Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (Picador Books) | Cormac McCarthy

book: Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (Picador Books) | Cormac McCarthy

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Blood Meridian: Or...

	Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (Picador Books) Cormac McCarthy Picador, 1994 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Blood Meridian is 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, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect...He is a great writer" - "Independent". "I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as "Blood Meridian"...A nightmare odyssey" - "Evening Standard". "His masterpiece...The book reads like a conflation of the "Inferno", "The Iliad" and "Moby Dick". I can only declare that "Blood Meridian" is unlike anything I have read in recent years, and seems to me an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement" - John Banville.

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A Cormac McCarthy vocabulary quiz

As I read Blood Meridian, I jotted down words that were either unusual or new to me or familiar yet not quite recognizable. This is the case with every McCarthy book one reads - astonishment at the writer's extensive vocabulary. I've deliberately left out most of the directly Spanish terms or Mexican off-shoots. So, anyway, here is one list of words you need to know in order to read Blood Meridian thoroughly. Each reader can come up with a similar list, I am sure.
THE LIST: swale; sprent; carbolic; coping (not the verb); swagged; chancel; sacristy; purlieu; awap; ramada; weskit; mortice; felloes; duledge; panniers; jornada; bistre; suttee; jacal; cantle; bandoliers; manciple; midden; revetment; charivari; imbreachment; withy; vidette; dunnage; thrapple; morral; selvage; lazarous; galena; sotol; kerf; stanched; tonsured; talus; vadose; ratchel; corbels; squailed; bated; slag; rebozo; almagre; fusil; carboy; malandered; gantlet (gauntlet?); flensed; quirt; thews; rill; luff; querent; aubergine; surbated; sark; playa; cassinette; scows; replivine; lemnisate; fulgurite; scrog; preterite (shades of Pynchon); gastine; marl; remuda; lobation; dap; cantonment; ignis fatuus; yaw; spangle; duff; escarpment; enfilade; rill; crenelated; roweled; rebus; esker; supernummeraries; serried; devenian; ristra; pulque; auger; archimandrite; thaumaturge . . .

. . . . and the list could go on, for I'm skimming the surface here, not for this one novel alone, but all of them. I've compared the volabulary of recent Roth books and DeLillo books and others, and nothing comes close to the vastness of McCarthy's lexicon. And then, as I've mentioned already, there are all the Spanish words, the Latin. Reading McCarthy reminds me mostly of the prose in Beckett's MOLLOY trilogy. There too you reach for the dictionary every page or so. Same pace, poetic intensity, fury almost, fluidity, biblical density. (Let's not even think about Faulkner here!)

At any rate, test the words on your friends if you like, or do nothing at all with them. Interesting all the same.

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