It is a landscape many will recognize, from movies and from myths. It is located in the south and west of the United States. It is sparsely inhabited, with small towns and wide plains. Horses graze. English and Spanish are spoken interchangeably. It is a very, very dangerous place, brutal and unpredictable. The arm of the law is not long enough to reach everyone who hurts each other in the shadows. Most of Cormac McCarthy’s novels take place here. These novels are among the very best written in English, and now there will be no more of them. The author himself died yesterday, aged ninety. AWESOME: Javier Bardem played the killer Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of “No Country for Old Men.” Photo: Photo/copyright: United International Pictures McCarthy lived a reclusive life, gave no lectures, rarely did interviews. He grew up in Tennessee and spent much of his life in the same part of the United States that he writes about: the Southern states, Texas and New Mexico. His novels are sparse and descriptive in language, stylistically akin to Western films. But if the tone is subdued, it is about big questions and deep feelings. The men in the main role, because they are usually men, try to find purpose and meaning in the bloody chaos on all sides, and an outlet for the tenderness that explodes inside them. After the blood-dripping masterpiece “Blodmeridianen” in 1985, a massive breakthrough came with “All the beautiful horses” in 1992, a story about two cowboys, a doomed love story and a horse theft that has disastrous consequences. The author, who had never sought celebrity status, became world famous. In 2005, he released “No Country For Old Men”, in which the main character runs away with a bag of money that is not his, and is hot on the heels of a fearsome killer. THE DANGEROUS LIFE: Josh Brolin plays Lewellyn Moss, who runs off with a large sum of money that is not his own, in the film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men.” Photo: Filmweb It’s a plot that could resemble a myriad of crime novels and B-movies. But in McCarthy’s hands it becomes a lyrical fable about hard coincidences, the course of life, and the impossibility of holding on to something. And then, in 2006, came the bestseller “The Road”. In “The Road”, a natural disaster has made North America almost uninhabitable. A father and a son are on their way to find a place where it will be possible to live, while constantly having to flee or hide. For other peoples it is the most dangerous thing in the world; traveling gangs that have to survive and have nothing to lose. Again, it is lawless society that seems to interest McCarthy the most. It is about the desperate, exhausting battle the father fights to protect his son. He must comfort him, give him courage, but also frighten him so that he does not take unnecessary risks. And all the time he has to ask the question: Why is it really so important to survive? INSPIRED BY THE SON: Viggo Mortensen played the father who tries to keep his son alive in a post-apocalyptic world in “The Road”. McCarthy himself was inspired by becoming a father in the sixties when he wrote the novel. Photo: Macall Polay I finished reading “The Road” on a plane from the French Riviera, a year after I had covered the Cannes Film Festival. There I sat, surrounded by tanned Norwegian tourists, and cried until I became swollen and red. No pretty pearly tears. Strictly speaking, I don’t think they were the ones he would have wanted either, the author who himself stated that he doesn’t like authors who don’t write about life and death. In the only television interview he gave, to Oprah Winfrey, he said that “The Road” was inspired by his relationship with his youngest son, who was born when McCarthy was in his late sixties. To Oprah, McCarthy told how he had stood in a motel in Santa Fe while his then four-year-old son slept in the same room, looked up at the hillside and imagined everything burning and being destroyed. That was the starting point. THE DANGEROUS LIFE: Josh Brolin plays Lewellyn Moss, who runs off with a large sum of money that is not his own, in the film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men.” Photo: Filmweb The fact that Cormac McCarthy never received the Nobel Prize in Literature will probably remain a scandal. Perhaps he is the victim of an old prejudice. For the view of the United States as a bastion of complacent pop culture, set against a refined Europe. Because McCarthy was very American. Masculine, unsentimental, often backward-looking. But precisely because he never looked away from the violent forces in the world, those which are often people themselves, which tear everything apart if they get the chance, he also brought out the great, the insane fragility in all things.
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Some of the best things written in English – Utterance
