Book: Suicide Blonde
by: Darcey Steinke
Chosen by: Kyle
As Kyle was the first one to finish Blood Meridian, the duty fell to him to choose the next book. As happens so often with Kyle, he dropped the ball big time. He picked Suicide Blonde by Darcey Steinke. It wasn’t very good.
On the upside, the book had an interesting cover.
Apparently Kyle thinks he gets this book, so he sent in a review.
By Kyle:
This book takes on large themes-Empire, economy, death, and man’s dominion over nature and meaning–without blinking. As McCarthy follows a gang of scalp hunters through the southwestern borderlands, he both crumbles and strengthens the American meta-narrative, never stopping to mourn what has been lost.
The novel, perhaps one of the most violent books ever written, is at least partially based on the exploits of the Glanton gang, a group of mostly American mercenaries led by John Glanton under contract with the Mexican government to hunt and kill bands of Apaches in what is now the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. The gang was paid per scalp, but soon started scalping non-Apaches and everything in their path before finally running afoul of the authorities.
The most menacing character in the novel, however, isn’t Glanton, but Judge Holden, another character loosely based on a shadowy figure mentioned as being a member of the gang in Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession. The Judge speaks a number of languages, is a virtuoso on the violin, and seems to have extensive knowledge regarding just about everything. He is also described as a hairless man of great size who may or may not be a murderous child molester. One of the Judge’s hobbies involves sketching and classifying what he sees during the gang’s journeys. He has a notebook full of drawings of animal life, Indian rock drawings, and other phenomena. This is where the novel takes a critical turn. After the Judge has recorded the objects in question into his notebook, he destroys them, giving his representations of those objects primacy over the articles themselves.
Then, there is McCarthy’s prose–stark and evocative of the old testament-like beauty of the landscape he describes. Despite being historically accurate, the language also feels foreign to the reader in much the same way McCarthy’s version of the conquering of the west may seem foreign to those raised on Hollywood westerns. The total effect is an encounter with a sort of radical otherness that McCarthy might characterize as “the very life of the darkness.”
Book: Blood Meridian
by: Cormac Mccarthy
Chosen by: Kyle and Illandro
For the first ever Extreme Book Club Book, we choose Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork, Blood Meridian. We think it an apt start to an Extreme book club, as many of the people who start this book never do finish it, due to its extremely violent nature.
Literary critic Harold Bloom describes it thus: “a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence-its language, landscape, persons, conceptions-at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s.”
There are no rules!
(But there are a few guidelines)
- First one to finish the book each month wins, and he or she picks the book for the next month. EXTREME!!!
- The new book is announced the 2nd Saturday of every month at Capitol Hill Books’ monthly wine and cheese celebration (4-7 pm). Extreme Book Clubbers may not begin the book before then.
- Email Aaron at aaron.wiltshire at gmail.com to apply to be added to the bookclub, or to submit a review for posting.
