Blood Meridian review - 1985
Having some fun this morning looking at old book reviews in the NYTimes archives. Here's a snippet from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian review from 1985—a book I'm reading right now—which is as ambiguous as the story itself. If you enjoyed No Country for Old Men but are open to a lot more violence, and hazier plot, and according to this review, an ending that is even less resolved, you might try this one. It's the kind of book you spend a few chapters learning how to read, and once you figure it out you realize that the language is in complete control. You just have to give up, saddle up, and go along for the ride.
The horsemen cross the plain ''as if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality.'' That line, buried in the middle of the book, contains the heart of all Cormac McCarthy's fiction - its deep horror, the reality we are forced to witness, the qualifying ''as if'' throwing everything into doubt, and above all the brilliance of the work's conception.
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