hi everybody!
i was jealous of rene when he said he found good books at the
thrift stores his wife liked to look thru. when i tried it,
all i found was harlequin romances and hi-tech war thrillers.
not for me.
well, i was down in florida and the wife had to check a place
out and i went in and found mccarthy's
_blood meridian_. i'd never heard of him, but the description
on the back sounded pretty good.
i'm not quite thru it, but its been interesting. bloody and
brutal and cold. noir western, i guess. it reminds me of
conrad's _heart or darkness_, or more accurately, coppola's
movie adaptation, apoc- alypse now. not surprising. the theme
seems the same to me. by shirking almost every type of moral
responsibility, is the philosopher/killer descending into
hell, damnation, and insanity, or is he shedding his mortal
skin and ascending to godhead? hmm... got me. you choose. and
speaking of shedding mortal skin, there's a heck of a lot of
that in the book, too, and we ain't talking figuratively,
either. ;-)
the style is interesting... florid and eloquent. the term
"contrived" could be leveled at it, but i thought it provided
an effective contrast to the actual content. irony thru
style, maybe.
based on a true story of a band of scalphunters hired by the
mexican governor in chihauhau to clean up the "indian
problem", the book contains a delight- ful collection of
flora, like the dead baby tree, and fauna, like the idiot
with very questionable dietary preferences.
miker
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