blood meridian

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i’ve never been much of a reader. growing up, my entertainment medium of choice was the humble video game, and that hasn’t changed much, though i do now appreciate both film and literature much more than i have in the past. i consume all of my media in english despite it not being my mother tongue, mostly because i’ve grown to like the language, but also because most interesting stuff is either natively english or translated into it for obvious reasons. i was fortunate enough to somehow develop some level of fluency most would probably describe as sufficient for everyday life

these last few years, i think i’ve been suffering from some sort of cognitive decline. thinking has become hard, and when things get slightly complex, understanding what the hell i’m reading, both in fiction and non-fiction, takes me an amount of time i’m inclined to call at least a little abnormal. it feels significant because i think i remember a time where this was not the case. realizing you're stupid is tough but it's even tougher when someone keeps telling you that you're stupid in novel and creative ways

cormac mccarthy is an author and pulitzer prize winner who i’m primarily familiar with due to a glancing interest in the lives of former us special operations personnel turned merch salesmen and mercenaries who call themselves “forward observations group”. he seems to be a mainstay in those circles and, in general, enjoys some popularity among the blue-collared working man(tm), so i decided to go and see what all the fuss was about. his most noted work “the road”, for which he also got his pulitzer, is uninteresting to me in concept due to my dislike for the post-apocalypse as a fictional setting, so i settled for another one of his more popular novels, “blood meridian”, a story about some young adult and his escapades in the days of the wild west

the book is frequently called a “difficult read” due to gratuitious descriptions of violent acts. in one particular section, a band of american soldiers gets routed in a surprise attack by comanche indians who then proceed to scalp the troops and hack them apart limb by limb after. it’s somewhat gruesome but if liveleak means anything to you, you’re already familiar with human's true nature, so that doesn't matter to me. personally, i would actually call it a difficult read because for me it is quite literally difficult to read

the prose mccarthy employs is littered with dated expressions, americanisms and other terms a modern reader, especially a non-native speaker, might not be familiar with which results in frequent dictionary look-ups, hampering reading flow. it’s also flowery, overly descriptive and incredibly dense in a way that makes me feel like i should be on some form of medication but no one has actually told me what kind

to illustrate, i'll copy-paste you a passage of chapter four, my arch nemesis:

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.

and here's another in the same vein, also chapter four:

With the dawn they were climbing among shale and whinstone under the wall of a dark monocline where turrets stood like basalt prophets and they passed by the side of the road little wooden crosses propped in cairns of stone where travelers had met with death. The road winding up among the hills and the castaways laboring upon the switchbacks, blackening under the sun, their eyeballs inflamed and the painted spectra racing out at the corners.

if you were able to imagine these scenes on first read without stumbling, then you're smarter than me. i got angry re-reading this for the sake of pasting it into this article because these paragraphs are followed by many more like them that do nothing but describe the landscape in an extensive manner while the protagonist walks through the desert. what's whinstone and why do i care what kind of stone it is? what's a monocline? what is a basalt prophet and how does it bear likeness to a turret? are we talking a watchtower-esque structure? is this fallout? what's a switchback? what are painted spectra and how do they race out at the corners? what does that even mean?

i want to like the vibe these paragraphs try to evoke but i'm simply incapable of imagining the scene accurately because there are either too many words i have never seen or because they're used in a way i've never seen them be used. i then re-read the section in question until i can maybe begin to grasp it but the moment never truly comes. the vibe is lost along the way. it's also just really frustrating to go through this process almost every paragraph and beat your head into the same wall over and over. for what? i want to advance the story, not get hung up on your cool writing chops

perhaps my general literacy and reading comprehension skill are just leagues below the book's requirements but this is a widely beloved book in the states, and it really makes me wonder how its fans tackled this work. did they skip what they didn't get? did they have a dictionary at the ready like me? did they just understand everything and it's solely my problem?

let me give you another example:

He sketched for the sergeant a problematic career of the man before them, his hands drafting with a marvelous dexterity the shapes of what varied paths conspired here in the ultimate authority of the extant—as he told them—like strings drawn together through the eye of a ring. He adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences.

who writes like this? i feel like this entire sentence is just complex for the sake of being complex. it's uttered by a mysterious figure the author presumably wants to imbue with a feeling of some degree of otherworldliness, being out of place among these three-teeth-toting scoundrels, possessing authority and intelligence they could never imagine to possess. and i respect that, but i feel like the intent is once again at odds with reading flow. it makes my brain skip forward, masturbatory descriptions discarded

another peculiarity of blood meridian is how it dispenses information on a basic level. many sentences are strung together without any form of punctuation and run away into the sunset. there are no quotation marks by design. if you're lucky and behave yourself, you might get a comma like in the previous example but don't get too excited. upon arriving in chihuahua city, our protagonist makes some observations. this is what he sees among other things:

Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners rode past the carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and the stiff bodies of deer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things from the country round hanging head downward from hooks.

again, the writing feels outlandish for the sake of outlandishness. i have never seen any other person write like this. it's just what cormac mccarthy does, and i suppose that's respectable, but i can't shake the idea that this is garbage. i'm a kafka person, a true enjoyer of 20 sentences being written in one but kafka's writing doesn't bother me, cormac's does, and i don't know why it makes me so angry

it’s hard to quantify the impact this has had on my perception of my english language skills and, perhaps worse, my general level of intelligence but believe me when i tell you that it makes me want to cry. i spent multiple hours over several days on chapter four, reading and re-reading and re-reading every single sentence that describes the gang’s journey through the barren mexican wasteland. i'm stuck in an endless cycle. i put the book down because i get tired of looking up dictionary words, repeatedly asking myself why i even entertained mccarthy's game in the first place, and pick it back up because the story is ultimately interesting, the characters are interesting, and despite it pissing me off to no end practically every day, the writing is interesting, too. i also very much like the setting, and the banality of it all scratches an itch that usually doesn't get scratched when i read the usual shit i read i.e. elitist classic novels. stuff you'd find on a forbes list for some reason. my favorite book is "crime and punishment", and that was an easy as pie page-turner compared to this. baby's first novel practically

it seems that i'm not alone with my thoughts, but for every person making a reddit thread like such, there are 50 more telling them that they didn't really find it that difficult at all, so it'd be great to get a trained specialist in here to officially diagnose me with moron before i go insane

anyway, i don't know how to end this post

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath