#Southern Gothic Cormac McCarthy
Finish date: 6 November, 2024
Genre: novel
Rating: F
#Monthly Challenge “Voice Unbound”
Good News: I finished the audiobook. After all the brouhaha a/b the USA election I avoided any news on TV. I had to detox. So I just closed my eyes and listened to a 20 hr book. Suttree is for a reading challenge: read a book whose main character shares same traits with the author. Cormac McCarthy’s time in Tenneessee in 1950s must have been very strange.
Bad News: Suttree (protagonist) keeps some strange friends, miscreants, winos, ragpicker, musselhunters, Indian fisherman, Blind Richard, a black sorceress, the gay Trippin Through the Dew and the very wierd Gene Harrogate who has a “love” of watermelons, slaughters a piglet and walks around with a sack of 42 dead bats. With every chapter I asked msyelf: “When is this book going to end?”
Bad News: McCarthy wrote the book not caring if it was coherent or made sense to the audience. He wrote the scenes (…there is no real plot) to be bizarre for the sake of bizarre, and off-putting for the sake of itself ( gory details/descriptions). In short, he wrote it for himself, not caring what the audience would think. McCarthy is a deft wordsmith but it felt like pretentious self-importance.
Bad News: McCarthy doesn’t say things plainly in his books. He’ll occasionally say them beautifully being willfully difficult and convoluted.
Personal: Cormac McCarthy is obscure and aloof to no end. He overwrites everything. His writing reads like a few moments of genuine skill and a sharp eye for imagery padded with 280 pages of tedious literary meandering that serves no end.
#GoodRiddanceToOldRubbish
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