2023-06-16 08:06:00
On Tuesday the 13th, Cormac McCarthy, the great North American writer, died, a mixture of reclusiveness who gave only two or three interviews, but instead left behind some books that might be with us forever. Books that might well integrate those absurd lists that answer the question: what would you take to a deserted island?
Cormac McCarthy’s books—twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories—are sublime, sometimes disturbing and violent, sometimes bitter, never inconsequential. Few writers have been able to describe in greater depth the grandeur of the American landscape. But also the brutality, and the slow degradation where he insisted on finding some trace of human dignity among the ruins.
In recent years, McCarthy’s name has been circulated as a potential contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer for Literature, Saul Bellow, chose him as the winner of the MacArthur Fellowship for “genius” in 1981, noting his “absolutely overwhelming use of language, his sentences that give life and death”.
In “How to Read and Why”, Harold Bloom affirmed that his work “Meridian of Blood” (1985) was the best American novel of the second half of the 20th century, and assured that “it was not only the last western” but “the The Last Dark Dramatization of Violence,” placing him on a podium alongside three other contemporary authors he said had “touched the sublime”: Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon.
Where to start, how not to leave out anything essential, trying to cover as much as possible? Undoubtedly, the border trilogy, with that marvel that opens it, “All the beautiful horses”, and the other two, “On the border” and “Cities of the plain”, are essential. Even with the romantic air that “All the Beautiful Horses” breathes, all three are books in which nature swallows the glory of its characters, some cowboys from the Midwest, and makes them weak, with deep existential problems.
Not to be missed, of course, is “Meridian of Blood”, and also “No Country for Old Men”, a disturbing and disturbing police thriller, narrated with the deep and reflective voice of a sheriff who sees how his days and the world are consumed. it changes violently.
The novel was made into a film by Joel and Ethan Coen quite faithfully to the book. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, he won the Oscar for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor in 2007.
The cinema was a great ally in the dissemination of McCarthy’s work. Also “All the beautiful horses” had a version, with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz.
But his most popular book (which was also made into a film, with Viggo Mortensen in the title role), and the one that should not be missing from a Cormac McCarthy book list, is “The Road”.
He was the most popular for a reason that seems antithetical to McCarthy’s hermit character.
The reason – that kind of unexpected events that sometimes occur and change the course of a life – is that the very famous Oprah Winfrey, American television host, one of the most famous in the world, read the book, loved it and included it in his book club in 2007. In passing, he invited the writer for an interview in the studio. She herself called him on the phone and asked him. And McCarthy, who is withdrawn and reclusive but like most of us expects to make a living from what he does, thought regarding it for at least two hours and accepted. With his conditions, yes: he told Oprah that he would do the interview if it was done at the library in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which the writer considers something like his second home. And there she went, and she broadcast live an interview that came out among other parts of the show that featured Michel Moore and U2 singer Bono as guests.
The result is that this is how he had his first best seller and was much more than the secret best writer of these times.
Desolation: a declaration of love
“The road” is a devastating book, which is read with a clenched heart and stomach, and yet it has so much beauty in the midst of horror, so much love, so much attempt at kindness.
What counts is a journey to the South of a father and a young son along a North American highway amid the ruins of humanity.
He will never tell us what happened so that everything is like this. We will never know what year it is. But you can smell it: the devastation is almost total. There are no animals anymore, none. There are almost no human beings anymore. Nothing springs from the ground. What there is is an apocalyptic, sterile landscape; there is smoke, dead, human beings who live poorly trying to eat others to feed themselves. A hell. And there, in the middle of that highway, a father and a son, with a little supermarket monkey as their only belonging, go through everything to get to the south.
How they do it, what they say to each other, what they do with the hope that men insist on cultivating even in the most unfavorable situations, that is the core of La carretera. And the marrow, that marrow, is terrifyingly beautiful.
Legend has it that the book came to him one night, while watching his six-year-old son sleep peacefully. He was leaning out of the window of one of those classic roadside motels in the United States, in this case around El Paso, Texas. The father looked at the boy in the shadows; he saw that measured, deep breathing and thought that the child was the vivid image of tenderness and kindness.
Then McCarthy, the father, looked out the window once more, and a writer and pessimist that he is, wondered what that same land would be like many years later. He imagined fires, destruction, darkness. And so, as some seeds germinate, he found in that mixture of inner goodness and outer destruction, the breeding ground for The Road, the novel that would win him the Pulitzer Prize and that would become his most widely read, most admired book. more terrifying.
McCarthy said there that this book was a declaration of love to his son.
McCarthy writes paragraphs like this: “And he stood there and fleetingly saw the absolute truth of the world. The cold, merciless twist of the infested land. Relentless darkness. The blind dogs of the sun in the race of him. The crushing black void of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals shivering like foxes hiding in his burrow. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to mourn it.
And also phrases like these: “we carry the fire”, a line of dialogue that father and son repeat over and over once more throughout the book. A phrase that hides one of the wonders of this story, that core, that core idea, of teaching to do good, of wanting to be good people even in the midst of the most absolute atrocity, of keeping a flame alive even though there isn’t much to do. make it vibrate A father and son, pushing a supermarket trolley with a few last cans of food, a blanket to keep warm, not much else, but with the iron, stubborn decision to continue forward, towards the South, with stoicism and that faith in the goodness of man and his ability to endure with dignity and love for his neighbor.
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