I almost (almost!) never read fiction.
Personal reasons.
I use to read a lot of fiction as a teenager, but, gave it up.
I had enough to do rearing 7 kids and having to indulge in life to make the trade-off of time required to keep up with fiction.
Now, there has come an author who has stopped me dead in my tracks and changed all that and his name is Cormac McCarthy.
He is some kind of genius with quirky style and a bottomless vocabulary and a penchant for storytelling that won't let me escape.
I first heard of McCarthy by reading the Literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom praised McCarthy lavishly. That got my attention. I decided to try out one of McCarthy's books titled BLOOD MERIDIAN.
I couldn't get into it. I don't read Westerns, for one thing. Another thing, I couldn't get past McCarthy's unwillingness to use punctuation.
About four or five years passed.
I hear about a film coming out called NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy which two of my favorite directors (Fargo, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple) are directing.
I work in a bookstore and laid my hands on a copy of the book easily.
I started to read on my lunch break.
It grabbed me. It wouldn't let me go. I was sucked into a different world. McCarthy had me, but good!
From there I read ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. Wow! I can't begin to tell you how much I loved that book.
Then--hold on to your hats, folks--I kept hearing about his latest novel which won the Pulitizer Prize.
It was a Post-Apocalypse novel. Imagine that genre winning a Pulitzer! What was going on??
I started reading THE ROAD.
I can only tell you it was one of the best written, most haunting, penetrating pieces of writing I've ever come across.
I simply have to suggest this book for you if you want to give it a try.
A father and his son set out across the dying landscape of a holocaust setting trying to keep from starving to death. Their only goal is to not die. They encounter what few humans remain as foragers, cannibals and victims of some hideous world-shattering event. They are trying to reach the coast by taking what remains of a road, a highway perhaps. Daylight lasts about four hours each day. The rest is wintry night. It snows constantly. There is so much ash they must wear masks to filter the air for breathing.
This book gets inside you in a way that a mere horror story or sci-fi concoction only play with for effect. This, my friends, is literature.
It is about love, purpose, survival and what it means to be a human being.
I hope you give it a try.
I fully intend to read all the rest of McCarthy's books.
Currently, I'm half way through Blood Meridian (the book I couldn't hack previously). I know my way around McCarthy by now.
This author believes the only excuse for punctuation is to make something clear to the reader. The way Cormac McCarthy writes, sure enough, you have no problem understanding that somebody is talking. You know who is talking.
His descriptions sometimes consist of statements which are mere brush strokes of prose. It works. It isn't merely coy or affected. This guy is an original!
T.