe him: his actions are clearly manipulative, and so must be his words. The judge shares the narrator's King-James-inspired dialect, though the judge uses that rhetoric to a much greater extent, consciously, with the intent to manipulate and gain authority. Whenever a dialect is assumed in a narrative this automatically distinguishes the personalities of author and narrator. Once I had this present in my mind, when I was about three quarters of the way into the book, I began to look for signs of slight parody, by which I mean, not humor, but notable and critical repetition. I found them immediately, everywhere. I began to note some formulas being used in the narration. An object or person in the landscape is frequently described as "like some" fearful object, monster or god from ancient times, mythology or religion. Things are often described as "like some" ominous or meaningful thing. Sometimes there are as many as four of these formulaic constructions per page. On page 251 of the Modern Library edition, for instance, the lakebed of lava is "like a pan of dried blood, threading those badland of dark amber glass like the remnants of some dim legion scrabbling up out of a land accursed..." while the character called "the idiot" is "clinging to the bars and calling hoarsely after the sun like some queer u...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Childhood in Tennessee – Runs away – New Orleans – Fights – Is shot – To Galveston – Nacogdoches – The Reverend Green – Judge Holden – An affray – Toadvine – Burning of the hotel – Escape.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rain-blown bottomland toward night.
A year later he is in Saint Louis. He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat. Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. He lives in a room above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook beast to fight with the sailors. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated.
On a certain night a Maltese boatswain shoots him in the back with a small pistol. Swinging to deal with the man he is shot again just below the heart. The man flees and he leans against the bar with the blood running out of his shirt. The others look away. After a while he sits in the floor.
He lies in a cot in the room upstairs for two weeks while the tavernkeeper's wife attends him. She brings his meals, she carries out his slops. A hardlooking woman with a wiry body like a man's. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night and sleeps on the riverbank until he can find a boat that will take him on. The boat is going to Texas.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been.
His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. The passengers are a diffident lot. They cage their eyes and no man asks another what it is that brings him here. He sleeps on the deck, a pilgrim among others. He watches the dim shore rise and fall. Gray seabirds gawking. Flights of pelicans coastwise above the gray swells.
They disembark aboard a lighter, settlers with their chattels, all studying the low coastline, the thin bight of sand and scrub pine swimming in the haze.
He walks through the narrow streets of the port. The air smells of salt and newsawn lumber. At night whores call to him from the dark like souls in want. A week and he is on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned, walking the sand roads of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat. Earthen causeways across the marshland. Egrets in their rookeries white as candles among the moss. The wind has a raw edge to it and leaves lope by the roadside and skelter on in the night fields. He moves north through small settlements and farms, working for day wages and found. He sees a p...
Childhood in Tennessee – Runs away – New Orleans – Fights – Is shot – To Galveston – Nacogdoches – The Reverend Green – Judge Holden – An affray – Toadvine – Burning of the hotel – Escape.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rain-blown bottomland toward night.
A year later he is in Saint Louis. He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat. Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. He lives in a room above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook beast to fight with the sailors. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated.
On a certain night a Maltese boatswain shoots him in the back with a small pistol. Swinging to deal with the man he is shot again just below the heart. The man flees and he leans against the bar with the blood running out of his shirt. The others look away. After a while he sits in the floor.
He lies in a cot in the room upstairs for two weeks while the tavernkeeper's wife attends him. She brings his meals, she carries out his slops. A hardlooking woman with a wiry body like a man's. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night and sleeps on the riverbank until he can find a boat that will take him on. The boat is going to Texas.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been.
His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. The passengers are a diffident lot. They cage their eyes and no man asks another what it is that brings him here. He sleeps on the deck, a pilgrim among others. He watches the dim shore rise and fall. Gray seabirds gawking. Flights of pelicans coastwise above the gray swells.
They disembark aboard a lighter, settlers with their chattels, all studying the low coastline, the thin bight of sand and scrub pine swimming in the haze.
He walks through the narrow streets of the port. The air smells of salt and newsawn lumber. At night whores call to him from the dark like souls in want. A week and he is on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned, walking the sand roads of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat. Earthen causeways across the marshland. Egrets in their rookeries white as candles among the moss. The wind has a raw edge to it and leaves lope by the roadside and skelter on in the night fields. He moves north through small settlements and farms, working for day wages and found. He sees a p...
