On the death of American author Cormac McCarthy

It's been about a year since I discovered American author Cormac McCarthy. Somebody claimed, „Blood Meridian“ is a novel without a plot. That's probably true: The protagonist (a very young man) meets a group of irregulars in the middle of the 19th century. They roam the border area between Texas and Mexico, murdering hundreds of Native Americans and Mexicans - and being hunted by them.

The leader of this group is Judge Holden, an original character who is very eloquent in expressing his own ideas about morality and meaning. Here is a quote:

That man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

At the end of a long odyssey, Judge Holden storms the young man's room in a motel naked, presumably murdering him.

What is the meaning of such a life full of longing, murder, violence and adventure? Life itself abounds in McCarthy's books, seemingly wasted senselessly and wantonly.

At the moment I'm reading „Suttree“. This novel takes place in Knoxville in the 1950s: Cornelius Suttree is a failed college grad who drinks too much and makes a living as a fisherman on the river. He drinks, fights, has to bury his young son, has been rejected by his family and sometimes ends up in prison.

This book is also written so poetically that the language sometimes almost overwhelms you:

I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all. How surely are the dead beyond death.

The extremely intelligent author of a series of brutal books was born in 1933. It is said that it was not until he was 60 that he had literary success. On the way there he suffered hardship, was abandoned by his wife and yet rejected opportunities to earn money in an easy way (e.g. with lectures).

Cormac McCarthy was a member of the Santa Fé Institute and enjoyed pondering the nature of this world with physicists and philosophers. His novels "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris", published at the end of 2022, contain thoughts on the worlds of psychopathology and quantum physics. They are on my reading list.

McCarthy's conversations with the director Werner Herzog can be found on YouTube.

We also got a glimpse of the author behind the books when Oprah Winfrey interviewed him.

Other well-known works include the Borderland trilogy, the successful novel "The Road" and "No Country for Old Men".