Tag Archives: Cormac McCarthy

Pessoa

Weds night

Finally got the car in for an oil change in Gilford today.  Turns out the service manager, David, whom I’ve known for ten years now, is a big reader.  He retains his courtly Tennessee accent too, a bit more mild every year.  He loves McCarthy’s The Road.  I told him to find a copy of Blood Meridien.

 

best passage from today’s reading  from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet

    93 [174]  29.3.1933 

How good to be all alone!  To be able to talk out loud to ourselves, to walk about with nobody’s eyes on us, to lean back and daydream with no interruptions!  Every house becomes a meadow, every room takes on the amplitude of a country villa.

All the sounds one hears seem to come from somewhere else, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe.  We are, at last, kings.  That’s what we all aspire to and, who knows, perhaps the more plebian among us aspire to it more eagerly than those with false gold in their pockets.  For a moment we are the pensioners of the universe, existing on our regular incomes with no needs or worries.

Nic Pizzolatto

Galveston Pizzolatto’s first novel.  I read McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and wondered what had happened to the prose of Blood Meridien.

Pizzolatto, being way under 40, must have read late McCarthy and said, dang, I wanna do that too and has done it.  Better, I’d say.  I don’t think of myself as a fan of this sort of fiction, usually, but Pizzolatto works impressive magic here.  Terrific book.  Noir, hard-boiled, apocalyptic, but much more than those tags.

May be literature.