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Finished this last night and I stumbled in here to see if maybe there was a discussion because it’s still sitting with me. Was wondering if anyone else had the same kind of general knee jerk take away and yep…Proust Malone posted:I get the feeling the author is looking deeply at his own mortality surrounded by physicists on a land haunted by the atom bomb. I enjoyed it well enough, and was initially put off by the Alicia chapters but appreciated them by the end. I thought Bobby’s background of math whiz/race car driver/diver contrasted in an interesting way with his general personality through the narrative, which was primarily to meander through the narrative and react when outside forces pushed him, in contrast to the kind of proactive nature you usually expect from a protagonist with those backgrounds The oil platform really seemed to highlight this, alone on an empty platform in a storm suspecting you’re not actually alone and your close friend recently died under unusual circumstances during a similar job but what does he do beyond just wander the halls and pick up a knife All in all he just seemed to me like somebody adrift with no sense of purpose trying to create an identity as a man of action but not really taking action. There’s also a lot about carrying so much guilt over his sister and father but I haven’t really fully digested that stuff so I’ll stop before I say something dumb Anyway it’s still sitting with me and I’m neither a great mind in literary criticism nor a particularly insightful poster so interesting to see what others think and hopefully there will be more to come
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Nov 19, 2022 00:14
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Boco_T posted:I think that's a good read. Yeah it’s really a central component of his character, so many little details competent enough to track down the island where the escape raft came aground, but no effort beyond that to unravel the mystery. Or when he hides out in Idaho until he’s starving and only then wanders into town for food. Or when he finds the truck in the ditch and stops the engine and leaves the abandoned passenger to his gate, expecting to find the driver further up the road but nope. Or of course the big one of being unwilling to read his sister’s last letter. It also strikes me of all the Cormack McArthur I’ve read, which isn’t everything he’s written but most of the big ones, he’s the only protagonist who is never in any overt physical danger, which Kline reminds him a few times. Just kind of blowing in the wind, and that kind of goes with the fatalism that comes up a few times of individual lives and experiences dropping out of existence as time moves on He’s just stuck on his sister dying (and his father dying too, although less present) the way his uncle is stuck on the drowned farm and just yells at the television
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Nov 19, 2022 01:26
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Proust Malone posted:Do y’all think that he is the missing passenger from the plane wreck? Boco_T posted:I'm still waiting for people smarter than me to write articles about that part of the book so I can understand it better. Maybe? Yeah I’m sure people who are much smarter than me will hash this out, but personally that feels cheap to me. I feel like it works better if the protagonist is just there, surrounded by events and circumstances he can’t really understand and that are bigger than him and beyond his influence. That’s just something that happened that he was present for a small part of that’s beyond his understanding or control but that he has to deal with the fallout of anyway. Kind of ties in with the bomb and the math/physics and the flooding of the valley and his sister’s suicide and oiler dying In Venezuela and even the Kennedy stuff. I feel like there’s an underlying current throughout of the inconsequential nature of the individual experience against the greater universe and the flow of time. You get that especially a few times in the Alicia chapters, when the kid plays the video comes to mind, and also iirc from the last conversation with Sheddan. All this stuff happens around people beyond their ability to influence and they just experience the world as they move through it and then they die and they’re gone. So yeah I’m not a particularly insightful critic or articulate either and I don’t know how effectively I communicating my point, but for him to be the literal missing passenger to me at least feels counter to what I felt like the book was trying to do/say
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Nov 19, 2022 16:45
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King Carnivore posted:He killed the pilot light opened up the burners on the stove and ate the gas. As you said, it mentions him sealing beneath the door. The death isn’t made out to be big deal because what’s another wino suicide in New Orleans? I’ve never read the road because I don’t like post apocalyptic stuff. It just makes me anxious in a bad way. Idk why I can deal with bleakness and horror and awfulness but not post apocalyptic settings Blood Meridian is a beautiful book and expansive and I hated it when I was a teenager because I worked way to hard trying to follow the precise plot instead of just getting lost in the expansiveness of the language, dropped it before they even got to Mexico, picked it up again five years ago and just adored it Second NCFOM and borders as good starting points, but also Child of God was the first of his books I actually read cover to cover. I know people usually put it in the middle when they rank his works but (and being my first probably plays into this) it stuck with me for a long while, especially the ending, and I’d recommend it to anyone who can deal with the subject matter
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Dec 24, 2022 18:04
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I finished Stella Maris last night and it was fine and definitely had some really interesting parts and maybe needs to sit for a minute but wanted to say the passage about suicide by drowning was beautiful and dark and terrifying
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Apr 21, 2023 19:04
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Carthag Tuek posted:yeah that has stayed with me as well. best/worst part Some amount of it went over my head which I doubt I’m alone in, but even then the more it sits with me the more I appreciate it. A very sad book. I was more positive on the passenger than a lot of posters but I think I enjoyed this better. I can see why it was carved into its own smaller work rather than worked into the narrative of the passenger. Very sad in general but the ending especially really worked
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Apr 22, 2023 00:08
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Carthag Tuek posted:i think most went over my head, but its still there Yeah I agree. The passenger is just Bobby who is an amazingly passive protagonist for a McCarthy novel. I think you hit the nail on the head though re: Stella maris being the better of the two. The conversations really flowed even when they went over my head, and I appreciated the times either the therapist would interject with confusion or she would remark that he appeared confused, often at places I was getting lost myself It’s okay to hate vaudeville Ben Shapiro, he almost certainly hates you too (and me, and nearly everyone else who posts on this website…)
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Apr 22, 2023 16:14
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Also it just occurred to me that the cover art is quite possibly inspired by the specific passage we’re discussing
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Apr 22, 2023 16:50
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After sitting on the passenger and Stella Maris for a bit I decided to go back and reread the borderlands trilogy. It’s been maybe not quite twenty years and the world and me were both very different. Anyway, I finished the crossing last night and I’m going to let it sit for a bit before finishing the trilogy because I have some other stuff I need to get to, but it’s strange because my reaction is so different than I remember. I remember really liking AtPH and kind of hating the crossing. But on this reread I really found the crossing to be far more interesting and Billy far more interesting than Grady, for reasons I’m still kicking around in my head. Part of it is the various people Billy converses with just seemed to resonate more, and part of it was Billy carried along reacting to circumstances seemed more textured than Grady. I don’t know. Just thought I’d share escape artist posted:I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Stella Maris. I liked it more than the Passenger. I don’t know if I’d say more exactly, but I’d agree it’s at least as interesting as the passenger, and there are some really haunting passages half a year on I still think about her plan to drown herself in Lake Tahoe, just an amazing and terrifying and horribly beautiful paragraph
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Mar 7, 2024 19:08
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algebra testes posted:Reading the book really made me appreciate the film more because of how much so much of the book is just on screen but also the cuts they did make were excellent. The movie is one of the closest adaptations I’ve ever seen, which makes sense as it was originally a screenplay nobody wanted (lmao, imo that worked out for the best) and I’d agree with that sentiment that the cuts were all really good except it bothered me that they decided to add ambiguity to the last coin flip which might just be me I guess that’s possibly because I really enjoyed how it flips the (spoilers feel unnecessary here because I can’t imagine anyone hasn’t seen/read it but just to be safe) the damsel in distress plot beat where she’s never in any immediate danger until the very end where she dies unceremoniously to a coin toss HashtagGirlboss fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Mar 27, 2024 |
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Mar 27, 2024 18:37
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algebra testes posted:I always assumed She was dead because thematically it makes sense and also he checks his boots for blood. but I can't remember what happens in the book. Yeah you’re right. I had misremembered my issue with the movie (tbf it’s been more than a few years since I’ve seen/read) movie she refuses to pick, book she picks and it comes up the other side of the coin, I liked that better for whatever reason
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Mar 28, 2024 15:14
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uber_stoat posted:Javier elevates the character. he just is Chigurh. Book Chigurh runs his mouth too much. It’s a really good performance and I would mostly agree but I think the Chigurh/Wells bit specifically works better in the book
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Mar 28, 2024 19:15
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Proust Malone posted:I think there’s an essay to be written somewhere about our boy Cormac’s relationship to cafes. Our detached masculine characters off in the wilderness always seem to find one. The bit in the crossing where the get chicken and its terrible and they should of gotten the goat
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May 3, 2024 21:22
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algebra testes posted:All these cowboys are drinking coffee at night I don't understand how they sleep. Long days, lots of physical activity, relatively weak coffee. It’s really hard to overstate how much stronger we brew our coffee then they did before European brewing methods started popping up in the 70s/80s
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May 4, 2024 03:13
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