2023-06-14 00:08:38
Cormac McCarthy leaves us shortly after being back and after almost two decades without publishing. At 89 years old and after 16 years of editorial silence, the legendary, brilliant and elusive narrator of ‘The Road’ had reappeared with a double novel, ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris’. Today they are the last legacy of one of the giants of American letters of the last half century, who died Tuesday in the southern city of Santa Fe. Like Thomas Pynchon and Salinger, McCarthy had decided to live on the other side of the mirror, far from the fame and the admiring harassment of his millions of grateful readers and viewers of the great films that emerged from his novels and that are modern westerns sometimes with a metaphysical pulse.
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize among many other awards, McCarthy passed away on the verge of turning 90, according to the Knopf publishing house, and his colleague Stephen King also mourned. Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at the age of 89. He was full of experience and created an excellent work. I regret his death », King fired him on social networks.
“For almost six decades Cormac McCarthy’s books have changed the literary landscape and have influenced generations of authors and artists,” added his publisher Reagan Arthur, “very proud” to publish “his extraordinary and inimitable works.” And it is that McCarthy’s novels, which explore a bleak world of violence and marginalization, received all the great Anglo-Saxon literary awards and were adapted to the cinema, such as ‘All the beautiful horses’, ‘The road’ and ‘No country for old’.
His fictions, which explore a bleak world of violence and marginalization, were made into movies
With his last and celebrated diptych, McCarthy delved into the worlds of quantum physics, the philosophy of mathematics and the madness that are so present in his work. The existence of God and the notions of heaven and hell were also questioned through the tormented story of the brothers Bobby and Alicia Western, obsessed with the role of their father, a physicist who participated in the development of the atomic bomb.
In the south
McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933, into a wealthy family of Catholic origin. He spent his childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he set his first four novels. Heir to the tradition of William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, he unwittingly became one of the giants of American letters, at the top of his generation along with Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo.
Javier Bardem won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the adaptation of the novel ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2005).
R. C.
The biography of this elusive narrator is quite an enigma. He gave just twelve interviews in his entire life, the last one to Oprah Winfrey in 2007, when he won the Pulitzer for ‘The Road’, to clarify that writing is “a compulsion” for him.
Extreme violence and moral devastation mark novels such as ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2005), which takes place in the implacable southwest of the United States, and ‘The Highway’ (2006), the epic escape of a father and son in a apocalyptic world, the success of which was universal.
After titles such as ‘The guardian of the orchard’ (1965), ‘The outer darkness’ (1968), ‘Son of God’ (1973) and ‘Suttree’ (1979), McCarthy triumphed with ‘Meridian of blood’ (1985), and especially with the ‘Border Trilogy’ (1992-1998), made up of ‘All the Beautiful Horses’ (1992), ‘On the Border’ (1994) and ‘Cities on the Plain’ (1998). For his fiction he has won awards such as the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
He gave just twelve interviews in his life, the last to Oprah Winfrey in 2007 when he won the Pulitzer for ‘The Road’
The first film adaptation of one of his works was ‘All the Beautiful Horses’ (2000), directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon and Henry Thomas. They followed ‘The Highway’ (2009), directed by John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen, and ‘No Country for Old Men’, directed by the Coen brothers, starring Javier Bardem, who plays the contract killer Anton Chigurh, and winner Four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem. ‘Outer Darkness’ (2009) was adapted by Stephen Imwalle, and ‘Son of God’ (2013) by James Franco.
latest works
“These extraordinary novels are nothing like what Cormac McCarthy has written before, and although both must be read and experienced separately, they represent two sides of the same narrative coin,” its editor clarified about ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris. ‘.
Robert Duvall (i) Kodi Smit-McPhee (c) and Viggo Mortensen (d) in a scene from the movie ‘The Road’.
R. C.
Concerned with the metaphysical world, ‘The Passenger’ is the story of a loss-obsessed salvage diver, fearful of the aquatic depths, hunted by a conspiracy beyond his comprehension, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.
Set in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 1980, Bobby Western, who discovers something suspicious in the wreckage of a sunken plane, is haunted by memories of his sister Alicia, a brilliant being who ended up committing suicide and whose story takes place in ‘ Stella Maris’. There are appointments to Ibiza and Formentera, where McCarthy wrote one of his first novels.
‘Stella Maris’ takes place in 1972 and is presented as “an intimate portrait of pain and nostalgia” of the young Alicia Western. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she is committed to a psychiatric facility in Wisconsin where she tries to understand her very existence. Posed as a dialogue between the doctors and the patient, it narrates how her search for her original mathematical theories led her to the brink of madness.
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