cmagnoletes

This is the second Cormac McCarthy book I've listened to. I tried to listen to ATPHs as well but Brad Pitt's narration sucked. Which is weird because I thought he'd be a natural. I like to listen to these because I'm a very slow reader and reading McCarthy can be even slower. He has that biblical style that gets confusing on the page. What did I think? No cowboys, so take a star away for that. Cannibals, add the star back. The Father is great, add a star. His little boy is annoying, always, Papa, this, Papa, that, take away a star. The voice the narrator uses for the father is good. The little boy voice is annoying. It starts very slowly. It ends very weakly. I hear Viggio is going to be the dad in a movie version Ridley Scott is supposedly doing. And the movie'll also star some pathetic kid. Probably Dakota Fanning's kid brother, Hampshire Fanning. OK I am now adding this: The other day I checked up on my Slate Magazine Audio Book club podcast. I orgininally subscribed to hear the bookclub discussion of Independence Day by Richard Ford because I love that book so much. The most recent one is from the end of May and it's about The Road. I recently listened to the Cormac McCarthy book and so I eagerly listened to the podcast. And the more I reflect on the book, the more I think I was moved by the entire father-son dynamic in play but completely let down by the half-assed way the book ended. Though I will say that the final paragraph does allow the gracious/forgiving reader to put a different, more appropriate (given the tone of the rest of the book and the rest of the McCarthy canon), gloss on the ending. It was also funny that one of the people who read it called it contrived. So self-conciously Hemingway with the sparcity of it's sentences as to drift into macho parody. And to illustrate this, she read a paragraph aloud while including all the punctuation. It went something like, "The boy moved PERIOD His father awoke PERIOD Leaves rustled PERIOD". And that did make it sound almost ridiculous. And it's interesting that listening to it on audiobook (as I did), I never experienced any of that writerly distraction. It seemed appropriately paced while read. And I actually think this is just the way McCarthy wants you to read. Slowly. So that it Anyway listening to the podcast sent me to this review by Michael Chabon in The New York Review of Books which oddly focuses on the book as an important writer stepping into genre writing, science fiction (subgenre: post-apocolypse) and doing a good job. If that's the case, then McCarthy's really just a genre writer. He's just progressed from Southern Gothic to Western to Science Fiction, with a detour through the Detective novel in the, to my mind, unfairly maligned NCFOM. I prefer to just focus on him as a writer. And no one makes the banalities of life's activities and environment (in any genre) as portentous, biblical and lyrical as McCarthy.

2022-11-14 17:21