Cormac McCarthy, one of the greats of North American literature conceived in the old testosteronic style, has passed away this Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe (New Mexico) as announced by the publishing house of the author, who had his greatest popular success in 2006 with ‘Road’, in which he raised a post-apocalyptic futurea few years ahead of the negative visions of the future that have proliferated so much in current literature.
McCarthy’s consideration is superlative, direct comparisons of his literature, which also contains hits like ‘No country for old men’, have always been with authors of more muscular prose, such as Herman Melville or William Faulkner, of whom he was his best disciple. In his novels, especially the one in which he is his masterpiece, the western’ Blood Meridian’, he pushed the depiction of violence to the limit and reached paroxysm with the also excellent ‘Sutree’. For Harold Bloom who considered ‘Blood Meridian’ the best novel of the second half of the 20th century, that work was “the last dark dramatization of violence & rdquor ;.
Little is known of McCarthy’s life, for although he did not adopt the reclusive, hidden life of a Salinger, he gave very few interviews throughout his life. It is known that he was born in Providence in 1933 and that he grew up on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee, where he studied at his university, which he dropped out to enlist in the army for four years before returning to his studies, which he did not finish either because the need to write it was imposed on him. In 1965 he published his first novel, ‘El guardián del orchard’, while worked as a mechanic, with very little critical and reading impact. She was followed by ‘The Outer Darkness’ in 1968 (which she wrote during a long stay in Ibiza) and ‘Son of God’ in 1973, on a serial killer that included scenes of necrophilia, not suitable for sensitive stomachs.
After turning 50, and after a vagabond life with numerous economic ups and downs, he published ‘Meridiano de sangre’, the pinnacle of his novels, and was crowned as the great renovator of the old western epicwith an almost terrifying atmosphere and temperatures and a style that owes much to the Biblical prosody. “I think the idea that human beings can live in harmony is a dangerous idea. The supporters of that idea are the first capable of giving up their soul and their freedom & rdquor ;, she wrote.
In 1992, he surprised his readers with a kind work, ‘All the beautiful horses’another western that on this occasion inaugurated a trilogy about two cowboys who worked on the border between the United States and Mexico that won the National Book Award and is perhaps the most accessible novel for the reader who wants to enter McCarthy territory.
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The author was very interested in cinema. In fact, ‘No country for old men’ began as a script which later ended up being a novel that the Coen brothers made into a movie in 2007. It was the same year he won the Pulitzer for ‘The Road’, a book with a humanist spirit that emerged after the birth of his second son, when the author was over 60 years old. However, the script work he did for HBO ‘The Sunset Limited’ and ‘The Counselor’, shot in Spain by Ridley Scott, received devastating reviews.
For the past 20 years, the author has resided at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, very interested in the destruction of the planet and the responsibility that science has regarding that. From this concern, 16 years after he published his last novel, two books emerged last year that were published independently in the United States and in Spain in a single volume, ‘The passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris’. It was an intense swan song from one of the greats.