The American writer Cormac McCarthy died this Tuesday at the age of 89, advances his editor, Alfred A. Knopf, quoted by AFP. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and author of “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
McCarthy explored the dark side of human nature in a dozen poetic and unsentimental novels. Writer Saul Bellow praised its “absolutely overwhelming use of language, its life-giving sentences that also cause death”.
Some literary critics called him the heir to William Faulkner and Herman Melville, two writers with whom he shared an interest in topics such as loss, suffering, bloodshed, and fate.
“If it’s not about life or death, it’s not interesting,” Cormac McCarthy said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
For the first quarter century of his career, McCarthy was little more than a cult figure, a “writer’s writer” who refused to speak to most journalists and who, according to some rumors, lived like a hermit. None of his first five books sold more than 3,000 hardcover copies, and even the most positive reviews admitted that they were not a joy to read.
His semi-autobiographical novel “Suttree,” published in 1979, was compared to “a good long scream in the ear,” while 1985’s “Blood Meridian” was described as a book that hit readers “like a slap in the face.” This novel has a scene where dead babies are found hanging from a tree.
The American’s writing style was idiosyncratic, earning him comparisons to James Joyce and Shakespeare. He used few commas, dispensed with semicolons and quotation marks entirely, played with traditional syntax, and filled his books with obscure words.
Source: TSF
