This week, yesterday in fact, I finished listening to Richard Poe reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. This was my second time starting this book, with the first time being a few years back, but I stopped because I was feeling that I was lost in the story and that I wasn't able to focus as much attention as I felt the book deserved. So the middle-end of last month, while at work, I decided to get back into Blood Meridian.
I first acquired the audio book through, surprisingly enough, or perhaps not, the "Humble Audio Book Bundle featuring Recorded Books" back in February 2014. I picked it up mainly for The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, True Grit by Charles Portis, Junky by William S. Burroughs, and of course, Blood Meridian. At the time I had never listened to an audio book, but I had listened to both the Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings radio dramas a number of years back when I was helping Delaños in the archaeology lab sifting through bins of mid 19th century garbage; this was seriously a lot of fun. So with that in mind, I thought dipping my toe into the realm of audio books would be a good idea.
Just a word of warning before I go much further, I should say that there might be spoilers, although I genuinely feel that there is not a whole lot to spoil in this book. I also want to say that I only looked up information about the plot after I was finished with the story because I was worrying that there was something very significant that I was missing. At this point I would like to say that for the most part, I was apparently able to follow along with the story a lot more than I had thought.
One of the reasons why I felt that I had a hard time tracking the events, were because there seemed to be no central plot. The story follows an unnamed main character simply called The Kid, and events that happen and around him during his life in 1850s, primarily in the southwestern United States. There is no, "The Kid sets out trying to discover why his Mother never named him," or "The unnamed kid sets out to make a name for himself," or "The Kid, wronged by one Ernest Griswald, sets out on a path of revenge." There is The Kid, and things happen to and around him. It is almost like he is a passive observer in his own story. It is definitely not a way of storytelling that I am used to, and while it did give me the feeling that I was missing something important, by the end of the book, I did not really mind.
All of that being said, Blood Meridian was far from boring or uninteresting. During the first handful of chapters, I could only digest a chapter or two at a time before I had to step away and listen to something else. The writing and the delivery were so powerful and equally disturbing in parts that I felt a sense of sensory overload, which, at least for me, is a good thing.
Now, I could probably come up with something that sounded like drivel compared to, what I would assume, are hundreds of analyses of Blood Meridian that were the basis of literary dissertations. Also, not having actually read the book, I feel like I have only experienced a few facets of the book. As pointed out in the Wikipedia article, as well as Conklederp reminding me about how Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road, in Blood Meridian, there was no quotation marks to designate when people were speaking, and there were no apostrophes for contractions. As this was a conscious decision, there is no way I could have known this listening to the book being read to me.
And let me tell you, Richard Poe did a fantastic job narrating the book and slightly changing his voice to suite the various characters. Granted there were times when the voice he used for The Kid and Toadvine sounded pretty similar, but only if they were not talking to each other or in the same scene. I do not know if there are other professional recordings available of other people reading Blood Meridian, but if you have the chance, I highly recommend listening to Richard Poe read this. Just a word of warning though, this is a pretty violent book in many definitions of the word. There are also more than a few utterances of racial slurs which I do not feel the need to put into words here.
I definitely want to actually read this book after having listened to it one and-a-half times. Presently I have only read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but from this audio book alone, I can feel the power of how he writes. I had considered starting another audio book at work after finishing Blood Meridian, but I am sure that most will pale in comparison. Either way, I am now a fan of Richard Poe and eagerly look forward to hearing another book read by him, preferably a western, or anything else written by Cormac McCarthy. Or Joyce Carol Oates now that I think about it. Hell, Stephen King's The Stand: Complete & Uncut!
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Should Have Known That It Was Coming To This
One of the reasons why I felt that I had a hard time tracking the events, were because there seemed to be no central plot. The story follows an unnamed main character simply called The Kid, and events that happen and around him during his life in 1850s, primarily in the southwestern United States. There is no, "The Kid sets out trying to discover why his Mother never named him," or "The unnamed kid sets out to make a name for himself," or "The Kid, wronged by one Ernest Griswald, sets out on a path of revenge." There is The Kid, and things happen to and around him. It is almost like he is a passive observer in his own story. It is definitely not a way of storytelling that I am used to, and while it did give me the feeling that I was missing something important, by the end of the book, I did not really mind.
All of that being said, Blood Meridian was far from boring or uninteresting. During the first handful of chapters, I could only digest a chapter or two at a time before I had to step away and listen to something else. The writing and the delivery were so powerful and equally disturbing in parts that I felt a sense of sensory overload, which, at least for me, is a good thing.
Now, I could probably come up with something that sounded like drivel compared to, what I would assume, are hundreds of analyses of Blood Meridian that were the basis of literary dissertations. Also, not having actually read the book, I feel like I have only experienced a few facets of the book. As pointed out in the Wikipedia article, as well as Conklederp reminding me about how Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road, in Blood Meridian, there was no quotation marks to designate when people were speaking, and there were no apostrophes for contractions. As this was a conscious decision, there is no way I could have known this listening to the book being read to me.
And let me tell you, Richard Poe did a fantastic job narrating the book and slightly changing his voice to suite the various characters. Granted there were times when the voice he used for The Kid and Toadvine sounded pretty similar, but only if they were not talking to each other or in the same scene. I do not know if there are other professional recordings available of other people reading Blood Meridian, but if you have the chance, I highly recommend listening to Richard Poe read this. Just a word of warning though, this is a pretty violent book in many definitions of the word. There are also more than a few utterances of racial slurs which I do not feel the need to put into words here.
I definitely want to actually read this book after having listened to it one and-a-half times. Presently I have only read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but from this audio book alone, I can feel the power of how he writes. I had considered starting another audio book at work after finishing Blood Meridian, but I am sure that most will pale in comparison. Either way, I am now a fan of Richard Poe and eagerly look forward to hearing another book read by him, preferably a western, or anything else written by Cormac McCarthy. Or Joyce Carol Oates now that I think about it. Hell, Stephen King's The Stand: Complete & Uncut!
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Should Have Known That It Was Coming To This
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