Blood Meridian [Paperback]

I recently saw Harold Bloom, the famous literary scholar from Yale, on a television show where he stated that Blood Meridian was the greatest work of any contemporary American author. I agree. I can't think of anything I've read that even comes close to this novel. First, you have the prose style, which is so controlled and crafted and at the same time flows so naturally that it must have taken years to develop. It reminded me of a missing book from the bible: hypnotic, enigmatic, ancient and at the same time, familiar. I kept thinking of the ocean when I was reading it because of the vastness of the landscape he describes. It seems as if the characters are on a journey, but they're not, unless they're circling further and further down into hell.

I think the familiarity of the novel comes from it's relation to violence from a Christian standpoint. There's no doubt that McCarthy intends to have us react to this book from a moral perspective and yet at the same time be fascinated with it's violence. The setting, the wild wicked west, is a part of the American psyche that still takes forms today in our action films and tv shows that feed our hunger for blood and murder. By taking us back to our roots, stripping away the restraints of our Judeo-Christian values, MCCarthy steeps the story of death and evil in biblical prose and washes it with blood so that we see our dark selves reflected in all our ugliness.

I compare this work to the works of the great Russian novelists ,Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who always went for the big questions, What is life?, Who is God?, What is morality? and the American Moby Dick which encapsulated a universe. When you read books like these a lot of what appears on the bestseller lists seems so meaningless.

This is a book you simply stand in awe of if you're a writer or ever thought of being one.

To put it plainly, BLOOD MERIDIAN is like nothing that I have ever read before; any serious attempt at gaining a contextual understanding of this text will require multiple readings, with English and Spanish dictionaries in hand.

Multilayered with symbolism and meaning, and masterfully crafted with bilingual verbosity and unorthodox syntax, Cormic McCarthy presents a nightmarish reality where moral law is a cipher in toto.

So far, I have read this sublime offering by McCarthy only once; I definitely intend to read it again.  However, truth be told, BLOOD MERIDIAN is not an easily digestible piece of pap writing; it is a hauntingly graphic work of historical fiction that requires ample time for rumination and ancillary study.

Without question,  BLOOD MERIDIAN is one of the most brutal pieces of literature that I have ever read.  Set in the U.S./Mexican borderlands, in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican-American war, McCarthy vivid portrays an inhospitable, lawless region where extreme violence is the modus operandi, and benevolence is nearly non-existent. 

I reiterate, the unflinching levels of violence portrayed by McCarthy are tantamount to "total war":  American soldiers scalped, disemboweled, and sodomized by Comanche warriors; Apache infants' heads dashed against rocks until their brains spill out; genitals severed and stuffed into victims' mouths; men skewered over fires and burned alive; children abducted, raped, and murdered... 

At the epicenter of this panoply of blood lust is the Mephistophelian antagonist  known as Judge Holden, or "The Judge" - a seven foot tall, completely hairless, Caucasian leader of a band of vicious criminals that has been commissioned to collect Apache scalps.  The Judge is a towering enigma; he is a polyglot, a man of eloquent speech, education, philosophy, and a jack of all trades. However, he is also a man of extraordinary physical strength, unmitigated violence, sexual deviance, and is an apex predator.  He is a man equally held in awe and feared by his troupe of murderous companions; rumors are whispered that he may not be all together human; hearsay discussions allude to the possibility that he transcends time and space; in at least one instant, a claim is made that he is the devil.

While McCormic never provides elucidation regarding the mysterious origins of The Judge,  it is unequivocal that he is (at the very least) evil incarnate.  At the close of the book, with The Judge at the height of his horrible exultation, the readers are left to determine for themselves whether the antagonist is more than just an evil man... I tend to view Judge Holden as being in a very similar vein as Goethe's Mephistopheles in Faust; undoubtedly, this was an influence on McCormic's development of the antagonist.

Taken as a whole, Blood Meridian is a magnum opus:  Combining detailed minutiae on desert landscapes and flora, masterfully utilizing esoteric and arcane forms of language, providing a bedrock of historical knowledge from the time period, amalgamating the profane and the sacrosanct - McCormic's work has definitely left an indelible mark on the mind of this reader.  A century from now, I'm certain that scholars will still be reading and analyzing this book.

A final note/caveat:  I was given a copy of the 25th anniversary edition of BLOOD MERIDIAN, which contains no introduction.  If you procure an older version of this book, chances are that there will be an introduction by Harold Bloom. While this introduction does provide good contextual analysis of the book, it is rife with "spoilers" and it gives away too much of the story.  If you have never read BLOOD MERIDIAN, I strongly suggest skipping the introduction until you have finished the book.  (Unfortunately, when I was still only halfway through the novel, I stumbled across the introduction from an online resource and unwittingly read it...I was NOT pleased afterward).

First of all, take my review with a grain of salt since I stopped reading halfway through (p. 160 of the edition I have). Although the writing was beautiful, the relentless violence and cruelty started to really get to me. I had to read with two dictionaries beside me (one English and one Spanish-English) because I don't understand Spanish, and I started to wonder if I understood English as well. McCarthy's sentences and diction are beautiful and precise, poetic and kinda neo-Biblical. I learned many new words, which is a good thing. I suppose you could skip the dictionaries and just read along without getting hung up on comprehending every single word, but that effort didn't bother me much. The story's violence, however, got the best of me and I felt relieved to finally stop. First book I have given up on in ten years, I think. His novel The Road is perhaps my favorite novel ever, so I was a bit disappointed that I did not have the stomach for this one.