Suttree

By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family.
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There are a lot of words that I did not understand. Suttree by Cormac is a book that deserves, much like some of Malick's films. The pen of the big Mac is like a brush taking its time on the canvas, where a sentence would suffice to describe a flight of birds making crates. Here we are far from Kerouac and its small ballads on the road. Here is lost America. At the edge of Knoxville live the outcasts, the excluded voluntary or not of the system, there are w I am helpless to talk about this book. At the edge of Knoxville live the outcasts, the excluded voluntary or not of the system, there are whores, alcoholics, beggars, blind, black, white, it is fighting, it spells, it survives.

I could say again and again that this novel is rich, beautiful, superbly written. Cormac is a genius. View all 22 comments. Life as infinitely detailed turbid flow. Suttree is saturated with this outlook, this philosophy, though it remains unspoken, instead being simply shown, in a style itself all detail and turbid flow.

Suttree is one of the most engrossing and enriching novels I have ever read, a perfect melding of pure verbal texture and sensual detail culled from actual lived life. It reeks of authenticity. You almost have to scrape each page off your shoes as you flow and roam along with it. And yet the language is so weird at times!

It satisfies the Joycean and the Bukowskian in all of us all stewed together. And while not exactly a moral or ethical guidebook, in that it never speaks its meaning or tries to teach, the humanity embodied by its verbal intricacy is example enough of open-heartedness and compassion for the wayward and down-and-out and downright tragic, for the mass of human dregs always with us, however unnoticed or ignored. He understands that we are all alone and so must look out for ourselves, but he also understands that we are all the same and so must look out for each other, though in the end not another soul can save us, or really be there as a substantial presence in our individual unfathomable depths, or at our deaths.

View all 55 comments. This is my favorite Cormac McCarthy novel so far. I noticed most of the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. There is really not much of a story. The dialogue in dialect is great. The poetic spill of words is incredible. Or, your one of those people that enjoy complaining about the trash and debris in your travels. Maybe, I should have waited for a hell on earth story. So, I included a link. View all 16 comments. May 12, Lawyer rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Recommended to Lawyer by: McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper was published in Sources clearly indicate that Suttree was already a work in progress.

It's just that good. It's just that perfect. Cornelius Suttree is the son of a wealthy and privileged family. He turns his back on an easy life style and becomes a regular roamer among the outcasts and misfits of Memphis Society in the McAnally Community down by the Tennessee River. In the background stands the Gay Bridge, where Suttree views the recovery of a suicide at the beginning of the story. Suttree readily takes to the life of a river rat. He runs trotlines, selling the carp and catfish on his hooks at the market and other customers on his regular route through McAnally.

Running a trotline Although Suttree is the central voice in the novel, Suttree is surrounded by a numerous crowd of characters reminiscent of Steinbeck's inhabitants of Cannery Row. The dialog is lean, each word ringing true. Suttree is a novel to be savored and read carefully. Time shifts throughout the novel. Other action occurs in the present. A careful reading indicates that Suttree looks back on his past life in Knoxville, having moved on.

However, Suttree is a novel that becomes a seamless read, endlessly engrossing, and completely fascinating. Knoxville and the river become as significant characters as the men and women who live in town and on the river. McCarthy's brings life on the river alive. You can hear it, smell it, feel it. Suttree is a constant puzzle.

McCarthy never reveals the reason for his separation from his family. However, Suttree served time in a Tennessee Workhouse, a lesser security level of the Tennessee Penitentiary system for an attempted pharmacy robbery. Whether Suttree's family banished him, or Suttree chose to save his family's is never clearly revealed. Nor is Suttree a stranger to love. He was married and had a son. That he remembered his wife's hair, black, spread across the pillow, storm blown, after they had shared their marriage bed clearly indicate that he did not deliberately seek the life of a loner.

Once again, his abandonment of his wife and child is left unclear. Reading Suttree is enough to make you believe Mark Twain has returned from the dead and written the later years of Huck Finn's life, unhindered by the social conventions that Twain pressed but did not cross excessively in his own life time. While many McCarthy readers and reviewers consistently point to Blood Meridian as his greatest work, I'll choose, Suttree.

View all 8 comments. Mar 20, Perry rated it liked it Shelves: Cormac McCarthy at his best Trudging through Smokies with Loquacious, Abstruse McCarthy Haled by cognoscenti, this early Cormac McCarthy tale follows the travails of Cornelius Suttree, a wayward, educated and privileged itinerant, as he wanders through the backwoods and over the rivers and streams of the Smoky Mountains, his acquaintances with the hillbill Cormac McCarthy at his best Trudging through Smokies with Loquacious, Abstruse McCarthy Haled by cognoscenti, this early Cormac McCarthy tale follows the travails of Cornelius Suttree, a wayward, educated and privileged itinerant, as he wanders through the backwoods and over the rivers and streams of the Smoky Mountains, his acquaintances with the hillbillies, bums, misfits, miscreants and poverty-stricken, and his rotten, even tragic, relationships with honeys from the hinterland.

This novel was, as are all other McCarthy novels I've read except All the Pretty Horses , filled with long stretches so verbose and packed with punishing esoteric descriptions and arcane allusions that it took away the flow of the story. Samples I was able to quickly pull: Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell.

A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea.

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As he rocks in his rusty pannier to the sea's floor in a drifting stain of guano. Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria. I wish I could be intelligent enough to understand, much less comprehend, all this on a quick read. Cabalistic, pleonastic and recondite issues aside ;- , this simply was not nearly as memorable or enjoyable as Blood Meridian , All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men. View all 4 comments.

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Jul 23, Darwin8u rated it it was amazing Shelves: It is amazing how McCarthy can find the lyrical beauty in an absurd gout of hallelucinationatory crazy. Absolutely one of my favorite novels of all time nearly stripped McCarthy's Blood Meridian of its bloody title. Reads like Steinbeck wrote a play based on a David Lynch film about a nightmare child of Fellini and Faulkner that is now worshiped as scripture by pimps, prostitutes, grifters, fishmongers and of course fishermen.

At times Suttree hits me like a complicated musical chorus, a surre It is amazing how McCarthy can find the lyrical beauty in an absurd gout of hallelucinationatory crazy. At times Suttree hits me like a complicated musical chorus, a surreal painting, and a ballet of misfits and grotesques, all chopped up and swirling in a dirty river's refuse.

I won't look at a summer watermelon with the same degree of innocence again. View all 9 comments. Aug 22, Jeremy rated it it was amazing Shelves: This is quite the slow burn. Most of Mccarthy's other works are very plot-driven, and you see that really reinforced in his western novels where you have this incredibly hypnotic language coalescing with often horrific events to create this sort of magisterial whirlwind of doom which just pulls you in with it's richness. That sort of building up takes a back burner here in favor of something which just sort of flows out in all directions, trying to encompass totally the world of the downtrodde This is quite the slow burn.

That sort of building up takes a back burner here in favor of something which just sort of flows out in all directions, trying to encompass totally the world of the downtrodden and dispossessed in and around Knoxville, circa, Mccarthy assembles this incredible rogues gallery of outcasts and we just sort of follow them around, watching them drink, fight, fuck, and in general just shyst their way through life. And yet we always return to Cornelius Suttree, an odd and supremely lonely man, as he stumbles through life, moving between these almost Huckleberry Finnesque moments of humor and surprising tenderness, and these really gothic moments of isolation and loss.

Unlike say Blood Meridian or All the Pretty Horses, I found that this took a few days to really work its way into my head. But once it did, I actually kind of wanted the stunning descriptions of floating river trash and burnt out industrial parks to just keep going on. If you've ever felt degenerate, or shiftless or lonely, you'll probably find that Suttree resonates, albeit slowly. View all 6 comments. No one in the world can write like McCarthy. The power of his sentences comes not from ease and lightness and polish - they are hard and angular like a sculpted figure whittled laboriously from a gnarled hunk of wood, rendered the more striking for the humble matter from which it was hewn.

The prose is wild and inscrutable, awash with metaphor and arcane vocabulary and curiouslyformed compoundwords to confound the reader - the purpose seems to be to locate the limit of language and extract from No one in the world can write like McCarthy. The prose is wild and inscrutable, awash with metaphor and arcane vocabulary and curiouslyformed compoundwords to confound the reader - the purpose seems to be to locate the limit of language and extract from it every available quantum of substance.

There is no neat little story, no tidy character arc. Like all McCarthy's novels, Suttree is an attempt to make sense of the anguish and absurdity of a life lived within the crucible of an indifferent universe, where redemption is nonexistent and slow entropic decay is the natural order of things.

Jan 05, Lane Wilkinson rated it it was amazing Recommended to Lane by: The heavily stylized prose hearkens back to the works of Joyce, Steinbeck, Algren, Faulkner, and Celine. Indeed, I have yet to encounter another book that so perfectly synthesizes these five unique voices of 20th century literature 'Suttree', at heart, is a sort of urban pastoral, replete with the myriad voices of a depressed, post-war Knoxville.

Suttree: Cormac McCarthy: leondumoulin.nl: Books

Cornelius Suttree's wanderings echo precisely the tourist-gu 'Suttree' goes directly into my own, personal daydream of the idealized 20th century canon. Cornelius Suttree's wanderings echo precisely the tourist-guide to Dublin that is found in 'Ulysses'. From the bottle-broken industry fields of the riverfront to the Dickensian squalor of McAnally Flats, every inch of pavement in downtown Knoxville is meticulously cataloged and populated with all manner of tramps, lowlifes, and assorted miscreants. This tour of the destitute is peppered with the strange vernacular of the streets, a sort of Southern-drawl meets drunken brusque.

Dialogues rise and fall with a natural cadence that is absolutely mesmerizing. In particular, I was struck by the amazing brevity with which some events unfolded. Though many pages might be spent on arguably mundane details of fishing, socializing, or even decorating basement rentals albeit, in beautiful prose , life-changing events such as the deaths of lovers, the deterioration of relationships, and the dire consequences of drunken brawls sometimes appear within the space of one or two paragraphs. Characters are killed and forgotten in a single sentence, which only adds to the narrative, insofar as Suttree, at heart, is a man who has given up.

Love, death, and squalor make no impression on Suttree, and he becomes a sort of infinitely malleable and sadly detached figure. Where a night if drinking and screwing occupies twenty pages, the death of a friend in a barfight later that night only warrants a single paragraph. This sort of terse approach makes 'Suttree' read as a psychological survey of despondency. Yet, Suttree is admirable in his insouciance. His ineffable lack of concern for the crumbling world around him gives him a strength that is lacking in all of the other characters.

It seems not so much that Suttree has given up on life, rather, he seems to have adopted the infinite resignation of some existential sage. Aug 31, Lyn rated it really liked it. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones. As if she slept in perpetual storm. He is the herald of the doom to come, of the ceaseless reminder of the night to follow.

Death is what the living carry with them.

Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Gene Harrogate is this source of ironic tomfoolery and his bumpkin misadventures were some of the highlights of this primarily somber work. One word about Harrogate: The author also draws on deeper, more atavistic images of pre-Christian Celtic subjects that works well with the mid-century east Tennessee setting. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle. A book that should be on a short list of modern works that must be read. May 11, Melki rated it it was amazing Shelves: A man spends a few years of his life living on the river; years that are filled with catfish and carp, sex and death, vile bodies, and viler bodily fluids.

Coffeecolored and seething, the river waits, always in the background, vying for billing as protagonist. He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face. The book is filled with adventures in drunken debauchery and foiled get-rich-quick schemes.


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And always, always, there is some heinous concoction to cloud A man spends a few years of his life living on the river; years that are filled with catfish and carp, sex and death, vile bodies, and viler bodily fluids. And always, always, there is some heinous concoction to cloud the mind and warm the belly. Suttree took the bottle and twirled off the little fluted plastic cap and hooked a good snot of it back.

Smoke rose from his noseholes. This is not a pretty book. There is nothing uplifting, though sly humor creeps through, sometimes when least expected. Mostly it is a slimy, humid, unpleasant trudge through the mire. It's a good one! Did you ever know anybody to be so bad about luck? Suttree said he had. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all. The decision seems a little too easy.

The novel has been called a bildungsroman because it is reportedly autobiographical and because it ends with a young protagonist experiencing a moment of transformation, but Suttree hardly fits the genre. Moreover, his decision at the end represents just one shift, not a general character transformation. If anything, Suttree ends with a moment of total nakedness, the precursor to the character transformation that will take place beyond the text: Until there was nothing left of him to shed.

Suttree is better seen as a meshing of the epic and Modernist realism; it is a series of adventures that, though they maintain a very tenuous link with the passage of time, do a rather precise job of evoking the Knoxville slum of McAnally Flats and the surrounding countryside. But though the book is not a bildungsroman , Suttree does close with a significant moment of choice: He will need to find one that he is comfortable with and he will do it out West.

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